PRAISE FOR THE ALMANAC BRANCH
“The Almanac Branch is a highly sophisticated novel...it shines with a mysterious and ingenious beauty.” “Bradford Morrow’s new book is a joy. Beautifully constructed and flawlessly paced, its subtle unities, vivid prose, and riveting story yield the best and richest of literary pleasure.” “The Almanac Branch is a riveting, superbly written, dark novel of familial intrigue.” “The Almanac Branch is imaginative and quite often breathtaking; it is a dark novel of insight and mystery.” “A damned good novel...that commands a whole range of experience, with narrative technique that is a marvel.” “Splendid...modestly, delicately and with unobtrusive, laudable self-doubt, Morrow has written a precise study of the sexual and artistic conscience.” “Subtle, craftly, witty, vivid, as well as disturbing and haunting, Bradford Morrow’s second novel is a Woolfian triumph. There has been little of this subtlety and skill for a long time. Here is a major author, of palpable style and impenitent mind.” “There are other qualities that recommend this novel—its elegant, precise prose, equally capable of evoking city or seascapes, its convincing group of minor characters, its mature pacing and structure, and Grace's unsparing but never quite angry insights into herself and others... A considerable achievement.”
Citation at PEN/Faulkner ceremony, Joy Williams introduction to Bradford Morrow at the PEN/Faulkner Award ceremony, May 16, 1992, Folger Library, Washington, D.C., at which Don DeLillo, Allan Gurganus, Paul Gervais, and Stephen Dixon were fellow finalists: Should I mention Conjunctions? I’m not going to mention Conjunctions. Tonight is Bradford Morrow’s night, not as the brilliant, intuitive editor of that classy journal, with its excellent writers excellently performing, but in his own write, as author of the rich and risky book, The Almanac Branch. Rich in its remarkable prose, its stories within stories, risky in its intention, which is to render and mirror consciousness—in this case the consciousness of a young, not terribly well-adjusted woman named Grace, a troubled, self-doubting, ruthlessly self-remembering and imagined consciousness. As a child, Grace lives in language. As an adult, she lives in plot. The Almanac Branch moves with stylish confidence in both worlds. |