Reviews

He spoke and wrote out of the conflicted heart of Chicago but found a transcendent emotional jurisprudence in the heart and soul of the blues/jazz idiom that was his birthright from the bars and juke joints that shaped his perspective on the human condition. --James Alan McPherson

I was, to put it mildly, deeply moved that in his last days, terribly weakened, his words rang true and so strong. --Studs Terkel

This rich and wonderful work is Forrest's Dubliners. . . . Bringing this novel together is one of the great comic gifts in twentieth-century literature . . . but taken to many places even great Joyce could not go. Like Joyce, Forrest was well aware that the belly laugh and the most bitter moment of tragedy are forever twinned. --Stanley Crouch, New York Times Book Review