I first came to Katharine Coldiron’s work on the pages of LARB, where I quickly fell in love with her critical eye. She is the kind of analytical writer I wish I could be: searingly sharp in observation, deeply persuasive in an inconspicuous way, and also incredibly funny. It was only sometime later I came to her fiction and began to understand that these techniques are the foundation of all her work. Coldiron writes about human failure and human strangeness and human longing in ways that ask us to pay closer attention. Her critical-creative oeuvre disturbs the status quo not just through unconventional plot turns and lines of argumentation, but also through exquisitely rendered detail that estranges us to what we thought we already knew and understood.