Really good writers seem to have their own terrain, their own timing, their own off-key lullabies, and Kirk Nesset is certainly a good short story writer. These stories are melodious when they need to be, jangle when we need to hear what's discordant. They're about lives lived without a self-congratulatory champagne flute in sight, played against a background of shifting, uneasy, endlessly surprising ordinary life. — Ann Beattie

I'm so grateful that Kirk Nesset's wonderful stories have been collected between covers. We need books like Paradise Road. Now more than ever. Nesset sees the world — our infinately screwed-up world — from such a beautifully peculiar angle. He allows us to see so much that we miss. These stories brim with soul and wounded heart. —Peter Orner

Paradise Road delivers us, in a barbed and wiry prose, into the certainties of a future riding in hard and indifferent, a world brittle and chipped at the edges, no home at all for the soft-hearted or soft-minded. Kirk Nesset works the mean and woeful precincts of the heart, his people gone whichaway with want, every sunrise revealing yet another chance to screw up, every midnight a welcome relief from misrule and mistake. Here's a book like gunfire down the block — spooky and unexpected and unforgettable — a book that grabs you by the scruff and shakes you silly with its wisdom and its odd and dangerous beauty. — Lee K. Abbott

The figures and voices that appear in Paradise Road are like ghosts from an ancient land that move toward their destinies with hope and defiance. Mr. Nesset conducts their journeys with a sure hand while making fiction of striking originality and beauty. Paradise Road may go through geography unfamiliar to some of us, but the route, once taken, is unforgettable. — Hilary Masters

Paradise Road is a sweet collection. Nesset's brisk style is sometimes married to quirky events, but it's consistently true to his characters — ordinary men and women whose ambitions and loves usually fail them. The stories are set mostly in California and they're rich in the detail of inner and outer landscapes, and of the wisdom that comes — or doesn't come — from losing. — Robley Wilson

Nesset can bewitch you with one word. But he can also make 100 sing like a chorus. — Pittsburgh City Paper.    Read more

Paradise Road recently won the annual Drue Heinz Literature Prize, an honor it very much deserves. This is a stunning collection. — Erie Times

What keeps us reading, what inspires us, really, to polish off this slim book in one sitting, is Nesset's stylized, polished control of so many contradictory impulses. — The Saint Ann's Review

Paradise Road leads anywhere but into a romantic sunset, but the course it charts is nevertheless oddly compelling. — Pittsburgh Magazine, March 8, 2008.

Nesset’s best stories take traditional plot elements — betrayal, abandonment, a desperate fool attempting a scam and getting caught — and pump life back into them by introducing the decorously unexpected. — Barn Owl Review     Read More

Kirk Nesset displays his mastery of the short story form in twelve rich and well-developed stories. — RainTaxi Review    Read more

Like other natural phenomena we'll never really understand, the hydra-headed thing we call love lends itself to endless deconstruction. Allegheny College English professor Kirk Nesset takes a whack at this elusive ghost in his new short story collection. — Steve Goddard's History Wire.    Read more