Alice McDermott has developed a reputation as the premier chronicler of the ordinary lives of Irish Catholic New Yorkers in the twentieth century. Though reluctant to be categorized as either an Irish...
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An American novelist, short story writer, critic, and editor, Tyler won a National Book Critics Circle Award for The Accidental Tourist (1985) and a Pulitzer Prize for her Breathing Lessons (1988). In...
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Towers is an American novelist. In the excerpt below, he commends the accuracy with which McDermott recreates a lower-middle-class Long Island town during the early 1960s as well as her focus on the o...
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In the following review, Kakutani praises McDermott's use of children as narrators in At Weddings and Wakes and her thematic focus on loss.
Alice McDermott's last novel, the criticall...
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An American editor, Smith is the author of the 1990 Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931–1940. In the following essay, based in part on conversations with McDermott, she provide...
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In the following review, Eder appreciates McDermott's use of period detail and complex narration in At Weddings and Wakes.
Get the subatomics right and you get the universe right; get the qu...
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Klinkenborg is an editor and nonfiction writer. In the following review, he provides a highly favorable assessment of At Weddings and Wakes.
Alice McDermott's At Weddings and Wakes is her th...
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In the following review, Baumann commends McDermott's evocation of daily life and family ties in At Weddings and Wakes.
Old Momma Towne, the widowed Irish matriarch of Alice McDermott'...
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In the following review, Pool praises McDermott's vivid depiction of family closeness and the mounting emotional power of her narrative in At Weddings and Wakes as well as the novel's in...
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In the following positive review of A Bigamist's Daughter, Harvey commends McDermott's refusal to sentimentalize her characters' loneliness.
It's no disparagement of Ali...
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In the following review, Wood praises McDermott's matter-of-fact depiction of love in A Bigamist's Daughter, but maintains that her secondary characters are underdeveloped.
[In A Biga...
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An American critic, Kakutani is a regular contributor to The New York Times. In the following mixed review of That Night, Kakutani asserts that while McDermott's failure to clarify the relation...
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Leavitt is an American novelist and short story writer. In the review below, he asserts that the "baroque richness of Ms. McDermott's sentences, the intellectual complexity of her moral ...
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An American critic, Eder received a 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and a 1987 citation for excellence from the National Book Critics Circle. In the following review of That Night, he lauds McDermot...
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Brown is an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. In the excerpt below, she admires the tight construction of That Night as well as McDermott's poignant insistence on the inevitabili...
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In the following review, Watkins maintains that although McDermott's narrator often distracts readers from the characters whose story she is recounting, That Night powerfully represents the los...
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In the excerpt below, Balliett, an American critic who frequently writes about jazz, praises McDermott's use of language and pacing in That Night.
Novels were once panoramas, chronicles, lab...
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Winners and finalists for the 2007 Pulitzer Prizes. Pulitzer juries make up to three recommendations in each category without listing them in order of preference. The Pulitzer Board, which awards t...
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