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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer... A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
Anger, humor and longing are neatly balanced in these richly nuanced, sharply revelatory tales.
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Outstanding
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Salon Priya Jain
It's the distance between that outsider's paradise and the native's often grim reality that Lapcharoensap shows us in his tales, so tenderly crafted and beautifully realized that they'll snuggle up behind your heart and stay there for a long time.
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Outstanding
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Los Angeles Times Mark Rozzo
It's a stirring coming-of-age fable, brimming, like
most of Sightseeing, with sharp-clawed survival lessons. [9 Jan 2005, p.R10]
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Outstanding
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Washington Post Carole Burns
[A] remarkable debut collection... Lapcharoensap's writing is both elegant and vivid. When occasionally his stories seem too perfectly sculpted, I wonder if the problem is reading too many at once. When I come back to them, their characters and images again seem alive.
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Outstanding
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The Guardian William Sutcliffe
Every story in this collection is dense with event, emotion and meaning. This debut shows more than mere promise: it is a fine achievement in its own right.
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Favorable
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The Independent Aamer Hussein
Lapcharoensap's prose is sensitive to sound and smell; his episodic, cinematic technique often hinges on the slightest of anecdotes.
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Favorable
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Wall Street Journal Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg
In this accomplished debut collection of short stories, Mr. Lapcharoensap displays a wicked command of language and an unerring sense of place.
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Favorable
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Houston Chronicle Fritz Lanham
A youthful linguistic high-spiritedness enlivens the page. The prose is snappy, colloquial, occasionally profane, often funny.
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Favorable
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San Francisco Chronicle Carolyn Juris
That Lapcharoensap, still in his 20s, can convey with such honesty the longings of this older man; indeed, of all of his characters, conveys both his emotional maturity and his burgeoning potential.
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Favorable
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Library Journal Shirley N. Quan
Though the stories describe a culture that will be foreign to most readers, they contain themes that touch on the human spirit. [15 Oct 2004, p.58]
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Mixed
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Entertainment Weekly
But his portraits of Americans here never go beyond unflattering cliché. Lapcharoensap's Americans aren't just fat: They're hopelessly broad.
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Mixed
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The New York Times Book Review Darin Strauss
When he's really going strong, Lapcharoensap is a commanding, animated tour guide, and a lot more than that -- he can write with the bait and the hook of genuine talent. At his weakest, however, he leans on exotic atmosphere and little else.
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Mixed
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Ray Robertson
Sightseeing occasionally suffers from that most common of creative writing workshop maladies: epiphanitis, the tendency of one's short stories to habitually conclude in breathless moments of overpowering insight. Even rhythmically, they tend to resemble one another.
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Unfavorable
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Village Voice Dennis Lim
But Sightseeing, time and again, manages to turn such swirling contradictions into tidy coming-of-age truisms, politely resisting the free fall of deeper desires and resentments. What's more, the symbolic East-West collisions are often clumsy: One character's first taste of a fast-food burger causes him to throw up.
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