PRAISE FOR THE UNINNOCENT
“I love these stories and could hardly stop reading. Like the gems they are, they're bright, multi-faceted, and catch the sun — which often shines on a very dark world.”
—Ann Beattie
“What links all these dark tales from Morrow is that the main characters live in the shadowland where normalcy and mania and at times even depravity meet. Hanging on the voices of their narrators—at once fascinating in their fixations and repelling in their twisted logic—and mixing elements of Southern gothic and noir, [The Uninnocent] will linger in the reader's mind.”
—Library Journal
“Morrow's prose is lush and eccentric and beautiful, somewhere between Bradbury and Kerouac at times, and his characters are superbly realized and gloriously imperfect.”
—Corey Doctorow, BoingBoing.com
“There has never been a short story by Bradford Morrow that I haven’t read at a single sitting—fascinated, thrilled, at times a bit breathless... If you read just a single story by Bradford Morrow, you will be drawn inexorably into his gravitational pull.”
—Joyce Carol Oates
“An ambitious, thoughtful writer, technically accomplished and emotionally truthful.”
—The Washington Post
“The Uninnocent is a masterpiece of empathy and of storytelling. I love this chapel of unholy stories with their charming, monstrous, wholly sympathetic characters.”
—Karen Russell
“Bradford Morrow creates beautifully dark and soulfully intimate stories in his first collection, featuring characters who, though hardly citizens of virtue, reveal their true colors with little remorse. Morrow's stories are hauntingly honest and linger in the consciousness.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred Pick of the Week)
“In The Uninnocent, acclaimed novelist Bradford Morrow shows off his dazzling short-story chops. The results are spellbinding, unsettling: as knowing, wakeful, and thorny as the title. Every writer of prose fiction should be as courageous, as open to the unknown, as Morrow reveals himself to be in this collection.”
—Peter Straub
“The Uninnocent is a major accomplishment, satisfying and unsettling, beautiful and haunting. I can't think of another recent collection of short fiction that offers up such rich, layered, provocative mysteries.”
—Joanna Scott
“Bradford Morrow alchemically merges his characters with luxuriant images of nature to yield dramas about the varieties of love and its mysteries. The Uninnocent is a profound, quietly passionate, beautiful book, rare in its wisdom, captivating in its telling.”
—Frederic Tuten
“To read The Uninnocent is to be plunged into a world that is elegant and chilling and deeply disturbing — imagine a Hitchcock classic penned by Nabokov. Bradford Morrow is a great American writer, and The Uninnocent is a dark masterpiece.”
—Elizabeth Hand
“Bradford Morrow gives voice to the peace at the center of the chaos all around and within us. His collection, The Uninnocent, is not only very beautiful but very important.”
—Robert Olen Butler