“A poignant meditation on the literary life, on friendship and regret, on fame and obscurity, and on mortality itself. . . . What’s so remarkable about this is that, because of the clarity and candor of Mr. Garrett’s voice, because of the sureness of his hand, the book never once has the pompous deliberately intellectual feel of a postmodernist exercise. It does, however, feel exactly like the work of a prolific (34 books), if underappreciated, American writer working at the height of his powers.”
—Wall Street Journal
“Double Vision is formally the most innovative of Garrett's novels yet . . . exciting in its risk-taking and in the successful way in which those risks are mastered.”
—R. H. W. Dillard, author of Understanding George Garrett
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“A brilliant novel! . . . George Garrett marshals a dazzling array of postmodernist tricks and devices to achieve a splendid and paradoxically old-fashioned directness of address in which he grapples with the most intimate and profound questions of life, art, and mortality. Double Vision is a wise and wonderful book.”
—David R. Slavitt, author of Re Verse: Essays of Poetry and Poets
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“This novel—this creation—is perhaps the most radical of all Garrett’s experiments. It is fascinating, engaging, entertaining, funny and sorrowful by turns, wise, eloquent, graceful, and bawdy, too. It has, I believe, an element of the kind of mordant truth-facing of the Elizabethans in it—an almost valedictory tone, a summing up of experience, but couched in terms of this playful double-sided narrative—all of it contributing to the overall sense of the reader having stepped into an enthralling house of mirrors.”
—Richard Bausch, author of The Stories of Richard Bausch
“Structured according to the precepts in Aristotle’s Poetics (beginning, middle, end), Double Vision ought to be required reading for every MFA fiction student in the country. . . . [This book] shows us how the bits and pieces of a novel are patterned and ordered to reflect and refract, creating the wholeness and unity of a work of art, a closed and boundless universe. . . . Double Vision is masterful, the work of a writer at the height of his powers, a gem wrought by genius.”
—Kelly Cherry, author of My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers
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