“The writing is in turns vibrant and imaginative, eloquent and thoughtful, and lush and whimsical.”

“Horvath’s stories simultaneously stimulate the intellect while being fantastically imaginative. Contemporary urban life is examined through the looking glass, twisted slightly but still entirely recognizable… His images imprint, linger and the characters balance on the fine edge of what is real and what is imagined. This is memorable stuff.”

“[T]here’s a push towards psychological veracity here, and it’s what helps make this collection stand out. There’s plenty of imagination present here, yes — but it’s rooted in recognizable and occasionally irrational emotions, a human quality that’s makes these stories endure.”

“This is transformative prose at its best. . . . If you want an actual contemporary wordsmith who does not just tinker but thrives in the micro-worlds of Calvino and Borges, Walser and Perec, read Understories.”

“As any great book, Understories confronts the making of fiction itself, intermittently directly confronting the mechanics of fabrication. . . . A major accomplishment by a major writer . . . full of writing as deeply aware of its antecedents as it is aware of the possibilities within, of, and about narrative.”

“Often the books I’m supposed to be reviewing will cross over into that pleasure category, but it’s not often that a book I’m reading for pleasure gets me so excited about literature and writing and the writer who made it that I’m motivated to put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) and tell the world what’s so wonderful about it. Tim Horvath’s first short story collection, Understories, is that kind of wonderful. It is a cat’s cradle of people and places and a mad scientist’s bubbling test tubes and levers, woven together and delivered by a writer possessed of an intense intellectual curiosity and playfulness. . . . The stories in this collection are all a part of the understory, are all a new and unexpected species, a new kind of delight to be had in each one.”

“Though we encounter the understory as one thing, Horvath delights us with its individual shrubs and flowers, roots and bugs. As a fiction collection, then, Understories resonates not only on the stories as stories, but as an arrangement of individual parts. The buzz it gives off is the combined buzz of countless pockets, all charged with a life and surprise of their own.”

“There is so much to appreciate in these intelligent and eloquently written, yet deceivingly understated stories, you may wish to read some of them more than once.”

“Philosophical, sometimes whimsical, darkly funny, thought provoking, intense, evocative.”

“This stunning collection revels in wordplay and inventiveness, and is one of the finest short fiction collections I have read all year.”

“Taken as a complete work, Understories is a remarkable collection, with pitch-perfect leaps of imagination side-by-side with characters struggling in wholly recognizable ways.”