[Said's] book is relaxed and discursive, original, immensely learned, fluently written.
   --John Bayley, New York Times Book Review

This striking book...represents an imporant contribution to literary criticism as well as suggesting a new direction for criticism to take.
   --Publishers Weekly

It is a pleasure to read someone who not only has studied and thought so carefully but is also beginning to substantiate, as distinct from announcing, a genuinely emergent way of thinking.
   --Raymond Williams, The Guardian

The intellectual excitment of each essay and the enlightening effect of the brilliant thinking and writing of the book as a whole move the reader to the recognition of Said's major contribution to contemporary literary critical theory and practice.
   --English Literature in Transition

Provocative and exacting; the essays provoke due interrogation of contemporary literary, and exact from the reader the care and conscientiousness the question at issue warrant...The book issues from a remarkably sharp intelligence, forcing us to face questions and possibilities that literary theorists on the whole prefer not even to raise.
   --Denis Donoghue, The New Republic

A learned, lucid, powerful book. It speaks with a particular and moving urgency to the issues facing criticism today.
   --Stanley Fisher

Edward W. Said was University Professor at Columbia University.

Read More by Edward W. Said:

• Reflections on Exile and Other Essays