The Curious Incident brims with imagination, empathy, and vision – plus it’s a lot of fun to read.

What struck Celia most about young children was the intensity of their passions, life too new to be modulated, perspective a possession not yet acquired.

The day’s dashed hopes had temporarily reduced her to the childish presumption that someone she loved should, in return for that love, be able to read her mind.

Miriam came to consider Eliza a gosling born into a family of ducks, loved and accepted, but always and forever a goose.

Eliza wonders if death is not a sleep you can’t wake up from but life reduced to one inescapable moment.

As much as I admire and value intellectualism and experimentation, I’ve discovered that unless a book has a throbbing heart as well as a sexy brain, I feel like the story is a specimen in a sealed glass jar and not a living, breathing creature I want to take by the hand and talk to for hours on end.

Ben Marcus has created an innovative and unflinching portrait of the turmoil of the human condition, providing the reader a most rare gift: something truly new. Notable American Women contains strains of Donald Antrim and Samuel Beckett but is beholden to neither; it is a brave, original book.

Miriam realizes she is a broken vessel, pieces of her scattered everywhere. She has been finding those pieces, in their many forms, and bringing them together so she can be whole again.

School is consonantal in its unchanging schedule. God, full of possibility, is a vowel. Death: the ultimate consonant.

[O]nce you can read, you can no longer open a book and see a jumble of letters; after you get to know someone's face, you can't see her as a stranger.