Reviews

Review from The Seattle Times...

“Raymond's prose often lights up the poetry-circuits of the brain, less because of lyrical language and more due to things that work as both literal and symbolic nouns: stolen rings, voice-mail messages gone astray; heavy-footed humans in the middle of fragile habitats." ... Click here to read the full review...

Review from Seattle Books Examiner...

“All of her stories are heartbreakingly honest ... I wouldn't be surprised if she started getting compared to Alice Munro or Jhumpa Lahiri." ... Click here to read the full review ...

Review from The Short Review...

“Forgetting English is an enjoyable read; Raymond's style of writing is engaging, her locations exotic, her endings are often resonant and deftly written, and what her stories express about travel and exploration is honest and forthright." ... Click here to read the full review...

Review from Read All Day...

“Using taut language, straightforward plots that give a sudden twist, and unflinching characterization, Raymond brings us face to face with people once sure of themselves, now unsure; once standing on solid ground, now they are rocked out of complacency or dormancy of their desires, and brought back to life, hard and fast. They are no longer secure, but they are more alive than before..." Click here to read the full review...

Review from Fiction Writers Review...

“In her impressive debut collection, Forgetting English, Midge Raymond sets her stories in a variety of locations outside the continental United States...Alongside personal, human histories, Raymond incorporates larger traditions. Marriage rites. Fertility symbols. The meaning of jade. The natural history of the penguin." ... Click here to read the full review...

Review from Seattlest...

“Forgetting English is a wonderfully written, powerful compilation of short stories. After reading it, we're not surprised at all that the collection was the winner of the prestigious Spokane Prize for Short Fiction in 2007." ... Click here to read the full review...

Review from The Rumpus...

“Raymond has quiet, unrelenting control over the writing; each story is compelling and thrives because each detail and line of dialogue reveals just a little more about the characters and the evocative settings."... Click here to read the full review...

Review from Luxury Reading...

“Midge Raymond will soon become one of your favorite authors." ... Click here to read the full review...

Review from Author Exposure Book Club...

“Forgetting English is an entertaining collection of remarkably insightful stories. It was unlike any other volume I’ve read before. The characters were well-developed and memorable. The endings were both satisfying and thought-provoking." ... Click here to read the full review...

Review from Literate Chicks Book Reviews...

“Super writing with a lot of nuanced complexity" ... "Raymond certainly knows her way around a story" ... Click here to read the full review...

Review from Green Hills Literary Lantern...

“These eight stories won the 2007 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, and prevailed, one suspects, in part because of the integrity of each combined with the degree to which they amount to a single coherent reflection on nearness and distance, on the possibility and impossibility of human connectedness. " ... Click here to read the full review...

Review from Reading Local Seattle...

“The most emblematic story is the excellent tale 'The Road to Hana,' which hinges on a suggested mystery and division between Ethan and Sue, the couple in the story." ... Click here to read the full review...

Review from Metroreader...

“Forgetting English is an exquisite thematic collection of short stories...Raymond’s masterful prose transports the reader to various locales including Antarctica, Japan, and Tonga, to name a few." ... Click here to read the full review...

Review from Book Club Classics...

“Each place is vividly realized...In addition to Raymond’s lovely characterization and sense of place, her deft use of metaphor is intuitive and contributes to the sense of closure present in each story." ... Click here to read the full review...

Review from Book Chatter...

“This collection of stories is a restorative tonic for the soul...I was so mesmerized by the beauty of the writing that I spent an entire morning on the couch enjoying it. From one story to the next, I found myself completely and utterly absorbed." ... Click here to read the full review...

Review from A Reader's Respite...

"The writing is beautiful." ... Click here to read the full review...

Praise from Mark Kramer...

“Midge Raymond turns her elegant, austere sentences precisely, forcing unmediated, intimate connection with readers of her exotic tales. It's nothing short of style-alchemy, spare tales and lean words and stark characters sculpted so articulately they whisper the secrets of pure language itself. Forgetting English is well-named, a text informed by aesthetic convictions, recognizable people, alien circumstances, sentences that bind reader to writer, finally a composer's offering of untranslatable but realized emotion. Raymond will be noticed; she's written at a height of elegance and authenticity that no teacher can quite bestow, but that any reader will feel. Forgetting English reminds us why we read new writers.”
— Mark Kramer, Founding Director and Writer-in-Residence, Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism, Harvard University

Praise from Melanie Rae Thon...

“When you forget English, you might learn to speak the forbidden language of your sister’s Tongan lover — you might find you understand the sweet murmur of the Gentoo and the ecstatic cry of Emperor Penguins. When the man you saved from the sea chooses the icy water a second time, you may bend to the universal posture of grief, recognizing the way your body echoes a bird’s in a wild communion of sorrow. Midge Raymond’s stories are a revelation and a delight, a journey from the frozen desert at the bottom of the world to the lush rainforest of Hawai’i. Prepare yourself to think in Chinese, to start over, to reveal your worst crime and discover you are a stranger to yourself, born again into a world where all things become wondrous and new, terrifying and possible.”
— Melanie Rae Thon, author of First, Body and Sweet Hearts

Praise from John Keeble...

“Midge Raymond’s exquisitely written stories turn on relationships, and not just of one kind — between lovers, yes, but also within families, between sisters, among friends, or forged in chance encounters with strangers — and the turning often occurs in moments when the utterly mundane had abruptly conjured itself into crisis….Raymond’s eye for telling detail is very fine, as one expects of an accomplished writer, but to this she adds the informing eye of a natural historian of place.”
— John Keeble, author of Nocturnal America and Yellowfish