Reception
New York Times reviewer Gerald Jonas found that the stories "offer a mixture of overheated Hype and genuine concern for the human condition," noting that on occasion Ellison "raises excess and pretension to a form of art." In 1993, the Times described a reissue of the collection as "Fantasy at its most bizarre and unsettling." Writing in Galaxy, Spider Robinson reviewed the collection favorably, despite faulting Ellison's "unrelieved pessimism."
One academic biography describes Deathbird Stories as "a kind of spiritual autobiography" and notes that Ellison's modern gods "gain their influence not from revelatory or charismatic social movements but from the driving anxieties of mid-twentieth century American culture."
Read more about this topic: Deathbird Stories
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)