"In The Suicides [Antonio Di Benedetto's fiction] suffers a deliberate 'disintegration' of language into a neutral term of writing . . . the 'degree zero' of literature which, according to Barthes, achieves a style of absence that is almost an absence of style: 'This art has the very structure of suicide.'" --Augusto Roa Bastos

"The novel's success lies in the author's light touch with weighty themes, which he layers into the narrative with snippets of philosophical writing on suicide from Confucius, Nietzsche, and others. This is brilliant." --Publishers Weekly

"Esther Allen deserves great credit for introducing the author to an Anglophone readership. Having read her translation of Benedetto's Zama, followed by The Silentiary, I found the wait for The Suicides excruciating. But it was worth it. The final part of this 'trilogy of expectation' is, as it should be, a glorious anticlimax....Benedetto may be understated, but he should not be underrated. Like so many in the NYRB imprint, the book is thrillingly singular."Benedetto may be understated, but he should not be underrated. It perfectly dramatizes Nietzsche's aphorism that the thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one successfully gets through many a bad night."-- Stuart Kelly, The Spectator