The best stories in Jamie Quatro's first collection, I Want to Show You More, are about adultery. They are passionate, sensuous, savagely intense, and remarkable for their brave dualism. . . . Moves between carnality and spirit like some franker, modernized Flannery O'Connor tale . . . Quatro has a poet's compound eye [and] fearless lyricism . . . Expansive, joyful, with forgiveness supplanting ruination. -- James Wood * The New Yorker *
Subtle, sexy, and reflective . . . There's so much in these stories that's shocking. Yet there's so much solace. -- Dwight Garner * The New York Times *
A dogged, brutally thoughtful piece of work, and gives us a writer of great originality and apparent artistic maturity who seems to have come out of nowhere ... Strange, thrilling, and disarmingly honest. * New York Times Book Review *
Haunting and sharp . . . [reminiscent] of the dark-meets-light style of Lydia Davis or Alice Munro-but it leaves room for zingers, too. Quatro is so good * Elle *
A brilliant new voice in American fiction has arrived. Bright, sharp, startling, utterly distinctive, passionate, and secretive, Jamie Quatro's stories are missives from deep within the landscape of American womanhood. They take you by the heart and throat, shake you awake, and ask you to ponder the mysteries of love, parenthood, and marriage. She has earned a place alongside Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, and Alice Munro. -- David Means
It's rare, to the point of near non-existence, to find a book that has such literary weight and heft, yet reads like a sonnet. I look at it in puzzlement, wondering how Jamie Quatro gives such breadth, depth, and intensity in so few words. And it's funny, and real, and painful, so painful. Also a shot of light. An education. A mirror. Terrifying. -- Samantha Harvey, author of The Wilderness and Dear Thief
Jamie Quatro has taken one of the great themes - infidelity - and subjected it to her own exacting and poetic brand of scrutiny. At times painfully honest, always intensely felt, Fire Sermon is a moving and gripping novel of the emotions. -- Rupert Thompson author of Katherine Carlyle