In these nine stories of pit-dog fighting and crawdad cooking, where giant pigs live in sink-holes and Bible pages are used for cigarette-rolling, Pinckney Benedict depicts a South that is odd and idiosyncratic. Emerging from the harsh realities of difficult lives, these stories do not spare us the violence of love or the love of violence ... Benedict's voice is unique; it is meant to be listened to

Beware the wise who are young and gifted. They quickly become irreplaceable. And with these first stories, Pinckney Benedict, who is not merely precocious, shows convincingly that he is one of them

These are intelligent and fully imagined stories. And Pinckney Benedict clearly has an amazing gift, a dazzling future

Town Smokes introduces a young writer of exceptional gifts and promise. The stories are funny and horrific by turns, poignant, painful, beautifully modulated - storytelling at its best

In his major postwar novels, the pain and earnestness of the individual’s quest for ‘meaning and design’ can be felt more intensely than perhaps anywhere else in contemporary Western prose

An antipodean King Lear writ gentle and tragicomic, almost Chekhovian . . . an intensely dramatic masterpiece.