"Melissa Bull is George Saunders and Clarice Lispector and Lorrie Moore and none of these people—she's her own vivid, mordant, heartbreaking story-writer, a teller of present and future Montreals, where desire and language and memory tangle in the alleys."
— Sean Michaels,
author of Us Conductors
"In a literary sense, Montreal has always been a city of women. You'll be reminded of that reading Melissa Bull's short, concise little balms/bombs. This is the world I want to inhabit: full of gloriously flawed human beings, singular and part of a brilliant, inclusive weave."
— Sina Queyras,
author of My Ariel
"Stories of women watching women—bulls-eye, without flinching. The Knockoff Eclipse is sensorial, sexy, uncanny. Thrilling line by line spiral into alarm and grotesque. Bull has carved her voice into these texts."
— Tamara Faith Berger,
author of Maidenhead
"In The Knockoff Eclipse, Melissa Bull captures the city of Montreal: its myths, history, languages, and energy. Reminiscent of Gallant's Montreal Stories, these tales grasp the grit of a contemporary Montreal and all of its human struggles: resigned love, strained familial relationships, the obsessions of a young girl, and the search for solace. Against the backdrop of the urban cold, Bull's characters are drawn out with warmth and heart. Contrary to its title, this collection is luminous."
— Gillian Sze,
author of Panicle
"In these stories of a present and future Montreal, Melissa Bull draws sharp balances between longing and despair, grace and loss, both the sweat and the fruit of a life. The people who inhabit them live with ghosts who will not leave, and their languages run slalom up and down a reader’s senses. I return to these stories like one returns to the moment they opened their eyes from a dream—that search, that quick sadness, and then a flood of light."
— Chelsea Rooney,
author of Pedal
"Bull’s eye is unfailingly precise, and the best of these stories distill warped vectors of humanity into dry-ice absurdity and pitiful rawness. This knack for cataloguing unfairness and grubby immobility on every scale, from the macroeconomic to the domestic, makes for addictive reading."
— Paige Cooper,
author of Zolitude
"Rooted in the sensual life of Montreal—its cafés, bars, parks, streets—these stories extend into the cruelties and vulnerabilities of intimate life. They are unflinching portrayals of the way that power structures relationships as well as psyches, whether this is the girl who fantasizes herself as an amputee or the woman who gives birth to her heart. Wry, weird, and funny, Melissa Bull's collection looks at how we are deeply entangled with place as well as with each other. Holding fast to the sense, these stories are compassionate, dark, and true."
— Alison Winch,
author of Trouble