Pilgrims

Praise for Pilgrims

“Gilbert is keen on seeing as many of her characters achieve redemption as possible—in the most creative ways possible. . . . She achieves the enviable feat of telling her characters’ stories in their own words, on their own terms, without pomp or superciliousness.”—The New York Times Book Review

“With her first story collection, Gilbert proves herself to be a capable fiction writer. Many of her nonfiction strengths carry over: She draws her characters beautifully, and her sentences are sharp and bright. She has retained her gift for dialogue. But while I admired many of these stories, I didn’t always take the kind of pleasure in them I’d hoped to. Perhaps it’s because of their solemn, even sententious tone.” —Los Angeles Times

“Rendered with care and airtight precision.” —Time Out New York

“A superior collection of stories about women who are as tough as they look, though perhaps not as tough as they think they are.”—Glamour

“An imaginative range, assured comic touch, and dead-on ear for dialogue that’s truly exceptional. . . . A gifted fiction writer’s sympathy for an amusing, believable array of resolute searchers and a reporter’s thoroughness that never gets bogged down in detail . . . her nimble, sharp prose is like the fingers of a gifted illusionist.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Each story is full of humor, strength, and strange experiences. . . .Gilbert has taken her encounters with people of every past and place, and infused them with the light and longevity of her own imagination.”—Chicago Tribune

“Gilbert’s prose is honest and straightforward, her descriptions often funny and apt . . . [she] has given voice to very real and likeable characters all caught in that very most American of locales: on the way to being somewhere, or someone, else.” —Detroit Free Press

“Hopeful, deluded, intoxicated, amazed, Gilbert’s characters shoot across the sky, and she catches them like a skilled photographer just as they pop, before they crash, drown or grow dull and fade away. . . . Her fiction, like the best reporting, bristles with sharp, startling details.” —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Reading this talented trickster is like watching an acrobat. The risks are cruel. The light-as-a-feather endings can charm. One waits with interest for more of this fabulist.” —Hortense Calisher

“This is a killer collection, a run in the bad part of town, a sideshow of the heart. Elizabeth Gilbert writes with fierce grace about people who are all wised up, beaten down, and still manage to hope and love and get on with it.” —Frederick Barthelme