“A remarkable novel. A brilliant mixture of pitiless observation, excoriation, humor, love, and forgiveness. David Shields is an enviably talented writer, a stylist with a strong metaphoric gift and the ability to stage scenes of almost excruciating intensity.” --Robert Towers, The New York Review of Books
“The style is rich, often beautifully lyrical. Mr. Shields is a talented writer, and in Dead Languages he explores fertile themes with intelligence and verbal energy.” --Eva Hoffman, The New York Times
“As touching and funny a rendering of adolescence as The Catcher in the Rye. Dead Languages speaks to everyone who has ever struggled to articulate an emotion and failed to find the words. From Billy Budd to Billy Bibbitt, characters tormented by stuttering and thus prevented from expressing their most passionate feelings have played a central role in American literature. But Jeremy Zorn is the first such character to narrate his own story.” -- Library Journal
“A beautiful book. Shields has an addiction to language. What's lovely about Dead Languages is that he uses the language he loves to convey the most poignant feelings and to do with truth and beauty.” -- Walker Percy
“David Shields is absolutely the real thing, to his bones. Nothing I can say can match the excitement, the eagerness with which I found myself reading this book, but I do know this: here is the best prose written about childhood and boyhood since Salinger fell silent.” -- Leslie Epstein