And you remember you're in the hands of a pro. That he's writing from a tradition, from a terrain. That he's interested in something authentic. He's giving us gentle reminders; how in spite of our flaws and weakness, snow and stars can still slide in. Grace and "God spots" too.
~Emily Sernaker
It’s no wonder Jack Driscoll has been singled out as one of America’s greatest writers. The ten stories in his new book are elegantly written.
~Lisa Lenzo
Moving across place and memory, these stories are technically dazzling and deeply affecting accounts of precarious lives in a unique environment.
~Alexander Moran
The writing in this collection of stories is wonderful, the characters are raw, some stuck in their hopeless lives and old enough to know it’s not going to get better, others are scratching to escape households where their parents are miserable with the struggle of staying afloat, some still altered after being burned by love physically, bottom dwellers and those just ‘knocking around’. The children are just as perceptive and believable as the grown ups, maybe a little criminal but for good purposes.
~Lolly K Dandeneau
Set mostly in Northern Michigan, these precise, intricately constructed stories feel crystalline in their authenticity. Driscoll is a masterful writer who makes it look easy.
~Dawn Raffel
The ten stories in The Goat Fish and the Lover’s Knot come from the pen of a writer who always tells the truth, but also understands that truth is more than just cobwebs and dark places. Though his characters are down on their luck in some ways, they look to the future with a hopefulness and sense of grace that seems to light the world beyond the page.
~Mary Stewart Atwell
Gearing up or slowing down, these short stories from [ . . . ] Jack Driscoll are a great way to leap into summer reading.
~Glen Young
Like all Driscoll's stories, the ones in this brilliant new collection beg to be read aloud...The Goat Fish and the Lover's Knot is filled with vivid characters and compelling plots, but, in the end, it's the language that makes a Jack Driscoll story a Jack Driscoll story. Which, as many would agree, is the best kind of story there is.
~Sharon Harrigan
There’s a beauty here, both in language and in content, and Driscoll is the master of capturing a delicate humanity where most people might be least likely to look. It is no accident that this collection ends with a story about miracles, and the arc of this book as a collection is beautiful and deliberate. Narrative’s tension comes from time, after all, and what is time but a life unfolding?
~Natalie Bakopoulos
The Goat Fish and the Lover’s Knot, ten stories comprising Jack Driscoll’s eleventh book, provides all the proof any judge of literature would need to place Driscoll near the top of what America has to offer in the way of supremely gifted writers.
~Duff Brenna
A new book by Jack Driscoll is a cause for celebration. The Goat Fish and the Lover's Knot reminds me—not that I'd forgotten—exactly why Driscoll has long been one of my favorite American writers. The qualities that have made his work indelible—his deeply intimate relationship with the natural world, the natural lyricism, and palpability of his language, the authentic way in which his always credible narratives earn their mystery—are here in abundance in this beautiful collection.
~Stuart Dybek, Author of the Start of Something: the Selected Stories of Stuart Dybek
You'll savor every word as Driscoll sings the sad, sweet songs of rural America. These songs believe in heartaches and miracles. These miracles look up at the stars and see humanity in the constellations.
~Bonnie Jo Campbell
In this new collection, Jack Driscoll has proven himself again to be one of the finest fiction writers at work these days. His great gift is how uniquely he is able to bestow complexity upon his characters, complete their humanity with just this or that perfect detail, or gesture, or line of dialogue. Combined with the empathy that, as a writer, he shows for all of them, along with his sly eye for foibles and absurdities, reading his fiction feels like living it, and you come away from his pages under his influence, with a deeper vision of your own, feeling understood and better able to understand. There's no sentimentality in The Goat Fish and the Lover's Knot, but Driscoll is able to see through others' eyes in a way few writers can, and his work adds to the world's store of compassion. And, such language! Without ever compromising the power and immediacy and pull of his stories, his sentences often just have to be reread and admired. There's everything in this book that a work of fiction can give us—suspense, and comfort, and conflict, and character, and poetry, and landscape, and sanity, and craziness. It's the kind of book that renews one's belief in the power and importance of books.
~Laura Kasischke
These are tales of family mayhem and magic—of how love survives and how we survive love—each of them told in the rich, wry voice of the real. Jack Driscoll is a local hero to Michigan writers; this book proves him a national treasure.
~Peter Ho Davies
Every sentence written by Jack Driscoll is a miracle—and every story bright with humor and heart and insight. The Goat Fish and the Lover's Knot will hypnotize you with its lyrical beauty.
~Benjamin Percy
