Reviews

"Sullivan seems able to do almost anything, to work in any register, and not just within a single piece but often in the span of a single paragraph..."Pulphead" is the best, and most important, collection of magazine writing since Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again."..Sullivan's writing is a bizarrely coherent, novel, and generous pastiche of the biblical, the demotic, the regionally gusty and the erudite." --"The New York Times Book Review"

["Pulphead "is] a big and sustaining pile of--as I've heard it put about certain people's fried chicken--crunchy goodness . . . What's impressive about "Pulphead" is the way these disparate essays cohere into a memoirlike whole. The putty that binds them together is Mr. Sullivan's steady and unhurried voice. Reading him, I felt the way Mr. Sullivan does while listening to a Bunny Wailer song called 'Let Him Go.' That is, I felt 'like a puck on an air-hockey table that's been switched on.' Like well-made songs, his essays don't just have strong verses and choruses but bridges, too, unexpected bits that make subtle harmonic connections . . . The book has its grotesques, for sure. But they are genuine and appear here in a way that put me in mind of one of Flannery O'Connor's indelible utterances. 'Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, ' O'Connor said, 'I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.'" --"The New York Times"

"Sullivan's essays have won two National Magazine Awards, and here his omnivorous intellect analyzes Michael Jackson, Christian rock, post-Katrina New Orleans, Axl Rose and the obscure 19th century naturalist Constantine Rafinesque. His compulsive honesty and wildly intelligent prose recall the work of American masters of New Journalism like Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe." --"Time"

"Sullivan's essays stay with you, like good short stories--and like accomplished short fiction, they often will, over time, reveal a fulle