“His writing reminds me why I love to read.”

- Gina Oschner, author of The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight

"Stuart Nadler is an artist of secrets. Line after line of clear, revealing prose turn out to be incendiary. These are stories that expand without warning. A striking, rousing collection of people waking up fast. Nothing in The Book of Life is without consequence."

- Rosecrans Baldwin, author of You Lost Me There

"Stuart Nadler will end up being compared to people you've heard of. Bellow, I'm guessing; Nathan Englander, probably Malamud, I.B. Singer. Heavy-hitters. This is both apt and not. Nadler's great, and those guys are all great -- so it makes sense. Sort of. But Nadler (like each of the others) is great in his own way. He addresses tradition, but he captures the right-now as well as anyone I know of. He's heart-breaking, yet he's funny. He writes beautifully, but his prose is lean -- fat-free, even. He's really worth reading, so please do."

- Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng and Half A Life

"Stuart Nadler has written seven of the most gorgeous, poignant, intricately crafted, and compulsively readable stories I have read in a long time.  His flawed protagonists tend to be forever on the brink of heartbreak, yet the unlikely effect of Nadler’s fiction is that life is continually reaffirmed." 

- Frederick Reiken, author of Day for Night, and The Lost Legends of New Jersey

“Stuart Nadler treats his characters like people. The Book of Life is a fitting title for this collection—that’s what it’s about: life.  Here’s a Chekovian fascination with the human condition—the pleasures and tortures of family, love, sex, money, work, religion.  These are stories about fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, wives, husbands, friends, lovers—people with complex lives, troubled souls, deep hearts and messy desires.  Nadler is a writer, who, like Alice Munro, John Cheever or Bernard Malamud, does not write about “ordinary people” because he knows there’s no such thing as an ordinary person.  Each of these carefully wrought stories is as moving and masterful as a Chopin sonata; the notes and the silences between them will resonate with the reader for a very long time after they’re done.”

- Benjamin Hale, author of The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore