“A gripping, wonderful book…marked by mature skepticism and young imaginative energies, by laughter and shuddering… with ongoing consequences for our own creative American struggle between the parties of Hope and Memory.”  —John Hollander

“I have rarely responded to any book as intensely, no [as] viscerally, as I have to Slow Fire…Nowhere in English is there a better sense of the tensions which encompass the Jewish experience in Germany…a mini masterpiece – readable, self-revealing, and intelligently balanced.” —Sander L. Gilman