Crace, Jim 1946- (James Turton)

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Crace, Jim 1946- (James Turton)

PERSONAL:

Born March 1, 1946, in Brocket Hall, Lemsford, Hertfordshire, England; son of Charles Sydney (an insurance agent) and Edith Crace (a homemaker); married Pamela Ann Turton (a teacher), January 3, 1975; children: Thomas Charles, Lauren Rose. Education: Birmingham College of Commerce, London, B.A. (with honors), 1968. Politics: "Libertarian Socialist; Labour." Religion: Atheist. Hobbies and other interests: "Family and garden; tennis, politics."

ADDRESSES:

Home—Birmingham, England. Agent—David Godwin Associates, 55 Monmouth St., London WC2H 9DG, England.

CAREER:

Writer, playwright, and journalist. Sudanese Educational Television, Khartoum, volunteer producer and writer, 1968-69; Kgosi Kgari Sechele Secondary School, Molepolole, Botswana, teacher of English, 1969-70; freelance radio and feature journalist, 1970-86; full-time novelist, 1986—. Midlands Arts Centre, writer-in-residence, 1981-83; Birmingham Festival of Readers and Writers, founder and director, 1983; West Midlands Arts, chair of literature panel, 1984-85; Birmingham City University, visiting professor of creative writing, 2003—; University of Texas at Austin, distinguished writer-in-residence, 2008.

MEMBER:

International PEN, Society of Authors, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Royal Society of Literature (fellow).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Arts Council of Great Britain major writing bursary, 1976; West Midlands Arts writing award, 1980; Whitbread Award for first novel, David Higham Prize for Fiction, and Guardian Fiction Prize, all 1986, and premio Antico Fattore, 1987, all for Continent; GAP International Award for Literature, Echoing Green Foundation, 1989, for The Gift of Stones; British Society of Authors travel award, 1992; Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, 1995, for Signals of Distress; E.M. Forster Award, AAAL, 1996; Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, 1997, for Quarantine; National Book Critics' Circle Award for fiction and Book Review Best Books selection, both 2001, both for Being Dead; honorary doctorates from University of Central England, 2000, and University of Birmingham, 2002.

WRITINGS:

Continent (stories), Harper (New York, NY), 1986, reprinted, Ecco Press (Hopewell, NJ), 1997.

The Gift of Stones, Scribner (New York, NY), 1988.

Arcadia, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1991.

Signals of Distress, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1995.

Quarantine, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1997.

Being Dead, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2000.

The Devil's Larder (short stories), Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2001.

Genesis, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2003, published in England as Six, Viking (London, England), 2003.

The Pesthouse: A Novel, Nan A. Talese (New York, NY), 2007.

Author of radio plays Salateen and The Bird Has Flown, BBC-Radio. Contributor to Introduction Six, Faber, 1977; contributor to periodicals, including the Sunday Times, Telegraph Sunday Magazine, and Times Literary Supplement.

ADAPTATIONS:

The Devil's Larder, Quarantine, and Signals of Distress have been adapted as plays.

SIDELIGHTS:

Jim Crace is known for his original fiction probing the social and political nature of human beings. Although his works are often remarkable for their unique settings—Continent takes place on an imaginary continent while The Gift of Stones is set in a prehistoric era—the books' scenery becomes subordinate to Crace's examination of communal behavior. Crace's first book, Continent, portrays an invented and unnamed continent modeled after the Third World. A collection of seven loosely connected stories, the work contains vignettes that demonstrate how development impinges on Old World ways, often exploiting the continent's natives. Nevertheless, Crace once told CA that the work was never meant to be a polemic, or even to represent his own opinions. "With Continent I wasn't writing about what I knew—political views that I'd already formed about the relationship between the Western World and the Third World, or between the new ways of mankind and the old," he explained. "I was writing about what I was interested in and what I still wanted to debate and discover. So that book poses questions rather than answers them; I find that a much more interesting way of approaching narrative than writing political tracts."

Robert Olen Butler described the essence of Continent in the New York Times Book Review: "Tradition and progress, superstition and rationalism, the primal and the mercantile struggle for the souls of men." In one story, for example, a city-educated young man returns to his small village and contemplates how to carry on his father's business of selling milk with supposed magical properties. The son decides to continue marketing the milk as magical, determining that preying on the villager's superstitious nature can be quite profitable. In another story, electricity is introduced to a town by way of a ceiling fan in a local establishment. The fan packs so much power, though, that it knocks bystanders against walls while the urbanized installer of the appliance stands safely in the "calm" of the fan directly beneath. And in the story "Sins and Virtues," a calligrapher whose antiquated signs are suddenly in great demand in the United States is urged by his government to produce new masterpieces for export. Elderly and exhausted, the craftsman is unable to produce signs in his former manner and resorts to submitting forgeries of his own work for sale; notes the calligrapher, "The quest for Meaning in Form belongs to an age long past."

Continent was hailed enthusiastically by several reviewers. Calling the book "brilliant, provocative and delightful," Butler wrote: "One of the basic tasks of fiction is to strip down and rearrange experience in order to distance the reader from habitual reactions to surface reality and thereby, paradoxically, draw him closer to a deeper reality. Mr. Crace … does this splendidly." Crace was not only applauded for creating a fictional landscape that highlights social and political realities, but also for composing lucid and lyrical prose.

Crace moves from an imaginary present-day setting to an actual historical one with his second work of fiction, The Gift of Stones. Set in the late Stone Age, the novel depicts a community whose livelihood rests on its stone-crafting skills. The villagers' flint tools and weapons are so superior that trading in them sustains the community fully, thereby affording it seclusion from outside influences and dangers. Visions of the outside world, though, are brought to the village by a storyteller who, rendered useless as a laborer because he lost one arm as a child, travels in search of adventures with which to embellish his tales. During his travels he befriends a young woman, Doe, and her daughter. When the three return to the storyteller's village, they find the community in economic turmoil. Doe is then mysteriously killed by a bronze-headed spear, thus foretelling the village's demise in the face of technological advancement. The community disbands under the leadership of the storyteller.

The setting and plot of The Gift of Stones, reviewers noted, are secondary to Crace's efforts to explore themes of art and technological progress. The author himself once told CA: "I was interested in what happens when a community is robbed of the certainty of wealth and occupation that is provided by having jobs." The resulting novel "is not a ‘you are there’ experience, but a contemplative one," commented Jane Smiley in the New York Times Book Review. "The setting … is, rather than an attempt to create a world, a conceit that provides the author scope for his meditation. The reader seeking to be swept into the past will be disappointed." Describing how the author conveys his themes, Chicago Tribune Books contributor Perry Glasser noted: "Crace writes allegory. Every carefully shaped event advances an idea and illuminates one more facet of the argument. The Gift of Stones is not about people, but about imaginative art, storytelling in particular, and the complicated relationship between art and the realm of commerce that at once supports and despises its artists." Times Literary Supplement writer Richard Deveson offered another interpretation of Crace's intentions: "He suggests … that the artist may … be the true progressive, and that it is the imagination, rather than economics, that will teach a society how to regenerate itself."

The Gift of Stones earned overwhelming appreciation from critics. Commenting on the author's prose, Glasser pointed out that "Crace's language, crackling with sensory detail and intensely imagined, achieves the kind of effortless ease that comes only with extraordinary work and care." Glasser went on to write: "Poetry lurks in this prose." Smiley acknowledged that "The Gift of Stones is a work to be read and savored, full of thought, but also full of the concrete world … a prose poem where the natural world is new and powerfully evoked."

The success of Continent and The Gift of Stones allowed Crace to devote himself full-time to fiction after having worked as a scriptwriter with the British Broadcasting Corporation and as a journalist for two decades. Crace told Michele Field in an interview for Publishers Weekly that, although he is a disciplined worker who spends at least five hours a day in his office—and who sets a 5,000-word-per-week goal for himself—he still views himself as an adventurer. "I am not like some writers who have a flow-chart on their walls before they start writing," he said. "I definitely fly by the seat of my pants."

Crace once elaborated for CA: "One of the key pieces of advice which colors the way I write is something I read many years ago from a Chinese poet called Wei T'ai. He said that poetry presents ‘the thing’ in order to convey the feeling. ‘If a writer wishes to set heaven and earth in motion and call up the spirits, then he should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling or the emotion.’ In other words, the writer ought to describe the coffin and not the grief. This has been advice that I have applied to fiction. I don't want to define for the reader the heights or depths of emotion that he or she should feel, but to provide the raw materials that will elicit that response independently from the reader. That's one of my narrative methods."

That method informs Crace's 1995 novel Signals of Distress, a tale set in a small English fishing village in 1836. The story begins with a storm that grounds an oceangoing American vessel on a sandbar near fictitious Wherrytown. Simultaneously, a moralistic entrepreneur named Aymer Smith arrives via steamboat, preparing to tell the local kelpers that he no longer needs their services in the production of soap and is hoping to find a wife. The zealous Smith soon comes into conflict with the American ship's captain after he sets the captain's slave, Otto, free, giving the African carte blanche to run away during a snowstorm without food or sufficient clothing. Calling Crace "one of the brightest lights in contemporary British fiction," New York Times Book Review contributor Charles Johnson described Signals of Distress as "a quiet tale of strangers thrown together by caprice, emigrants, business scions, paupers, street toughs and former slaves who, before their paths diverge, find their lives are unintentionally and irreversibly linked."

As is often the case with Crace's fiction, the historical details in Signals of Distress are less important than the tone of the narrative and the interplay of the characters. "The point of my fiction is to adopt a tone of voice and use language and make things up which sound authentic, that are more real than real," the author once explained to CA. This technique proved useful in Signals of Distress, a novel "in which history is reimagined, viewed through a late 20th-century microscope," according to Tribune Books contributor William O'Rourke. The reviewer added: "Crace's novel has the look of miniaturized Dickens, revved up and sleeked down for the 1990s." O'Rourke also noted: "Crace's cast is to a man (and woman) vivid and compelling."

Critical response to Signals of Distress was not universally positive. Although Tim Parks commented in the Spectator that Crace's "blend of period-pastiched terse modern prose is excellent and engaging, with the set piece descriptions—the shipwreck, the night fishing, the snowstorm—particularly strong," he added that "what promised to be an excellent plot crumbles away in a series of costume sideshows, beautifully written, but somehow inconsequential, even when lives are at stake. In short, the book fails to focus." Conversely, in the Times Literary Supplement, T.J. Binyon asserted that Signals of Distress "is an intriguing work; more approachable, being less schematic, than Crace's three earlier books." Library Journal contributor Barbara Hoffert dubbed the book "real, vivid and indelible … a quiet, thoughtful work that pulls the reader in powerfully."

Crace's 1998 novel Quarantine takes place during the lifetime of Jesus Christ, specifically during Christ's forty days in wilderness exile. A self-proclaimed "scientific atheist," as Crace referred to himself in a New Criterion article, he "certainly meant to debunk religion and religious impulse" in this novel, maintained New Criterion writer Brooke Allen, "but Crace turned out to be too imaginative an artist to stick to anything quite that simple, and the book developed into a near masterpiece of poetic ambiguity." Quarantine won the coveted Whitbread Prize for British fiction.

Crace's next book also brought its author kudos, this time in the form of the National Book Critics' Circle Award. Being Dead, set in the present day, is a mystery that unfolds into a character study. Two aging zoologists, Joseph and Celice, "are not the kind of married couple you'd expect to see on the beach doing anything other than collecting sea-cricket specimens," noted Salon.com Web site contributor Gary Krist. Yet as the novel opens, the pair are found brutally murdered on the sands of Baritone Bay. The narrative then proceeds backward in time. The story touches on the ritualistic "quivering," in which loved ones remember the deceased; Crace also reconstructs the couple's thirty years together to relate how Joseph and Celice met, became lovers, and ultimately met their fate. "These two thematic lines, along with a third involving their daughter's reactions, … intertwine in a kind of narrative fugue, spun out in chantlike prose that often takes on the measured rhythms of blank verse," according to Krist.

Some reviewers have pointed to Crace's scientifically grounded view of death and decay as witnessed through the disintegration of Joseph and Celice's bodies prior to their discovery. Allen, reviewing Being Dead for the New Criterion, said that Crace "creates what is in effect a spiritual vision out of the most earthbound ingredients, details we are usually accustomed to perceive as disgusting." To Eric Miles Williamson in Southern Review, "there's no mistaking Crace's intentions." Williamson went on to write: "His idea: when we die, we rot. That's it. If there's anything spiritual about the condition of humanity, it only happens when we're alive, and is to be found in love between two human beings, no matter how tainted or soured or tired that love may be." "Crace cannot tell us what being dead means," acknowledged F. Gonzalez-Crussi in a Commonweal review. "No one can." However, the critic continued, the novelist "seems to tell us that, if we pay close attention to the surroundings of death, we shall perceive absolutely nothing of death itself, but our vision of life—that other mystery—will be wondrously enhanced." Allen summed up Being Dead as "a remarkable piece of work, utterly unsentimental yet beautiful, faintly comical yet full of measured gravity." Allen also wrote: "It is also as consoling a meditation on death as an atheist is ever likely to encounter."

Crace next wrote a collection of fictional vignettes about food titled The Devil's Larder. Spectator reviewer D. SJ. Taylor wrote that the book "roams all over the nutritional universe: neat little descriptions of scene and incident, tall stories, fragments of culinary law." Ranging from just a few words to just over a page in length, each of the entries shows that "food is intimately connected to memory," suggested Ferriss. In the tradition of Marcel Proust, the critic continued, Crace's characters "take nostalgic trips to the past, recalling birthday pies and Grandma's calls to dinner." Yet The Devil's Larder takes its dark turns as well. In one story, patrons sit down to a restaurant so chic it doesn't serve any food, preferring instead to celebrate, as the book puts it, "emptiness in an otherwise sated world." In another tale, a "truculent, self-denying health-food faddist," as a Kirkus Reviews contributor described it, "is remembered by the jaded voluptuary who long outlives her."

The Devil's Larder earned mixed notices from critics. New Republic writer Dale Peck wrote that the book's stories "defy paraphraxis, like Aesop or Lydia Davis at their insipid worst." Taylor, while acknowledging Crace's "usual arresting prose," also perceived the writer's "tendency [to] surface glitter" and wrote that the book, "to borrow its own critical language, … resembles nothing more than a meal of celery." "This is not the big Crace we are waiting for," stated Library Journal's Barbara Hoffert, "but [it] will certainly hold us." The overall challenge to readers, opined Adam Phillips in the New York Times Book Review, is in the author's experimental style: "It is often Crace's trick to let a simple observation draw itself out until it begins to go mad." The Devil's Larder "toys with the reader's willingness (or unwillingness) not to make too much sense of what is going on." But the critic summed up this work as, "even by Crace's standards … an extraordinary book."

In Genesis Crace once again deposits readers in an unnamed, unnerving, yet familiar invented landscape, this time telling the story of Felix Dern, an actor whose talents on the stage are bested only by his talent for impregnating women. "Every woman he dares to sleep with bears his child," the reader quickly learns of Dern, and the book's six chapters divide the novel's narrative focus between the six consequences of Dern's amorous adventures between 1979 and 2002. Describing Crace's prose as "rich yet lean," a Kirkus Reviews contributor added that in telling the story of Dern's growing awareness of his destiny, Crace "dives into life's chaos, surfacing, every time, with the mot juste." Through his focus on Dern's innate caution and wish to remain out of the public eye when not in character, Crace makes his protagonist an Everyman whose concerns over sexuality and the responsibility inherent in creating human life are universal. Calling the book's tone "cool and nonjudgmental," a Publishers Weekly contributor went on to praise Crace as a "protean British writer" and Genesis as a novel with "memorable metaphorical impact."

Crace noted in Publishers Weekly that the respect accorded his fiction has been, for him, "the resolution of a lot of unspoken dreams" dating back to his student days when his father encouraged him to write. "There are five impulses which form the basis of my fiction," he once explained in a CA interview: "one, the simple pleasures of invention, of convincingly merging the real and the concocted, the mundane and the bizarre; two, an admiration for the disciplines of good journalism—clarity and depth of expression, orderliness of structure and design; three, a preoccupation with international issues and politics, and a disdain for the domestic; four, an instinctive preference for restrained and dispassionate prose which avoids sentiment and declamation but which takes its power from the narrative itself and not from authorial intervention; and five, a ‘fear-of-self’ hostility towards political repression, conservatism, racism, sexism, Puritanism, officialdom, and rules."

These impulses have comingled to produce a unique fictional style that Southwest Review contributor Adam Begley compared to poetry. Crace's rhythmic prose "is full of meticulous lies that sound like sober scientific fact, and routine facts dressed up in fairy-tale costume," Begley wrote. "He's brilliant at exploiting the tension between the highly specific and the generic, … between an imaginary topography and the invented landscape's familiar features." Begley also wrote: "The cruelty in his books does a little dance with tenderness; humor and sadness do the same," and he added: "In a Crace novel nearly everything is equivocal."

Commenting on Crace's next novel, The Pesthouse: A Novel, Spectator contributor Simon Baker noted: "The Pesthouse finds the author not just on his own best form, but arguably on the best form any English writer has shown in the last couple of years. What impresses most, in this beautifully written novel, is the way that Crace makes the reader believe unquestioningly in the authenticity of what is, when considered, such an unlikely setting." The setting Baker refers to is an apocalyptic future in the United States. "This is meant to be a false historical travel narrative set in the United States about two hundred years from now," the author told Peter Wild in an interview on the Book Munch Web site. "The country has fragmented. The machines have stopped. The novel provides America not with a science fiction future but a future which mirrors something that many of its citizens have always wanted and lacked—a medieval ‘past’, an ancient European experience."

Following a series of wars, the world has fallen backward into a pre-industrial way of living. The United States, in particular, has taken a turn for the worse as a lawless wasteland with only a fragment of its population left living. With no machines, no government and few people, farmlands are abandoned, which is probably for the best because the soil is contaminated by toxins. As a result, people are sick and dying as they struggle to survive by whatever means they can muster. "The thing that is key to understand when going into this book is that it's all about tone and feeling, and not about details or logic," wrote Tony Ross on the Mostly Fiction Web site. "To a certain extent, the reader just has to accept the world that Crace has presented, and not try to figure it out."

Facing a losing battle in the United States, throughout the country families gather what they can and start traveling eastward with the hope of finding passage on a ship to Europe, which is faring much better in the new world. Franklin Lopez is traveling with his brother, Jackson, when his injured knee forces him to stop and rest. As Jackson moves on, Franklin encounters a woman named Margaret in an isolated stone building. The building is called the Pesthouse, where people are left to either recoup or die from their ailments. Margaret has a deadly infection but Franklin nevertheless lets him join her as he restarts his journey eastward.

Along the way, they encounter a group who rounds up men to sell into slavery; then they find refuge in a religious community called the Ark. However, once there, they find that the community has bizarre requirements for those they shelter. Although Franklin and Margaret have been distrustful of each other, their experiences slowly reveal their deeper humanity as they grow to accept and rely on each other and, eventually, fall in love. Richard Eder, writing in the New York Times, noted that "unlikely as it may seem, The Pesthouse is a romance."

Once again, Crace was the recipient of wide critical acclaim. "Crace can write amazingly well, as he did in Being Dead," noted Francine Prose in the New York Times Book Review. "When he's on, as he often is here, the results are stellar." New Statesman contributor Peter Bradshaw commented: "It is entirely compelling. The story is a gripping, harrowing adventure tale and Crace's language is extraordinary: he has immersed himself in his own kind of variant American idiom …, which is simple, often beautiful, as tough and workable as leather." Despite the novel's apocalyptic setting, some reviewers noted the story's hopeful outlook. "In the end, The Pesthouse is a surprisingly optimistic novel," wrote Henry Hitchings in the Financial Times. "It leaves us with the idea that relationships will prevail over suffering. Real connections are redemptive." Referring to the novel as a "thoughtful and exciting post-apocalyptic tale," Jim Croan went on to write in the Library Journal that the author "manages to give depth and complexity to characters in a post-literate society who are practically nonverbal."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Novelists, 7th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2001.

Crace, Jim, Continent, Harper (New York, NY), Ecco Press (Hopewell, NJ), 1997.

Crace, Jim The Devil's Larder, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2001.

Crace, Jim, Genesis, Farrar, Straus, (New York, NY), 2003.

Tew, Philip Jim Crace ("Contemporary British Novelists Series"), Manchester University Press (Manchester, England), 2007.

PERIODICALS

America's Intelligence Wire, April 13, 2007, "Jim Crace Travels through a Post-apocalyptic America in ‘The Pesthouse.’"

Books, January 11, 2004, Dan Cryer, review of Genesis, p. 2; April 29, 2007, Art Winslow, review of The Pesthouse: A Novel, p. 5.

Booklist, April 1, 2000, Frank Caso, review of Being Dead, p. 1435; October 15, 2001, Frank Caso, review of The Devil's Larder, p. 381; October 15, 2003, Benjamin Segedin, review of Genesis, p. 388.

Bookseller, August 26, 2005, "Crace Staged," p. 38.

Book World, May 13, 2007, John Crowley, "After the Fall," review of The Pesthouse, p. 5.

Christian Century, March 10, 1999, review of Quarantine, p. 292.

Commonweal, June 18, 1993, Edward T. Wheeler, review of Arcadia, p. 26; July 14, 2000, F. Gonzales-Crussi, "Approaching the Unknowable," p. 27.

Economist, October 16, 1999, review of Being Dead, p. S14; February 24, 2007, "Go East; New Fiction," p. 97.

Entertainment Weekly, May 11, 2007, Jennifer Reese, "Apocalypse Now," review of The Peshouse, p. 78.

Financial Times, March 17, 2007, Henry Hitchings, "Fiction—Anarchic States Dystopian and Decayed—It's America, Jim, but Not as We Know It," p. 32.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), November 6, 1999, review of Being Dead, p. D27.

Guardian (London, England), September 18, 1999, Carol Birch, review of Being Dead, p. 10.

Houston Chronicle, December 16 2001, Suzanne Ferriss, "Tasty Tidbits," p. 19.

Hudson Review, autumn, 2000, Susan Balee, review of Being Dead, p. 513.

Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2002, review of The Devil's Larder, p. 1144; August 15, 2003, review of Genesis, p. 1032; February 1, 2007, review of The Pesthouse, p. 89.

Library Journal, August, 1995, Barbara Hoffert, review of Signals of Distress, p. 114; February 15, 2000, Lawrence Rungren, review of Being Dead, p. 195; September 15, 2001, Barbara Hoffert, review of The Devil's Larder, p. 115; September 1, 2003, Marc Kloszewski, review of Genesis, p. 204; March 1, 2007, Jim Coan, review of The Pesthouse, p. 69.

London Review of Books, March 8, 2007, Thomas Jones, "Only the Crazy Make It," review of The Pesthouse, p. 39.

Los Angeles Times, November 9, 2003, review of Genesis, p. 5; December 7, 2003, review of Genesis, p. 7.

New Criterion, May, 2000, Brooke Allen, "Meditations, Good and Bad," p. 63.

New Republic, December 31, 2001, Dale Peck, "The Devil You Know," p. 38.

New Scientist, March 10, 2001, review of Being Dead, p. 51.

New Statesman, November 29, 1999, review of Being Dead, p. 82; September 30, 1999, review of Being Dead, p. 57; September 8, 2003, Rachel Cusk, "Misconceptions: Rachel Cusk Discovers a Great Deal of Sex but No Real Love in Jim Crace's Novel about a Man Who Gets Every Woman He Sleeps with Pregnant," p. 51; March 5, 2007, Peter Bradshaw, "A New America," review of The Pesthouse, p. 59.

New Statesman & Society, September 2, 1994, Paula Burnett, review of Signals of Distress, pp. 36-37.

New Yorker, April 30, 2007, Joyce Carol Oates, "Rack and Ruin," review of The Pesthouse, p. 84.

New York Review of Books, December 3, 1992, Robert M. Adams, review of Arcadia, p. 14; April 13, 2000, John Banville, review of Being Dead, p. 30; April 8, 2004, Ruth Scurr, "Home Erectus," review of Genesis, p. 61.

New York Times, April 13, 2000, Richard Eder, "The Life after Death of a Pair Not Yet Gone," p. B11; September 27, 2001, Richard Eder, "Food Stories That Aren't Really about Food at All," p. E7; November 13, 2003, Janet Malins, "A Hero's Surfeit of Fertility and the Poetic Use Thereof," review of Genesis, p. 8; December 3, 2003, Mel Gussow, "A Novelist So Revealing His Life Is a Closed Book," p. 1; May 15, 2007, Richard Eder, "Innocents in a Brutal Land, Together against the Tides," p. 9.

New York Times Book Review, June 28, 1987, Robert Olen Butler, review of Continent, p. 30; July 16, 1989, Jane Smiley, review of The Gift of Stones, p. 12; October 18, 1992, Phillip Lopate, review of Arcadia, p. 11; September 24, 1995, Charles Johnson, review of Signals of Distress, p. 20; May 23, 1999, review of Quarantine, p. 36; April 23, 2000, Jim Shepard, "Dune: Working Forward and Backward, a Novel Details the Murder of Two Biologists," p. 10; April 1, 2001, review of Being Dead, p. 20; October 21, 2001, Adam Phillips, "Eat This Book," p. 30; November 23, 2003, Anthony Quinn, "Reproduction Values," review of Genesis, p. 8; December 7, 2003, review of Genesis, p. 66; April 29, 2007, Francine Prose, "Love in a Time of Dystopia," p. 9.

Paris Review, fall, 2003, Adam Begley, "The Art of Fiction CLXXIX: Jim Crace."

People Weekly, April 9, 2001, review of Being Dead, p. 59.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, May 6, 2007, "‘Pesthouse’ Author Finds Optimism in Dark Places."

Publishers Weekly, July 10, 1995, review of Signals of Distress, p. 42; October 2, 1995, Michele Field, "Jim Crace: Moral Activist, Conservative Romantic," pp. 49-50; November 6, 1995, review of Signals of Distress, p. 59; July 21, 2003, review of Genesis, p. 171; January 29, 2007, review of The Pesthouse, p. 38.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 2000, Paul Maliszewski review of Being Dead, p. 145; spring, 2002, Paul Maliszewski, review of The Devil's Larder, p. 128; summer, 2004, Thomas Hove, review of Genesis, p. 144.

Southern Review, winter, 2001, Eric Miles Williamson, review of Being Dead, p. 174; September 10, 2001, review of The Devil's Larder, p. 60.

Southwest Review, spring-summer, 2002, Adam Begley, "A Pilgrim in Craceland," p. 227.

Spectator, March 21, 1992, Francis Henry King, review of Arcadia, p. 34; September 3, 1994, Tim Parks, review of Signals of Distress, pp. 36-37; October 2, 1999, Miranda France, review of Being Dead, p. 46; September 15, 2001, D. SJ. Taylor, review of The Devil's Larder, p. 39; September 6, 2003, Digby Durrant, "Oh, My Papa!," review of Six, p. 40; March 17, 2007, Simon Baker, "Struggling to Survive the Future," review of The Pesthouse.

Times Literary Supplement, September 2, 1988, Richard Deveson, review of The Gift of Stones, p. 952; March 13, 1992, Adam Mars-Jones, review of Arcadia, p. 22; September 2, 1994, T.J. Binyon, review of Signals of Distress, p. 12; September 17, 1999, review of Being Dead, p. 22; September 7, 2001, Christopher Taylor, review of The Devil's Larder, p. 8; September 5, 2003, Benjamin Markovits, "City of Kisses," review of Six, p. 4; March 9, 2007, Toby Lichtig, "Wicked Stepmother Nature: Jim Crace Wishes a Plague on Ferrytown," review of Pesthouse, p. 19.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), April 16, 1989, Perry Glasser, review of The Gift of Stones, p. 6; November 15, 1992, review of Arcadia, p. 3; March 9, 1997, review of Signals of Distress, p. 8.

Wall Street Journal, May 19, 2000, Wendy Bounds, review of Being Dead, p. W8.

Washington Post, October 21, 2001, Michael Dirda, review of The Devil's Larder, p. T15.

Washington Post Book World, April 1, 2001, review of Being Dead, p. 10.

Writing, September, 2007, Judith Spelman, interview with author.

WWD, November 7, 2003, Marshall Heyman, "Will and Crace," p. 14.

Yale Review, October, 2004, David Galef, "Fiction in Review," review of Genesis, p. 150.