"A novelist whose long, elliptical sentences and incisive explorations of human consciousness won her comparisons with Virginia Woolf and a place alongside Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood as one of Canada's greatest contemporary writers."

"Will American Readers Ever Catch on to Marie-Claire Blais? The French-Canadian novelist--who has lived in Florida for decades--has been writing brilliant, original fiction for more than half a century...For one thing, her magnum opus--a cycle of ten short novels, the eighth of which was recently translated into English--is set in Florida, where she has lived for decades. More pertinently, she is...one of the most distinctive and original living writers of fiction."

"[Blais] left behind a remarkable literary edifice that, in the words of her almost exact contemporary Margaret Atwood, 'spoke from that seething, fermenting, francophone-Canadian sensibility - formed by decades of repression by the Duplessis mini-dictatorship and also by the Church.' Repression, in fact, might be considered the bête noire of the author's entire oeuvre, a force she battled against with every fibre of her writerly being. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her last novel."

"The novel weaves in and out and back and forth over more than 50 years.... It all comes out in a beautiful cacophony: love, fidelity, marriage, resistance, sex, aging, death.... Grubisic does an amazing job with the translation, capturing the youthfulness of the chorus of characters and René's passionate digressions."

"Though Blais is gone, her legacy remains, and now readers can enjoy a new, posthumously published novel in her distinctive voice."

"A poetic rumination on what it means to live. Blais reminds us, in her novel filled to the brim with love, of the agonizing fleetingness of life."

"Nights Too Short to Dance is an impassioned call for love, justice and collective action that, in Katia Grubisic's vibrant translation, thrums with poignancy and urgency--a work of vast empathy amid menacing times."