Correction of Drift - Reviews

"A fully realized work, which reveals Ryder as an irresistible, lyrical storyteller."

—Brooklyn Rail

"Pamela Ryder opens up the well-known story of the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby to illuminate the ways we drift off course--perpetrator, victim, caretaker, witness--and are subsumed by the dream of memory and longing. With gorgeously precise language, she slips between the cracks in intractable surfaces, revealing the inexpressible word."

—Dawn Raffel, author of Carrying the Body

"Ryder, Ryder, you've done it, you have done it!-made that which no one else has made. Isn't firstness the consolation? Ask the ghost of Lucky Lindy. Oh, the occurrences, with what cruelty they will come to have their way with us. But to have been first at something, first at anything, as in having crossed an uncrossable distance-by air, let us say, or by word-is this not the deed? And thus, in proof of this, the luck of those who hold this ghostly book, this inconsolable haunting, in hand."

—Gordon Lish

"I first read Pam Ryder's eloquent stories over ten years ago, and thought she was one of the most powerful prose stylists I had ever encountered. Correction of Drift is dazzling, original, and brings something completely new to American letters."

—Pat Conroy

"Correction of Drift is a dreamy divagation of a novel, an elegiac lullaby, soothing and terrible, sung over the empty crib in the Lindbergh nursery. Ryder reimagines the event in shard-like sentences, some pretty as beach glass and others ugly and sharp, and these sentences and the sentence fragments and the headlines and ransom notes accrue to powerful effect until even the table scraps, "crusts, bones, trimmings of fat," seem ominous portents of violence and loss."

—Christine Schutt, author of Florida, a novel