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“... and moving, but symbolic of a whole order of events, a fundamental shift in social values. David Leavitt has praised the book for this ‘historical largeness’, for telling ‘the story of the Seventies and Eighties in America’: the story, in other words, of the unmaking of the traditional family, with its gender and generational roles, its ...”

“... on plates at the door? The señor and señora are preparing them to starve.’ The title story in David Leavitt’s Family Dancing begins with a graduation party, flower arrangement and girls in starched tunics, handing trays around. But like the other stories, ‘Family Dancing’ soon scratches its polished surfaces and considers the rough edges of ...”

“... is the heroine. Miss Oates can make one care about Marya’s situation, but not about Marya. David Leavitt’s The Lost Language of Cranes is a coming-out novel. Its story is basically simple, but artistically risky. Twenty-five-year-old Philip Benjamin brings himself to tell his parents, Owen and Rose, that he is a homosexual. Owen, the ...”

“... with its stable marriages, television sets and cartons of milk. One thinks of Garrison Keillor, David Leavitt, and John Updike, whose most luminous descriptions are located in ‘the post-pill paradise’ of pleasure, estrangement and divorce. Thus the ‘normal’, whether a word, a category or a quality, loses its Larkinesque dullness and takes on an ...”

“... tough keeping track of all the debutantes promenading into print and creating a stir: Donna Tartt, David Leavitt, Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Nancy Lemann, Susan Minot, Mary Robison, Anderson Ferrell – a cast of dozens. Many of those rookies trained at the literary dojo of the author, editor, creative writing teacher and ...”

“... presumably, many straight readers. Perhaps a few more gay male writers – Paul Monette, David Leavitt and Armistead Maupin in the US, Alan Hollinghurst, Paul Bailey, Adam Mars-Jones in Britain – enjoy this crossover status. International comparisons, however, can be misleading, since they disguise the very different ways in which each country ...”

“... Barry Hannah, Diane Williams and Mary Robison.One of the best accounts of Lish’s influence is in David Leavitt’s roman à clef Martin Bauman; Or, a Sure Thing. He appears in the first paragraph of the first chapter disguised as Stanley Flint, a creative writing teacher and human resources nightmare:Wild rumours circulated about this seminar. It was ...”