“One of the delights of reading his essays is that they reveal the interconnections between the two; the Wittgensteinian idea that the limits of one’s language are the limits of one’s world becomes, in his hands, a tool for revealing the blind spots common to our culture.”

— Scott Saul, The Nation on Eliot Weinberger's Oranges & Peanuts For Sale

“From modernist poetry he has learned, as an essayist, about collage and the need for concision and exactitude. He has taken to heart poetics' fluid conflictions between the public and the personal, its conflation of the contemporary and the archaic, and its taste for the encyclopedic. Many of the essays from the first two books, Works on Paper and Outside Stories, are not essays as we know them, but rather dismantlements and explorations of the essay form.”

— Eli Gottlieb, The Village Voice on Eliot Weinberger's Works On Paper

“There is no one like Shabtai: an erudite classicist who writes poems of voltaic frankness and political rage. These lyrics of a patriot betrayed by his government are both timely and timeless. Written for the newspapers, they will endure long after their referents are forgotten. But we are marooned in the present, and J’Accuse is the one new book of poetry that should be read right now.”

— Eliot Weinberger on J’accuse

“Famous in Europe, unknown here, Inger Christensen is a formalist who makes her own rules, then turns the game around with another rule.”

— Eliot Weinberger on Inger Christensen's Butterfly Valley

“There is no question that American literary history will have to be rewritten to accommodate Rexroth... And it will have to take into account one of the more startling transformations in American letters: that Rexroth, the great celebrant of heterosexual love... devoted the last years of his life to becoming a woman poet. ”

— Eliot Weinberger, Works on Paper on

“A child who paid for the political sins of her grandparents in Hoxha's Albania; a young poet who seems to have been writing for a hundred years in a language that's only been written for a hundred years; an erotic lyricist in the ruins of a state; Luljeta Lleshanaku is the real thing, and as unexpected as an oasis behind a mountain on the moon.”

— Eliot Weinberger on Fresco

“Four paths of a lifetime's learning converge in these poems: Eroticism, from the Sanskrit; Satire, from the Latin; Plain Speech, from the American; and, above all, from the Greek: Perfection.”

— Eliot Weinberger on The Secret Room

“Laughlin was more than the greatest American publisher of the twentieth century: His press was the twentieth century.”

— Eliot Weinberger, Nation on The Way It Wasn’t