"The deftly drawn settings and sensitively rendered landscapes that were created with such sensual prose in the early work became more challenging in the later work, as if testing his reader's tolerance for following him into ever more technically demanding altitudes of prose. If only the most supple of readers reached the pole, those were the readers he wanted. But you were also rewarded for getting there. If he laid down his prose like a gauntlet, you were a more agile reader than when you began the course if you survived it." - Roger L. Conover, from the Introduction