"Erin’s book is magnificent, simply one of the best books I’ve read in ages. I read it in a reverie of blissed-out, horrified amazement. It will be compared to Markson, but it’s better than Markson — more formally disciplined, more cold-blooded in its self-scrutiny. People will go gaga for this book. I can easily imagine it becoming a cultural touchstone like Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers or Maggie Nelson’s Bluets." – Sarah Manguso

 

"Deeply affecting. Grief blows a life into shards, and Vincent assembles here the precious fragments. Fourteen Ways of Looking, is a deep dive into the moment after which nothing is the same— life as afterlife, and yet it’s what we have. Vincent’s effort is both psychological and literary: trying to wrangle meaning from an event that may have none, or may hold it all. And what then, of her autonomy to make her own life? In her efforts to free herself by going back to the source of trauma, she is both Odysseus and Euridice, damned and saved. A remarkable achievement." – Anna Funder

 

"Fourteen Ways of Looking by Erin Vincent is an incredibly affecting work. Through a structure and project that holds the book to the tightest of attention, Vincent brings to this astute exploration of personal grief the world’s grief, the reader’s grief, the planet’s grief. All of time concertinas into these perfectly formed fragments that interrogate the number fourteen through the lens of how we are changed by the things of life that stop us in our tracks. However, I think the final message of Vincent’s magnificent work is the things we notice once we have been changed and the ways these act as markers to our inevitable tentative steps into the rest of life. This is an astounding work—resonant, intelligent and generous." – Pip Adam

 

"Fourteen – for Erin Vincent – is the age at which her self was formed, and this text is itself an astonishing formal experiment. The number fourteen becomes uncanny and arbitrary – both divine symbol and violent accident - as she remembers her younger self and tries to find patterns in chaos. An incredible achievement: as unclassifiable, humane and haunting as Maggie Nelson's Bluets or Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House. I was moved to tears." – Clare Pollard

 

"In Fourteen Ways of Looking, the repetition—no, insistence (to echo Gertrude Stein)—of looking for meaning in the number 14 reveals a mind processing grief kaleidoscopically and finding patterns in the coincidental. What at first might seem like obsession turns quickly into a sustained, free-wheeling, associative kind of thinking that is playful, poetic and, ultimately, emancipatory." – Toby Fitch

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"An extraordinary marriage of feeling and form, Fourteen Ways of Looking will take a place alongside strange classics like Joe Brainard's

I Remember and Sheila Heti's Alphabetical Diaries." – Brian Morton

 

"A haunting incantation of loss, written with bravery and brevity.  The purity of Vincent's voice is unforgettable." – Mandy Sayer

 

"The number 14 will haunt you for years as it has Erin Vincent." – Louis Nowra

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"Exhilarating... not a narrative of smooth redemption but a wrenching and true reckoning with the lifelong work of grief."

                                                                                                                                                                – Catriona Menzies-Pike, The Guardian

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"That Vincent has created from tragedy a work of such brevity and beauty is a testament to her exceptional talent and fierce intelligence. Fourteen Ways of Looking left me stunned, infected by numbers, compelled to return, again and again."

                                                                                                                                  – Jane Gleeson-White, Australian Book Review

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"Frankly brilliant." – Jason Steger, Sydney Morning Herald

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"As in the best narrative nonfiction, there is a liveliness this liveliness of thinking on the page. With white space and clean, cool prose, Vincent primes the reader to become an accomplice in the task of pattern identification and meaning making... Freighted with more than 40 years of thinking, writing, consuming art and enduring grief, Fourteen Ways of Looking is a brilliant and startling read."

                                                                                                                                                                    – Fiona Murphy, The Saturday Paper

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