“Rohan understands light and shade, the hard edges between things, and her short tales manage to capture this in small moments. Goodnight Nobody demonstrates attentiveness to each character’s sense of identity and how they come up against the world.”
—Heather Partington for The Rumpus
“It’s a daring, highly compressed form, and Rohan uses it to turn out characters who are often stuck, ill-adapted, grieving, or fallen out of love…More than any of the other stories in Goodnight Nobody, “Illustrated Girl” is working under the shadow of Donald Bartheleme, master of the short-short story. But Rohan’s work is fun and bizarre, and so a welcome addition to that growing body of literature.”
—Greg Solano for Zyzzyva Magazine
“Rohan’s bright, engaging fictions immerse us … Some satisfied [the] criteria for stories, some for poetry, while the most successful contained elements of both.”
—Audrey Ferber for the San Francisco Chronicle
“It is Rohan’s ability to create truthful, painful, and believable characters in all her stories’ geographies that leaves a lasting impression on the reader.”
—James Claffey for Necessary Fiction
“Ethel Rohan’s second collection contains thirty mostly very short, often quirky tales where the everyday is peeled back to reveal the rifts, shifts and occasional violence that ripple under or through her characters’ lives. . . . Beautiful, haunting, heartbreaking.”
—Diane Becker for The Short Review
“Rohan specializes in longing … Often her stories are about quiet inner struggles with loud strikes of violence surrounding them…. The darkness in these stories is often unexpected and always intriguing. But Rohan makes sure humor is there for balance.”
—Christy Crutchfield for The Small Press Book Review
Goodnight Nobody “is full of characters that are unable to let go, refusing to part, clutching vainly at the seams. Ethel Rohan has woven a book that’s hard to put down for the palpably tenuous desires the characters share…. The pain throbs. The stories from the collection throb. Most people long for morning during the night. Understanding why many of Rohan’s character wish morning never comes is part of the collection’s allure.”
—Peter Tieryas Liu for HTMLGIANT
“Reading these stories is like glimpsing into profound emotional moments that mirror the ways we all feel at different times…. Familiarity in an unfamiliar landscape is a privilege to read; being able to invest in these characters, and accept that we’re not lonely after all.”
—Michelle Goode for Metazen
“Rohan tells these tales with sentences that are at once fragile and fierce, wielded with both expert precision and a vulnerable heart. In each case, the potential peril is made visceral…”
—Jennifer Messner for Books, Personally