For The Exiles: “…Kirkpatrick does not expect the myths to carry the weight of the book, and each of the characters in this slim volume have depths beneath their surface, human behaviors and humor. They bend and distort their stories, slipping the noose of their expected endings. Each section is a different story, and a[…]
Light without Heat reviewed at the Collagist
“While Light Without Heat delights in the high-concept story and does not hesitate to challenge the reader intellectually, Kirkpatrick doesn’t lose sight of the thinker thinking the thought, the rememberer remembering. These are moving stories, as funny as they are sad, as full of death as they are of love.” –Joe Aguilar at the Collagist
Review of Light without Heat at The Oxford American
“The nineteen stories in Matthew Kirkpatrick’s Light Without Heat are disorienting. They employ a series of devices—photographs, diagrams, side-by-side points of view, multiple nameless characters, big blocks of unattributed dialogue, and pleasingly unusual plots—to either defamiliarize the reader by making the familiar strange, or jar the reader, often into laughter, by making the strange familiar.”[…]
A review of Light without Heat
“It’s difficult to speak in absolutes or generalities about a writer or collection so versatile and adventurous. This isn’t to say the pieces are listless or incompatible; Kirkpatrick simply refuses — and good for him — to ignore any corners of his palette.” – James Tate Hill at Bookslut.com
Review of Light without Heat at HTMLGiant
Here’s a review of Light without Heat at HTMLGiant… “Kirkpatrick can clearly pen a story that rivals the most anthologized of our short story writers, but also in his collection are heretofore unimaginable forms, stories that mirror the moment when you arrive late to a Surrealist tea party, and you’re not entirely sure which parlor[…]
A Review of Light without Heat
“Light without Heat is, at once, a collection that is relentlessly engaged with the possibilities of form and language, while also deeply invested in matters of universal importance: of love, of purpose, of life, of death. As such, even those readers who are not typically interested in innovative and experimental fiction will likely find much[…]