Praise for Summer Brenner’s writing:
My Life in Clothes, a book of short stories
“...this is really a novel told in vignettes. Piecing together the narrative from one story to the next is half the fun. So is divining the meaning of clothes and Belgian lace in a story that plumbs far deeper things. It's a mystery of sorts, without the murder.” - by Christina Binkley, “Books for the Pickiest Personalities in Your Life,”
The Wall Street Journal
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“THE title story of Summer Brenner’s My Life in Clothes is a fierce and funny slip of a thing. "Early on, my cousin, Peggy, discovered that her greatest talent was the ability to turn a boy's simplest request into the world's biggest marvel," the narrator says. "By the end of high school, after she'd been squeezed, groped, rubbed, pounded, and humped, she eloped (out of sheer exhaustion) with the next young man who asked." Peggy is a recurring character in Ms Brenner’s energetic book of short stories. She reappears in one of the collection’s best pieces, “Psychic Shopper”, about a woman who is able to divine and fulfil the sartorial needs of her customers. It’s another pared story, just five pages long. But rich enough to be plumped into a novel.” - by More Intelligent Life, December 13th, 2010, The Economist
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“From a little-girl Harrod's coat with carved wooden buttons to a black cocktail dress that sparks a friend's philandering husband to make a move on her (and then throw up), garments drive the bittersweet personal vignettes comprising Summer Brenner's new collection My Life in Clothes.” - Anneli Rufus, “2010 Local Book Roundup: Pot Brownies, Homicide, and Bondage,” East Bay Express
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“Garment by garment, story by story, the author reveals more and more of herself, until you feel like you know her and would recognize her in the streets, if not by face then by her wardrobe.” - by Fish Monkey
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“All twenty-six stories are brilliant in their brevity, yet rich enough
to fill out a novel.” - Teresa Weaver, Atlanta Magazine
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“Anyone who's formed a deep and lasting attachment to a vintage dress, an heirloom necklace or a beloved pair of dance shoes will relate to these brief, vibrant short stories by Berkeley author Summer Brenner.” - Georgia Rowe, San Jose Mercury News
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I-5, A Novel of Crime, Transport, and Sex
VOTED TOP TEN BOOKS OF 2009 – Los Angeles Mystery Bookstore
TOP 50 BOOKS OF THE DECADE – BSC Review
“...We learn Anya’s story in layers, and we learn her character in actions
that are never quite what we expect them to be. She kept me guessing
all the way through this hallucinatory shadow-world tour.” – Jedidiah
Ayre, Ransom Notes: The BN Mystery Blog
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“...it has a quality very rare in literature: a subtle, dark humor that’s only perceivable when one goes deep into the heart of this world’s absurd tragedy, or tragic absurdity.” – R. Crumb
“In I-5, Summer Brenner deals with the onerous and gruesome subject of sex trafficking calmly and forcefully, making the reader feel the pain of its victims. The trick to forging a successful narrative is always in the details, and I-5 provides them in abundance. This book bleeds truth – after you finish it, the blood will be on your hands.” – Barry Gifford, screenwriter, poet, novelist, including Wild at Heart
“....Completely outside my normal reading pattern, I found myself staying up one night with a quick-read-page turner: Summer Brenner’s I-5, a hard-boiled feminist thriller....Well-written, without a superfluous word, it’s a big chase, practically a movie on the page....” – Ned Sublette, musician, performer, and author of Cuba And Its Music, The World That Made New Orleans, and The Year Before the Flood: A Story of New Orleans
“I-5 offers an unflinching and unsentimental examination of the emotional wreckage created by sex trafficking. When Anya, a survivor of this brutal industry, is enlisted to help her tormentors “break” a difficult new girl, the trip she takes to another city offers her an exhilarating glimpse of freedom. Along the way, Anya’s flooded by painful memories that reawaken emotions she’d stifled long ago. As the journey goes off-course, Anya begins testing the boundaries of her captivity and entertaining thoughts of revenge. Steeped in tension and biting black humor, this noir road-novel-cum-character-study is an impressive debut by a promising new voice.” - by Garrett Kenyon, Literary Kicks blog
“....Brenner did not set out to update Ivan Desinovich [by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn], but the similarities are unmistakable. In both novels, the main characters are snatched from their families and delivered to remote places that function by a harsh new set of rules....[B]oth characters also exhibit a sense of agency that helps them retain their humanity in brutish surroundings....Amidst all the difficult questions, the lively depiction of villains and antiheroes in I-5 make Brenner’s novel a thrill to read.” – Matthew Hirsch, ZNet (also posted by mattgonzalez)
“....It is a hairy and perfect novel....It does not hurt that Anya is the heroine to end all heroines. Brenner’s book is an antidote for a wide range of complaints.” – magicmolly.tumblr.com
“I'm in awe. I-5 moves so fast you can barely catch your breath. It's as tough as tires, as real and nasty as road rage, and best of all, it careens at breakneck speed over as many twists and turns as you'll find on The Grapevine. What a ride! I-5's a hard-boiled standout.” – Julie Smith, editor of New Orleans Noir and author of the Skip Langdon and Talba Wallis crime novel series
“Anya is a wonderful, believable heroine, her tragic tale told from the inside out, without a shred of sentimental pity, which makes it all the stronger....” – Denise Hamilton, editor of Los Angeles Noir and author of the LA Times bestseller, The Last Embrace
“...a novel that will beat you up – chances are you deserve it. I-5 cuts through layers of flesh to reveal the true heart of noir: that for every American dream there are a thousand nightmares. I have read no better novel in the genre. Roll over Willeford, tell Goodis the news.” – Owen Hill, poet and crime writer of The Incredible Double and The Chandler Apartments
“...Having now read – and completely enjoyed I-5 – I still think Summer Brenner is a poet, but one with notable narrative skills and a deep commitment both to her characters and to justice...I-5 is in this sense a political novel, though Brenner never lets this obstruct our view of her character. Anya is someone you will never forget.” – Ron Silliman, ronsilliman.blogspot.com
“...I-5 is a very smart and conscientious book. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t also an immensely enjoyable book. Brenner is an elegant writer, with an ear for the kind of startling turn of phrase that catches the reader off-guard and reawakens them to the force of her story....” – Benjamin Whitmer, INDenver Times
“I-5 is a wholly original piece of dark fiction that never goes where you expect it to and ventures into uncharted waters. It’s uncompromising in ways that should be exceptionally appealing to readers of dark fiction, I-5 is as tough a crime tale as you’re likely to find anywhere.” – BSC Review
“Summer Brenner provides an insider’s look at the seedy world of sexual slavery....Nothing gets sugar-coated, yet Brenner shows sincere sympathy and warmth for her characters. I found it hard to stop turning the pages....” – David Batstone, author of Not for Sale, founder of the Not for Sale campaign
“....a journey marred with sex and crimes that exposes the harsh reality of the invisibility of women, immigrants, and the marginalized, struggling to survive.” – Opal Palmer Adisa, poet, fiction writer, professor at California College of the Arts
“Brenner says I-5, her eighth novel, was inspired by the events of 1999 in Berkeley when a 17-year-old Indian girl died of carbon monoxide poisoning....She and other teenagers had been brought to the United States to work as cheap labor and sex providers....but Brenner took the incident many steps further, a tribute to her social conscience, especially her identification with immigrants and other marginalized groups, her feminism, and her considerable writing skills.” – Estelle Jelinek, The Berkeley Daily Planet
“Her prose style is a mirror reflection of the interstate: parched, fast, and tense, with an emotional timbre that matches the velocity of the plot.” – Rachel Swan, East Bay Express
“....Brenner braves a subject matter that is not easy to embrace, and she manages to create a character that is neither cliche nor uninspiring. I-5 moves at a clipped pace towards its conclusion, and the reader is wholly invested in finding out how Anya finally resolves her life.” – Megan Burns, Gently Read Literature
“...a grim and gripping noir novel....Brenner writes boldly and with seething clarity....” – Nina Sankovitch, Read All Day
Dancers and the Dance
“The wisdom of the body is Summer Brenner's terrain. She is the author as choreographer, a moving force with a pen.” – Sasha Anawalt, The Los Angeles Times
“....graphic, lyrical language to make us feel the rhythms, the hard work, the disappointments and the occasional exhilaration of something that transcends ourselves.” – Charlotte Innes, The New York Times
“Each story focuses on a different dancer and a different dance, and marvelously, the writer's voice takes on the style of the form so well you can almost hear the music in the background.” – Stephen Whitty, San Jose Mercury News
The Soft Room
“...The erotic realism of these well-constructed little stories does not obscure the deep romantic vision that fuels them....The feeling of discovery, mixed with sharp insight and closely observed detail, adds up to some of the best prose this reviewer has recently noted.” – Andrei Codrescu, Baltimore Sun
“....properly located in a tradition of prose stylists which has included Robert Creeley, Fielding Dawson, Richard Brautigan....these stories deliver what we want out of a novel (lived experience) through an amazingly taut, sensuous language.” – Lindy Hough, San Francisco Review of Books