“It’s fair to say that Anthony Doerr is doing things with the short story that have rarely been attempted and seldom achieved. . . . Doerr has set a new standard, I think, for what a story can do.”
—Dave Eggers, author of Zeitoun and What Is the What
“Doerr has a way of saying the ordinary that makes you rethink the way the English language is used.”
—The Denver Post
“Doerr writes about the big questions, the imponderables, the major metaphysical dreads, and he does it fearlessly. The stories in Memory Wall shouldn’t work at all, and yet they do, spectacularly.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“It’s rare to encounter a writer who is able to make us see the world around us in new ways. And yet Doerr does so on every page.”
—The Boston Globe
More praise for
THE SHELL COLLECTOR
“If you have stopped reading short stories because they have turned pretentious, silly, or meaningless, The Shell Collector is a good reason to come back.... The stories in this collection are polished jewels. They will draw you back . . . first to marvel at what Doerr is telling you, and then to see how he has performed his magic.”
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Stunning. Eight stunning exercises in steel-tipped feathery fineness that no writer can read without envying. . . . [Doerr’s] is the all-knowing, all-seeing eye we find in D. H. Lawrence, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Pynchon, DeLillo, Richard Powers—writers able to pin down every butterfly wing and fleck of matter in the universe, yet willing to float the unanswerables about the ‘hot, hard kernel of human experience.’”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“These complex, resonant, beautifully realized stories sing. . . . A remarkable first collection.”
—Andrea Barrett, National Book Award–winning author of Ship Fever
“[Doerr] centers his stories on taciturn hunters and fishers with deep reservoirs of emotion—inept conversationalists and husbands whose senses only come alive in the woods. . . . Doerr’s wilderness contains a touch of the magical, too: a blind shell collector on the coast of Kenya discovers a miracle cure in a snail’s toxic sting. Tourists land a carp so huge it can’t be photographed. A woman finds she can divine the dream of animals by feeling them. ‘Want to know what he dreams?’ she asks her husband after touching a grizzly’s fur. ‘Blackberries. Trout. Dredging his flanks across river pebbles.’ These are tales that capture the wonder and the icy indifference of nature, and Doerr tells them exceedingly well.”
—Outside
“Anthony Doerr is a wonderful new writer. His stories reach deep and mine the forgotten places, as well as the never-before-discovered. These stories don’t just describe beauty, they help create it.”
—Rick Bass, author of Where the Sea Used to Be
About Grace
Four Seasons in Rome
Memory Wall