Country People
Wonderfully dry, intellectually frisky ... Mason...is a lively, fluid writer; here he glides smoothly between present and past, myth and everyday detail, skepticism and credulity ... Never gets too self-consciously quirky; Miles may have his head in the clouds, but the novel has its feet on the ground, even as it plays with the idea of a world beneath the ground. It is also, simply put, very funny ... Infectious ... The book’s barbs are pointed but not mean.
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Modest and manageable, a prescription for summer amusement that takes immediate effect ... It is lovely if occasionally confounding company, like going in and out of a thick mist ... While the prose of Country People, flows like a babbling brook, its depiction of the agony and bliss of procrastination is the world-class work of someone who must know ... If these Hollow Earthers exist merely to impart something profound or practical that will ground our drifting scholar, so be it. There’s so much fine, freewheeling observation and pillowy erudition here, it’s tempting just to sink in.
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A romp that unfolds over a single academic year and playfully explores the power of storytelling, family, and community ... Mason is a psychiatrist and associate professor in Stanford University’s Department of Psychiatry as well as a writer. His interest in the interplay between literature, history, and medical practice informs his fiction. In Country People, he highlights – with levity and humor – how erroneous ideas, gullibility, and blinders can lead even people who should know better down rabbit holes, and what it takes to tunnel one’s way out.
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