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“... Tulliver’s haircut and Jane Eyre’s sitting with her book between the curtains and the window. Anne Tyler, however, writes with intelligent and unapologetic enthusiasm about the Monicas. The heroine of The Amateur Marriage, her 16th novel, is absolutely ordinary. When we first meet Pauline in 1941 she’s a sweet, pretty girl who works as a ...”

“... by that one means fabulous, fanciful, whimsical, high-flown, etc, as under Roget 515: Lucas Salik, Anne Cowdenbeath, Cora Godfrey and the rest seemed precocious fictions, made palpable only by the finely-honed language in which they expressed themselves (‘Language is a case of knives’): ‘I was driven home by a man with no hands, my heart belonging to a ...”

“... This is not the one. But Brrm! Brrm! will keep readers amused until the real thing comes along. Anne Tyler’s stories are set in Baltimore, a city which many readers will neither know nor feel guilty about not knowing. That there will be many readers of Saint Maybe, however, is a certainty. It is Anne Tyler’s ...”

“... on being absolutely comfortable about when to hit the wrong note. This​ may be the reason Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl, though it’s a slight book, works so well. She plays The Taming of the Shrew as though it were an Anne Tyler novel, set, inevitably, in Baltimore. She asks of the play the question a ...”

“... The author of these books is a rather buttoned-up individual called Macon Leary, at whom people, Anne Tyler included, are apt to poke amiable fun. Macon, to whom the worst has happened – he is grieving for a dead son, and deserted by his wife – proceeds to get into some ludicrous plights, all of them centred on his ownership of an uncontrollable ...”

“... for his plummy fans any more than, say, J.G. Ballard should be blamed for the flakiness of his, or Anne Tyler for the limpness of hers. As for the books, they speak for themselves. Edmund Wilson once remarked of Powell that ‘he’s just entertaining enough to read in bed late at night in summer.’ This was presumably intended as a put-down, but to ...”

“... now illegible newspaper cutting in the window, I suddenly remembered that my book was a novel by Anne Tyler called Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. The lady must never see this. I managed to conceal it under my coat until, while settling myself at the table, I slipped it onto the chair and sat down on top of it. An uneasy sense of subterfuge must have ...”

“... once familiar to someone, all these unfamiliar things do more than establish a period. Realism in Anne Tyler’s novel has a way of endearing its subject, not just of documenting it. She is none the less an exceedingly sharp and sceptical writer. She loves her characters, but her ploy is to demonstrate that any assumption about them, favourable or ...”

“... I may not. And if I don’t that’s okay too. I don’t feel as if I have to write a novel. KB: Anne Tyler wrote that the reason you write such good stories is because you’re not saving the best things up for writing a novel. RC: She said I was a ‘spendthrift’. Thai’s good. I think that a writer ought to spend himself on whatever he’s ...”

“... I suppose, who you do it with.She spent a few days dipping into novels – Penelope Fitzgerald, Anne Tyler, Carol Shields, Beryl Bainbridge, William Trevor, Tim Parks among others – to limber up. Then she rolled up her sleeves and having extracted the technical nuts and bolts (beginning, middle, end; main and subsidiary plot and characters), wrote ...”

“... within it, The Corrections sets itself apart from the work of contemporary American writers like Anne Tyler for whom the family never stopped being central. As well as looking inwards to family dynamics of love, hate and mutual incomprehension, Franzen looks outwards to the worlds of corporate power, government policy, science, economics and national ...”

“... in novels; that is harsh and bleak and weirdly proportioned; that talks about the readers of Anne Tyler and other perfectly decent authors as ‘ostriches’; that dismisses most contemporary fiction. You, on the other hand, are a reader committed to the art of fiction. Do you really need to go to DeWitt’s website and fork out $8 to buy what even ...”

“... symbolic figure, perhaps intended to displace a more commonly perceived symbolic figure – Anne Frank, let us say.’ That’s a pretty loaded insinuation. As late as 2005, Ozick, speaking at Harvard, was still condemning Styron’s decision to position a non-Jewish protagonist at the narrative centre, thereby diluting, obscuring and ultimately ...”

“... In Anne Enright’s collection The Portable Virgin (published in 1991) the first story is about Cathy, who works in the handbag department of a large Dublin store. Cathy classifies the customers by the bags she induces them to buy, bags which ‘take them one step beyond who they thought they might be.’. Cathy marries late, but only falls violently in love when a ‘loose, rangy woman’ comes into the store and fingers the most beautiful of imports, ‘an Argentinian calf-skin shoulder bag in tobacco brown ...”

“... they refuse ever to eat again, and die. This lai is ‘a story prophane’, as the writer Margaret Tyler would later call her translation of a Spanish romance, and it turns upside down the terms of the communion feast; but for all its impiety and even ribaldry, the poem doesn’t alter the place of women as privileged participants in the great mysteries of ...”