The Common Wilderness - Reviews

"Michael Seide's The Common Wilderness is an original, energetic, language wrought, imaginative work by a daring writer. It is a lusty, intricate novel of a life in the Thirties ascending in art."

-Bernard Malamud

"An astonishingly determined, sustained, lyrical and profane work that takes us up from the city streets to the heights of witty despair that is really an exultation of language. For all its harsh material, it is wholly a literary work - many-tongued, bitter, solid in every pore. It hit me very hard."

-Alfred Kazin

"Hart Crane's 'the fury of the street is one of the great phrases of our literature since Baudelaire, when, in the 'ant-swarming city,' 'the ghost in broad daylight plucks you by the sleeve.' Michael Seide has caught and articulated this fury, has made it lament and scream and sing: has bodied forth the city-sensibility at its most naked and creative. His vision is all-out, and his language matches it. I have read no more powerful and releasing books in years."

-James Dickey

"Mike Seide's epic novel is the greatest creative effort I have been associated with in my lifetime - 30 years in the making. If it calls forth unused mental muscles in the reading, think of what a galaxy of brain-cells (and every other kind) it forced to their fullest in the writing. There is no book like it in America, there will probably never be another; its niche is secure, even though time and tide and controversy will wash over it before its true features are made permanent and clear. Seide, at 70, is the last and youngest member of a dedicated literary generation - the modernist generation - to 'go all the way.' It was all promised in the stories discovered by Katherine Anne Porter and Robert Penn Warren, and published by Harcourt, Brace in the collection, The Common Thread to splendid reviews by John Chamberlain, Isaac Rosenfeld and Mark Schorer. Now here is the heroic fruit. Eat slowly, it's a dish unlike any other."

-Seymour Krim