Although theater is not a form that [Ben] Lerner has seemed particularly conversant with in the past, Transcription feels like a step towards drama. It is by far his shortest novel—a short novel by anyone’s standards—and much of it is dialogue. Each of its claustrophobic acts is named after a hotel, as if the story were being staged in traditional, walled settings. Shortly after arriving at the Hotel Providence, the narrator notices that the building is situated across the street from a church that once hosted an experimental theater space. He saw a play there as an undergraduate […] and, in the present, he is “distracted by the idea that a version of myself was still watching the play.” Later, Thomas asks the narrator for reassurance that he is recording [their interview]. “Otherwise we repeat ourselves and it grows unnatural,” he says. “We will sound like bad actors. Even the transcript will show that we have rehearsed.”

Hannah Gold, “The World’s Worst Journalist”

Helen of Nowhere owes more to the closet drama, a play meant for reading rather than performing. The structure works to subdue the man’s speech by pushing other characters into the limelight even as he remains onstage, reminding the reader that we know only what these other characters are saying, not what they’re thinking. It’s as if the man believes this were a novel about him and the tragic, misunderstood end to his career, but the novel knows that it is a multivocal drama about the problem of change. […] In reading Helen of Nowhere, I had thoughts in the back of my mind that more usually come up in the theater: Who hasn’t spoken yet to whom? How on earth is this going to end?

Joanna Biggs, “Enter Man”

Short Talks is the moment before [Anne] Carson moves from portraying lyric mindstage to staging encounters between and among characters. In light of this trajectory Autobiography of Red’s Geryon was a revelation. This enactment of character and voice did not only occur in Carson’s own poetic fictions; her contemporized translation of Greek tragic plays corrupt those delineations that so often fence off lyric poetry from fiction and drama.

Over the past decades Carson has shown us how to pull very old poetry up through the crust of very new poetry. Her body of writing is renowned for its original, pithy, unruly theatricization of anticipation, desire, insight, terror, shame and resistance. The window frames have exploded: the profuse leakage, onslaught of fire and lava, appears formally alongside something brutally reconstructive in Carson’s present work, all of it engined by the evolution of discernible characters involved in some quotidian, occult, intensely private and profusely choral encounter with perception and mortality.

Margaret Christakos, introduction to Anne Carson, Short Talks