In the following essay, Brenner compares Richler's dualistic representation of the Jewish response to the Holocaust in his fiction and nonfiction with the works of A. M. Klein, Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, and Adele Wiseman.

In the following essay, Craniford surveys the critical reaction to Solomon Gursky Was Here and investigates Richler's inspirations for the Gursky family. Craniford notes that the “most compelling quality of Richler's novel is the fact that it is based on and made out of other works of fact and fiction.”

In the following essay, Robbeson analyzes the function of various textual strategies in St. Urbain's Horseman, contending that each strategy provokes a specific moral judgment.

In the following essay, Steyn characterizes Richler as a politically incorrect writer, placing him within the context of Canadian and Jewish authors.

In their themes and motifs, Mordecai Richler's novels return regularly to a constant set of preoccupations. Despite this consistency, however, his career as a novelist has undergone some interesting alterations in terms of his moral attitudes towards his favourite preoccupations. This change of outlook has naturally been accompanied by a change in style and genre. It would have been difficult, on the basis of his early naturalistic novels, to anticipate the satirist and caricaturist who emerged with ...

In the following interview, Richler discusses Canadian politics and culture, the differences between Toronto and Montreal, and the main thematic concerns of Barney's Version.

In the following review, Edwards explores the role of memory and truth in Barney's Version.

In the following review, Delany contends that Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!: Requiem for a Divided Country presents several important insights but notes that “the case for Quebec nationalism needs to be answered more seriously and scrupulously than Richler cares to do.”

In the following review of Barney's Version, Steyn lauds Richler's caustic wit and vivid depiction of Montreal.

In the following review, Dellandrea regards Barney's Version as an unreliable memoir, praising Richler's examination of the “authority of autobiography and the reliability of academic truths.”

[Canadianism and Jewishness] jointly form the main theme of [Richler's] fiction and the chief concern of all his writing. His novels deal, in general, with the large national problem of assimilating a Canadian identity out of disparate racial and cultural elements and, in particular, with the process of assimilating Jewish elements into an integrated Canadian culture. Richler's first full-length work of fiction, The Acrobats, may be regarded as a beginner's novel. Its chief technique is...

In the following review, Alexander offers a negative assessment of Richler's “lazy” intellectual tone in This Year in Jerusalem.

In the following review, Wheatcroft compares This Year in Jerusalem with Glenn Frankel's Beyond the Promised Land, calling them both “complementary and absorbing” books.

In the following review, Schechner praises Richler for creating “a delectable, side-splitting comedy of humiliation” in Barney's Version.

In the following review, Fulford evaluates the controversy resulting from Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!: Requiem for a Divided Country, calling the book “disorganized and rambling.”

In the following favorable review, Waller provides a critical reading of the controversial subject matter of Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!: Requiem for a Divided Country, focusing on Richler's charges of anti-Semitism.

In the following essay, Aubin recounts his relationship with Richler and offers some reminiscences of Richler's life and career.

In the following review, Ravvin contrasts the portrayals of Jerusalem in This Year in Jerusalem and Bronwyn Drainie's My Jerusalem, commenting that Drainie's work is the more journalistic and objective of the two.

In the following essay, Wilson-Smith offers a brief memorial overview of Richler's life and career.

In the following review, Lichtenstein discusses Richler's body of work and asserts that only the final section of Barney's Version lives up to the legacy of the author's oeuvre.

Mordecai Richler's novel, Cocksure, illustrates [a] satiric double focus on grotesque fantasy and morality. In attempting analysis, one can usefully distinguish between the two levels of satire in the novel—the first a gentle, humorous level dealing with the foibles of man, and the second a more biting, shocking level which attacks gross evils. These two levels in turn involve two different types of the grotesque. The first level of satire involves the people and activities which touch Mortime...

In the following review, Cooper argues that Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! is a useful study of Quebec nationalism and recent Canadian politics, commenting that Richler's criticisms are the “only appropriate response of a concerned citizen in a democracy.”

In the following review, McSweeney offers a stylistic and thematic examination of Barney's Version.

In the following positive review, Bemrose regards Richler's “bitter, ironic sense of mortality” as the central theme of Barney's Version.

In the following review, Gorjup contends that Barney's Version is “Richler's most remarkable accomplishment to date, the work of a great master who has come to understand the pitfalls of writing, the incompleteness of the text.”

In the following review, Rieff commends Richler's complex and poignant characterizations in This Year in Jerusalem but faults the work for its excessive political commentary and cursory travel narrative.

In the following review, Enright discusses Richler's characterization in Barney's Version and compliments the novel's lean narrative pace.

Of course, Joshua's [racist] outbursts can be explained away as the spasms of a mind twisted with jealous rage, but they're still coarse, particularly in a novel which prides itself on its heart-bruised Jewish sensitivity. Besides: even in calmer moments, Joshua acts as if all blacks make their homes in the trees…. A slapstick farce, Joshua Then and Now shuttles back and forth in time, tracing Joshua's bunged-up life from his boy-hood in a St. Urbain cold-water flat to his misadv...

In the following review, Kelly criticizes the incoherent and disjointed structure of This Year in Jerusalem, labelling the book as “an exercise in self-justification.”

In the following review, Marin commends Richler's wit and cynicism in Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!: Requiem for a Divided Country.

In a volume of his essays, Mordecai Richler once quoted with relish a question he was asked after lecturing to a Jewish audience in his native Canada: "Why is it that everybody loved Sholem Aleichem, but we all hate you?" He went on to suggest that his writing infuriates not only Jews but Canadians of all races and creeds because he writes with "a certain skepticism, a tendency to deflate," exactly what's needed, he felt, to discipline those given to anxious special pleadi...

In the following review, King offers a mixed assessment of Barney's Version, arguing that “for all its defects, this unruly book about a thoroughly unruly life contains not a page without its laugh and not a paragraph without its smile.”

In the following review, Linklater compliments Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!: Requiem for a Divided Country as an “impassioned” critique of Quebec's history and politics.

In the following review, Bethune debates the quality of Richler's first novel, The Acrobats, concluding that the work is “pretty good on its own merits and full of promise for the future.”

In the following review, Brzezinski offers a laudatory assessment of Barney's Version, noting Richler's “savage wit and precisely delivered irony.”