“Rikki Ducornet’s [Phosphor in Dreamland] is a delicious, spellbinding masterpiece. The exercise of her extravagant imaginative powers is rigorous, the richness of her writing concentrated to trenchant effect, and her enchanting narrative conducted with great intensity and seriousness. Phosphor’s bewildering, bewildered career deserves a constellation in the firmament of literary heroes.”—Harry Mathews
“Like all her work it is astonishing; a breathtaking succession of marvels—its fertility and wit are staggering.”—Robert Harbison
“Rikki Ducornet can create an unsettling, dreamlike beauty out of any subject. In the heady mix of her fiction, everything becomes potently suggestive, resonant, fascinating. She exposes life’s harshest truths with a mesmeric delicacy and holds her readers spellbound.”—Joanna Scott
“Ducornet is a novelist of ambition and scope.”—The New York Times
“Linguistically explosive.… One of the most interesting American writers around.”—The Nation
“Pick up a book by the award-winning Ducornet, and you know it will be startling, elegant, and perfectly formed.”—Library Journal
“Storytelling that enchants the senses.”—The Boston Globe
“Ducornet is a writer of extraordinary power, in whose books ‘rigor and imagination’ (her watchwords) perform with the grace and daring of high-wire acrobats.”—BOMB
“Ducornet’s is a world of surfaces so rich and textured that notions of meaning and interpretation are subsumed under a lush and seductive prose that eventually inhabits readers’ minds.”—The Millions
“[R]eveals strangeness in the most basic circumstances of life, flooding them in new light.”—Kenyon Review
“Ducornet is a mad maestro of words.”—Seattle Weekly
“Writer, poet, and artist Ducornet does things with words most authors would never even dream of.”—Men’s Journal
“Rikki Ducornet is a magic sensualist, a writer’s writer, a master of language, a unique voice.”—Amy Tan
“It is Rikki Ducornet’s magic to be able to coax an entire universe--’restless beyond imagining, a universe of rock and flame, whose nature is incandescence’--out of the modest and often grim contours of one man’s life.”—Kathryn Davis
“Netsuke comes at the summit of Rikki Ducornet’s passionate, caring, and accomplished career. Its readers will pick up pages of painful beauty and calamitous memory, and their focus will be like a burning glass; its examination of a ruinous sexual life is as delicate and sharp as a surgeon’s knife. And the rendering? The rendering is as good as it gets.”—William Gass
“One of America’s most incandescent satiric writers.… Phosphor in Dreamland has much to impart about European Expansionism, its brutal vanities, religious persecution and the scourge of one culture”s fear and ultimate hatred of the erotic, the natural, the mysterious …”—The LA Times