"These are the most marvelous stories. The poet Merrill Gilfillan wrote them years ago, thirty or forty years ago, and they speak of a West, the Indian country of Montana and Wyoming and the Great Plains of many decades before that. They're sad, stoic, yet so fulsome in detail that they seem bathed in light—a light almost impossible to conjure any more."
~Joy Williams, Book Post
"The stories in Talk Across Water—thirty-five stories written during a period Gilfillan spent exploring different parts of Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas—are quiet in every meaningful sense I can think of. The lands they inhabit are full of life but often sparsely populated. The characters speak with deliberation, or just don't talk at all. The prose is—not delicate, but it handles itself with ease, attending to the world of humans and the world outside of humans in about equal measure."
~Martin Riker, The Believer
"Gilfillan's exquisite sentences take their measure of the Plains' shared solitude. They catch the Plains' drift and distances. They test the resilience of memory through stories—less routes here than traces. Resounding the silence of the place, they sound human movement in plain sight."
~Garin Cycholl, Rain Taxi
"Gilfillan pushes the limits of the short story with a sable brush . . . In no way can these stories be seen as less than universal."
~Philadelphia Inquirer
"Some of the purest, most concentrated 'fiction' in American prose literature. Astonishing."
~Booklist
"His poet's language is carved and dangerous . . . his view is a long, clear one, heartening to find in print."
~New York Times
"Each character is given the same quiet respect the writer gives to nature. They rise out of the land, share its timelessness . . . No other author today writes such thoughtful, lyrical, and majestic prose."
~Lucia Berlin
"If anyone writes better prose in America I am unaware of it."
~Jim Harrison
