"An affecting memoir. . . . Thoughtful and deeply felt . . . an intellectually and emotionally satisfying reading experience."

Booklist

"A testament to Lerer’s passion for his work, this wise, literary, and allusion-dense book will strike a sympathetic chord with all involved in teaching or reading literature."

Library Journal

"I couldn’t put this book down. ’Memoir’ doesn’t begin to do it justice. Prospero’s Son is a beautifully observed and often haunting reflection about how we get here and what we leave behind."

James Shapiro, author of A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

"An absorbing and moving book, combining a scholar’s thoughts on the force of reading, especially reading in childhood, with episodes in a personal memoir, an intricate texture of stories and anecdotes that track the author’s education into life, into its forms of theater and forms of magic--often failed theater, failed magic. For all the power that he attributes to story-telling, Lerer knows its costs, knows that there are moments when stories, too, fail, or trap us, or ask to be revised, re-seen. It is a beautifully composed work, beguiling in its unfolding, weaving and reweaving its threads of attention, recollection, and allusion. After two readings, the book continues to surprise."

Kenneth Gross, author of Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life

"Prospero’s Son glitters like one of the gems that fascinated Seth Lerer as a child. After this riveting read, with its lovingly chosen details and ever-inventive ways of recreating the author’s life, I feel chastened and somehow unsettled.  It is as if he has shared his life and yet remained inviolate, for he writes these pages with an aura of calm, exquisitely titrating the emotional distance at each moment with delicacy--and yet pain seeps through.  Like the rain. . . .  I could not put it down. The book works: It casts a spell."

Ellen Handler Spitz, author of The Brightening Glance