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“Guillermo Stitch’s new novel The Coast of Everything hurls salvos of delicious sentences, voice, and prescient irony that hit the reader broadsides…. It is an outcry, a tour-de-force with wings, for the resurrection of intelligence and, yes, freedom of speech.”

—David Brizer, in Compulsive Reader

“You have to see Johnson’s precision-skill photos to grasp the ways in which you have never seen anything like Silverton’s objects in your life…. Dadaism and Surrealism were taken in lots of offbeat directions in the 20th century, some of them deadly academic serious, and some of them just for the curious fun of it. Silverton’s poems and objects, thankfully, are primarily for the fun of it. You can get a quirky, impish, funny, pathetic, ironic, or silly Monty Python-like kick off any page of New and Used Poems and Objects…. I think Duchamp and his unruly co-conspirators Tristan Tzara, Man Ray, Mina Loy, Andre Breton, Francis Picabia, etc., not to mention Gertrude Stein if not Jacques Derrida, would be proud of the soapbox derby go-cart Silverton is driving through art and poetry a century after they got the ball rolling uphill. If you grasp what rocker David Byrne meant a few decades ago when he admonished us all to ‘Stop Making Sense,’ then you should look through this book. For the fun of it, at least.”

—Dana Wilde, in Working Waterfront

“The Coast of Everything is the sort of book that makes you feel simultaneously more intelligent and more illiterate…. Despite its intellectual density, the prose remains agile and pleasurable. Stitch can move effortlessly from gritty noir to Dickensian comedy to postmodern fragmentation without losing tonal control. His sentences are alive with literary memory but rarely paralysed by it. One feels the presence of Borges, Calvino, Pynchon, Barthelme, and Joyce, yet the voice remains distinctively Stitch’s: playful, melancholy, encyclopedic, and slightly feverish. He writes as though every idea reminds him irresistibly of six others…. Lesser metafiction delights in eventually revealing the trick. Stitch is after something stranger and more difficult. The Coast of Everything suggests that stories are not codes to be solved but habitats to be lived inside. The recurring concern is not meaning but continuation…. [O]ne of the most ambitious literary works in recent memory: a maximalist meditation on storytelling, identity, and survival that insists stories matter because life itself depends on them. Scheherazade told stories to her captor to survive another night. Stitch, one suspects, writes for much the same reason.”

—Reggie Chamberlain-King, in PopMatters

“This is the sort of tragic tale that Shakespeare would envy. While Visiting Babette keeps the reader constantly on their toes….”

—Jason Denness, in Gnome Appreciation Society

“Containing elements of detective noir and sci-fi, as well as literary allusions taking in everything The Arabian Nights to Dickens, this is definitely one for those who like their fiction in maximalist mode. Indeed, The Coast of Everything is as wildly innovative a novel as you could hope to read.”

—Hotpress (May 2026 print edition)

“This refusal to treat trauma as singular or sacred, to set it apart from the texture of ordinary life, is among the collection’s quietly bracing achievements…. By the end of The Summer We Ate Off the China, one understands these stories don’t offer diagnosis nor cure. They offer a way of staying with discomfort without converting it to identity or spectacle. Trauma is not the story’s endpoint; it is the ground on which maturity must be built.”

—Travis Alexander, in The Rumpus

“In story after story, the author demonstrates a deep sensitivity to the ways in which people miscomprehend each other, even when one party is attempting to be honest…. the absence of sensational, dramatic events, such vulnerability, which is so rarely understood or reciprocated, forms the nucleus around which many of these ripped-from-life stories circle. Whether they’re longtime fans or are discovering Gerber for the first time, readers will take much from this collection, which feels like not only the culmination of a long career but of a long life. A book of consistently arresting and engaging stories about family life.”

—Kirkus Reviews

Anthony Howell reviews Melissa McCarthy’s Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro in the Fortnightly Review, “Is This a Quantum Book?":

“Melissa McCarthy’s fascinating book is replete with hidden variables. Bird shit is entangled with explosives, corpses may be confused with flowers, the camera might be a coffin—or at the least a memento mori…. [F]or me, Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro is a prose poem…. Not everything needs to be immediately comprehensible in the finest of poems, and reading this book is a cumulative experience. We delve down through layers of meaning, as Leonard Woolley delved down through layers of prehistory at Ur in Southern Mesopotamia…. McCarthy’s rabbit-holing prompts the enchanted reader to engage in similar sleuthing. This is a book that has an effect on one’s thought.”

—Anthony Howell, in The Fortnightly Review

“The fact that there is a writer like Guillermo Stitch defiantly working at these depths when so much feels so shallow turns me around whenever I’m at the point of despair. It’s the only kind of antic disposition committed enough to pierce through. I’ve been lost in The Coast of Everything for months and I’m not sure I’ll ever get out or if I even want to.”

—Luke Kennard, author of The Book of Jonah

“Finally, the pandemic gave John Patrick Higgins something to smile about. With a mask, he could grin without fearing the grimaces of others. In Teeth: An Oral History, Higgins provides a history of the mouth (his own and a handful of famous others) and invites the reader on a series of dental appointments to improve the quality and aesthetics of his own teeth. As he frames the beginning of the text: ‘Teeth, more than eyes, are the window to the soul.’ … [Higgins] deflects much of his own vulnerability through jokes or puns. At his first dental appointment to have seven bad teeth pulled, he names each tooth in the manner of Snow White’s seven dwarfs: ‘Achey, Splintery, Barely-Therey, Chippy, Stainy, Ghastly and Grizzled-Battle-Scarred-Castle-Collapsing-Into-theSeay.’ Despite his light tone, he is speaking about a serious subject—body shame…. But the beauty of Higgins’s biting wit is that he’s aware of it.”

—Anna Rollins, in American Book Review