Like those of Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Armistead Maupin's novels have all appeared originally as serials... it is the strength of this approach, with its fantastic adventures and astonishingly contrived coincidences, that makes these novels charming and compelling

San Francisco is fortunate in having a chronicler as witty and likeable as Armistead Maupin

Maupin is a richly gifted comic author

A consummate entertainer... It is Maupin's Dickensian gift to be able to render love convincingly

I have read Maupin's first two books three times already and shall probably read them again before too long. I love them for very much the same qualities that make me love the novels of Dickens

[Maupin] is the perfect chronicler of the moral, political, sexual and social fluxes of the world as we have lived and known them... Not only is all human life here but a hell of a lot besides that you'd never imagine

This mesmerizing novel places a mathematical mind, poet's imagination, and voodoo queen's superstition in an athlete's body and sets to work, in a town stark as a blackboard, on the problem of Death. Pitting axes against angst, kids against cancer, soap against sex, wax numbers against depression, and love against the certainty of the beloved's doom, Aimee Bender nevertheless arrives--with wit, grace, and proof (that math is funny)--at compassion

Aimee Bender writes in a skillfully minimal way, everything very tight and poignant and sharp and often burning, quick to get to things and out of them, but still providing us with significant characters of emotional depth