"Within the first few pages of Askold Melnyczuk's fifth book-length work of fiction, The Man Who Would Not Bow, you understand you're in for some sophisticated narrative. What you learn as you continue through these eight stories, however, is that this sophistication isn't achieved through ostentatious or experimental language and craft-the stories are firmly in the Realist tradition-but rather from how intelligently Melnyczuk handles the narrative material." - MATTHEW KRAJNIAK, Consequence Forum

"The genius loci of the book is Nikolai Gogol, who figures explicitly in the last two stories (the finale, 'Gogol's Noose', is a biographical 'fantasia', as the author calls it) and whose fascination with the links between the familiar and the grotesque, the real and the irreal or surreal, is everywhere explored and echoed. Several stories move between the New World and the Old (especially Russia and Ukraine); this is most impressively the case in the title story, which begins with the Romanovs and then ranges forward by generations, morphing eventually into an American immigrant tale...." - KIRKUS REVIEWS