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Outstanding
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Houston Chronicle Eric Miles Williamson
[Doctorow's] new collection, Sweet Land Stories, shows he is not only our master of the novel but also author-exemplar of the trickier form of the short story.
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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
A riveting collection of five tightly plotted long stories on a favorite Doctorow theme: the tension between American institutions and the criminal elements that undermine them.
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Outstanding
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Library Journal Barbara Hoffert
There's far more subtlety and insight packed into any one of these pieces than one finds in many full-blown novels. [1 March 2004, p. 110]
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Outstanding
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Booklist Donna Seaman
At base, what Doctorow's unique and electrifying stories grapple with is our longing to trust authority and our realization that, instead, we must always question it. [15 Feb. 2004, p. 1003]
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
In this knowing treatment of the cynical abuse of power, Doctorow uses the spare, laconic style endemic to thrillers and builds suspense with sure strokes.
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Favorable
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The Nation David L. Ulin
Sweet Land Stories is Doctorow's most overtly American work since Billy Bathgate, a state reflected by its title, which may or may not be intended as irony.
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Favorable
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Boston Globe David Thoreen
This is not your father's realism. The machinery whirs from time to time. There are tics amid the talk. And these effects are intentional, left by a craftsman worried lest we mistake the artifact for life itself, ideology for nature. [9 May 2004, D6]
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Favorable
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Entertainment Weekly Gregory Kirschling
Gracefully mordant and frequently heart-churning, these stories are worth the steep price of a book that's a mere 147 pages.
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Favorable
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Los Angeles Times Heller McAlpin
In the tradition of the best American fiction, "Sweet Land Stories" prods the beached whale of the American dream in order to examine its underbelly. Less complex and tangled than his recent novels, these are deceptively simple but subtle morality tales that showcase Doctorow's deftness as a storyteller. [16 May 2004, R7]
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Favorable
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PopMatters Steven M. Deusner
The stories are straightforward only on their plainspoken surfaces, but they conceal a deep network of ideas that build on each other as the collection progresses.
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Favorable
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Washington Post Kevin Baker
It is a slim volume, only five stories -- yet it shows as well as anything Doctorow has ever written that our present and our supposedly long-buried past are really quite interchangeable. [20 June 2004, T06]
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Favorable
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The Guardian Colin Greenland
The subtlety of Doctorow's imagination is delightful, but also moral. By identifying each character's problems from their own viewpoint, in their own terms, he invests them all with intelligence, with subjectivity.
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Mixed
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The New York Times Book Review Lee Siegel
Each of these five stories depicts a dark social or psychological atmosphere, a little world of hateful actions produced by hateful conditions. But the stories are told in a spirit of sweet affirmation, as if they were meant as signs pointing readers to shocking or daring destinations that the author did not have the harshness -- ''the power to do harm'' -- to reach himself.
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Unfavorable
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Daily Telegraph Daniel Swift
Doctorow is a very serious novelist, worrying at the great questions of history and narrative. These stories read as exercises, regular as clockwork, ticking their way through the expected movement of revelation and reversal; or, perhaps worse, as parodies.
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Unfavorable
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The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
Several of E. L. Doctorow's novels -- ''Ragtime,'' ''Welcome to Hard Times,'' ''The Book of Daniel'' and ''Billy Bathgate'' -- have been turned into plodding, overproduced movies. Here, in his latest collection of short fiction, ''Sweet Land Stories,'' he seems to be trying to turn old movie ideas into stories with equally little success at recycling. [11 May 2004, Sec. E1, pg. 7]
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