“Dazzling. . . . Potent. . . . Cleareyed. . . . There’s so much to praise and parse. . . . The stories are uniformly brilliant. . . . Would it be ludicrous to list, say, 20 of them as favorites?. . . . McGuane has emerged a master of the short story. . . . Cloudbursts is clearly the product of a life’s worth of thought and feeling and experience; it ought to be savored. That said, if you find yourself tearing through the book like a flash flood washing out a dirt road, I say go for it. You can always reread later, and you probably will.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Wonderful, essential. . .compelling and often astonishing. The stakes always feel high (characters can die and do die), and there’s no such thing as a not-funny McGuane story. The result is a continuous succession of storytelling delights.” —The Los Angeles Times
“Prose as chiseled and striking as a Rocky Mountain butte. . . . The brightness and humor of the writing never fails to delight.” —The Wall Street Journal
“A masterful addition to the form.” —Minneapolis StarTribune
“Sharply observed. . . . McGuane belongs on the social observer shelf with other short story masters including Anne Beattie, John Cheever, and Roald Dahl. . . . Simply a masterpiece.” —New York Journal of Books
“More than a few [stories] are what you might call, what you should call, masterpieces. . . . A great writer.” —Washington Independent Review of Books
“[An] outstanding career-capping volume, , , , Brief, stormy, and refreshing, McGuane’s stories erupt like the namesake of this marvelous collection.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Powerful. . . . Damn funny. . . . McGuane is a master, choosing his words with a lapidary’s precision and setting them in sentences that burn brightly, finishing his stories with epiphanies to treasure…One of our finest living short-story writers.” —Booklist (starred review)
“A career-spanning collection of short stories from McGuane, who’s observed America’s outskirts with equal measures of pathos and humor. . . . Putting all these stories in one place also spotlights the evolution of his prose over time. In his early stories, he could pull off a Cheever-esque domestic drama like ‘The Millionaire,’ about a family secreting away their pregnant teenage daughter at a summer home. . . . The newer stories, by contrast, are at once sturdier and more sensitive. . . . A stellar writer on the outdoors who’s gotten better at describing interior wildernesses over time.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
