“No other writer can make a few small decisions ripple across the globe, and across time, with more subtlety and power.”

“Fools is astonishing for its range, for its sweeping sense of time and place, and most especially for its deep insight into the way small choices can circle out to shape lives, and even human history. This is a beautiful book and an important literary achievement.”

“Joan Silber is one of the wisest, finest, most capacious observers of the human condition writing now. We should all be as heartbreakingly foolish and beautiful as the characters in this collection. Silber understands them inside out, and brings them close to us, as no one else can.”

“Fools'... deftly interconnected stories are devoted to those dreamers who act rashly out of their better natures, who never quit asking the world Can’t you do better than that?, a question certain to become increasingly urgent as this 21st century progresses.”

“Joan Silber's stories are like compressed novels. They are interlocking tales that fill in the history of revolutionary politics in the twentieth century. If you want to understand progressive intellectuals in America, read this book. It's always absorbing--the characters and the intensely condensed narrative details.”