Each of these stories could be expanded into a blockbusting novel. There is no writer alive who inhabits her characters so knowingly, or is able to send up contemporary attitudes and mores as expertly...clever, funny, revealing and a joy to read.

A strong collection about false assumptions and double standards...in these 11 social comedies, whose preoccupations - gender dynamics, celebrity, class, envy and disenchantment - are at once universal and yet specific to the moment we are living through...You Think It, I'll Say It has caught the attention of Reese Witherspoon, who plans to turn it into a comedy series starring Kristen Wiig. Smart move.

I so loved this collection. One of my favourite books of last year.

Has a rare and magical combination of accessibility, wit, and serious thinking. Sittenfeld was shortlisted for this year's Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, and she demonstrates these qualities again in this deft short story collection... Impossible to put down...She is saying what we are thinking.

The stories in You Think It, I’ll Say It feel so contemporary that we might worry they will date – except we’ll want a record of these times. We may be grateful for authors who chose to set their work in this exact political moment, when few Americans can maintain personal relationships across the Trump divide...The immediacy of these stories makes them effortlessly enjoyable to slide into, like new garments so comfortable that you decide to wear them out of the shop.

Fans...won't be disappointed: the tales here condense lifetimes of confusion, betrayal and bad decisions into perfect miniatures in deadpan American prose.

Clear-eyed and compulsive...Sittenfeld skewers what fraudsters we can be to ourselves and creates characters so vivid you half-expect to bump into them in the street.

This seems to be the year of the short story, and the best ones we've read so far are by Curtis Sittenfeld...an outstanding collection of funny, smart and pin-sharp takes on life.

A total treat. Savvy and ruefully wise, she burrows beneath the shiny surface of ...her disillusioned lovers, vaguely unhappy parents and dissatisfied employees [who] misjudge other people while in the grip of laughable, delicious self-delusion.

Say the words "Curtis Sittenfeld" to a certain reading demographic and you'll kick off evangelistic levels of enthusiasm. But it's for good reason, as no one nails understated humour with human behaviour as she does. This collection of short stories doesn't disappoint, uniting would-be presidential candidates with Insta-stalking mothers.

Nobody else writes with such precision and amusement about the absolute inability of men and women to understand each other...this collection is all killer no filler.

A collection of wry, psychologically astute portraits of stymied humans, characters with whom Sittenfeld commiserates even as they are skewered by her dry and languorous wit.

As smart, sparkling and ruefully wise as her novels.

Often praised for her psychological and social acuity, Sittenfeld is also a careful plotter, withholding facts and details until they are surprising enough to change the way we read a story, and to make us question our own expectations and values...there's no one better than her at showing how the personal is political.

Psychologically acute, deftly crafted and deeply pleasurable.

Every page of this book as engaging as the next.

OK, I’ll say it: I get a kick out of Curtis Sittenfeld...a sharp observer of human nature and human relationships — especially the male/female variety — and she’s a hoot, an appealing combination in my book...a lot of fun, even when it makes you wince.

A vivid cast of women caught up in knotty social dilemmas.

Short and sharp vignettes...In all, Sittenfeld demonstrates a gift for weaving the banal into the culturally significant, making this collection a touchstone for the present day.

A true American artist ... a revelator for this still new century.

A dizzying mix of humour and near tragedy that leaves us unsure whether to laugh or weep… For too long, Denis Johnson was not sufficiently appreciated. A fine novelist and poet, as well as one of the best short story writers of his generation.

An instant classic…A masterpiece of deep humanity and astonishing prose…. It's filled with Johnson's unparalleled ability to inject humor, profundity, and beauty—often all three—into the dark and the mundane alike. These characters have been pushed toward the edge; through their searches for meaning or clawing just to hold onto life, Johnson is able to articulate what it means to be alive, and to have hope.

Like a good rock song, a typical Denis Johnson sentence describes, with total precision, what an emotion feels like … Johnson has sometimes been compared to Ernest Hemingway for his creation of a distinctive American idiom.

Denis Johnson was the best American writer of the past twenty-five years.

He was the kind of writer who comes along once in a generation, if that often: a true original, in the same league as Melville and Whitman.

Here are stories that feel generously improvised but never haphazard, uncanny but earthy, reconciled to the passing of time but themselves out of time. Few books so relentlessly concerned with death feel so relentlessly alive.

Denis Johnson writes short stories like no one has ever done before. He makes the normal electric; the everyday enormous. There is not a single word here that does not hit you square in the face and say: look, this is what it's about, this is what you need to know.

Denis Johnson’s stories are astonishing… they dash between quicksilver wit and gallows humour, twinning the superficial with the profound so elegantly. His sentences are exquisite, often having the capacity to sock a sudden punch. The last story made me gasp.

[An] absorbing collection of deceptively rambling, craftily casual tales ... Magical stuff.

Sometimes streetwise and tough, and always informal, light, elegant and miraculously tender.

The late Denis Johnson is arguably the most influential American prose writer of the last thirty years ... and in the posthumously published The Largess of the Sea Maiden it is blindingly clear why.

The five darkly comic stories that comprise The Largesse of the Sea Maiden are befitting final testaments to [Johnson’s] wild originality... His sentences, like his plots, are full of gorgeous little shocks.