“Ian Penman is an ideal critic, one who invites you in, takes your coat, and hands you a drink as he sidles up to his topic. He has a modest mien, a feathery way with a sentence, a century’s worth of adroit cultural connections at the ready, and a great well of genuine passion, which quickly raises the temperature.”
—Lucy Sante, author of The Other Paris

“Ian Penman—critic, essayist, mystical hack, and charmer of sentences like they’re snakes—is the writer I have hardly gone a week without reading, reciting, summoning to mind. The writer without whom, etc.”
—Brian Dillon, author of Affinities

“A book about a film-maker but also, hauntingly, about the way our tastes and passions change over time.”
—Betsy Reed, The Guardian

“Sneakily brilliant … Thousands of Mirrors is wise and chatty, keenly observed and casual.”
—Christine Smallwood, 4Columns

“A painfully self-interrogating book, at the centre of which is the "monstrous" figure of Fassbinder, a centrifuge of absurd, gargantuan appetites, impossible productivity, heartbreaking melancholy, ever present paranoia, bleak cruelty, volcanic tantrums and rare, dissembling sweetness.”
—John Douglas Miller, Freize Magazine