Reviews
Fieldwork received widespread attention when renowned author Stephen King's review of it, called "How to Bury a Book," was published in Entertainment Weekly. While King lauds, at length, the novel's complexity, "narrative voice full of humor and sadness," and suspense, he issues a scathing attack on its publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, for poor marketing choices:
Why, why, why would a company publish a book this good and then practically demand that people not read it? Why should this book go to waste? Is it because there are people in publishing who believe that readers who liked The Memory Keeper's Daughter are too dumb to enjoy a killer novel like Fieldwork? If so, shame on them for their elitism. —Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly, April 15, 2007King's review resulted in increased sales of Fieldwork. When Berlinski won the Whiting Award, he attributed it to his "luck" that "Stephen King, the most famous writer in the world, picked up my book because he didn't like the cover."
In 2007, The New York Review of Books published a positive review of Fieldwork from Hilary Mantel:
Early in Mischa Berlinski's gripping and entertaining first novel there is a piece of postmodern skittishness which points to a truth that novelists shy away from: their trade embarrasses them. When you first start making things up, you expect that someone is going to tell you to stop. —Hilary Mantel, The New York Review of Books, July 19, 2007Read more about this topic: Mischa Berlinski
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