Ship Fever (Reprint) (Paperback) product details page

"European gentry, wild American sisters, and smart, starving immigrants populate these stories, which rove over centuries....The title novella is devastating: as with every story here, you enter right into it, and cannot entirely leave it behind."

Reviewer: Thomas Mallon, (New York Times Book Review)

"There is an artificiality to some of this maneuvering, and a tendency to spell out connections...and yet Ms. Barrett's scientific bent is sufficiently rare among fiction writers, and her concoctions so cunningly mixed, that dissatisfaction seems out of place...Ms. Barrett's narrative laboratory is stocked with a handsome array of equipment. She tells her stories through alternating voices, diaries, letters--whatever seems to hint at the most promising results...her work stands out for its sheer intelligence, its painstaking attempt to discern and describe the world's configuration. The overall effect is quietly dazzling, like looking at handmade paper under a microscope."

Reviewer: Molly E. Rauch, (Nation)

"In her new collection...she is as meticulous as any chemist, entomologist, or doctor...Barrett renders the world as shifting, disappointing, and curiously baffling...The stories that take place in the past--half of this collection--suffer from stumbles into prissy formalism...Barrett shines when she dives into the bloody soup of human frailty...Science, for Barrett, is not the unalloyed discipline of discovery and patience. In these stories it is a hell of despair and rivalry...The writing...is also a science, shot through with the blaze of discovery."

Reviewer: Nathalie op de Beeck, (Washington Post Book World)

"[This] novella and seven short stories represent an imaginative departure for the author. Even when these new tales follow the dysfunctional-family formula, they have an experimental edge..."