Mr. Sumell’s savage humor is thrilling, and Alby (who never speaks without his foot in his mouth) is loathsome, exasperating and endearing all at once. (New York Times)
Making Nice has an anarchic humour and a goofy, ingenuous humanity that makes every page feel new.... In its rampage to nowhere, Making Nice achieves the remarkable feat of making it feel better to travel hopelessly than to arrive. (The Guardian)
Funny and moving...a confident debut with a strong and youthful voice that refuses to accept life’s injustices. (The Irish Times)
Alby is Holden Caulfield in the Internet age: a central character unable to see past his own pain and hell-bent on flaming anyone before they can get too close.... The repetitive nature of his lashing out makes this brash tale both fun to read and one that will stick with the reader for its painful honesty.... Sumell gets closer to the heart of loss than many writers.... Making Nice is a profane, angry screed of a novel, but Sumell’s care when wielding Alby’s brash voice shows a kind of skill focused on getting closest to his character’s distress. (The Los Angeles Times)
Making Nice by Matt Sumell got me through OSCAR preparation week. A terrific read and one of my favorites this year.... Check it out! (Tegan and Sara on Instagram, March 18, 2015)
Alby is an ass, who knows he is an ass, and tries not to be an ass, but is still, triumphantly, an ass. (Literary Review)
Cringe-inducingly funny...linked by Alby’s oddly endearing ineptitude, his constantly lowering expectations and the solace he takes when, for a brief moment or two, life becomes ’something a little less than bad.’ (Wall Street Journal)
Darkly funny...Matt Sumell’s coarse tone belies tender insight into grief. (US Weekly)
Sumell’s strong debut...in which his wounded protagonist Alby lashes out hilariously and pathetically against men, women, siblings, toasters, garbage cans, and life itself. Like Stanley Kowalski without the proletarian nobleness-or barely acceptable social skills, for that matter-Alby is a punch-first, ask questions-never kind of galoot. (Entertainment Weekly)
Perfectly-pitched and grandly careening prose... The best [of the stories] will choke you on your own laughter and sucker punch you in the heart. (Justin Taylor Barnes and Noble Review)
Oh boy .... I’m going to ask you to buy this. I’m going to urge you to get this book into your life.... I think Matt Sumell is the greatest fiction writer publishing today...His book is so good it sort of made me believe that, as a writer, you can still do something better than what’s been done before. It also made me want to quit writing fiction because I’ll never write something this good... I haven’t read a voice this sure of itself, a voice this pure, since Salinger, no shit (Jacob Tomsky ShortStoryThursdays.com)
Sumell’s shrapnel-sharp sense of humor is never more than a sentence away. By the time you’re finished, you’ll want more of Alby, which is good because his creator’s just getting started. (GQ)
Making Nice is hilarious in its prose, but painful in its nakedness. (The Paris Review Daily)
Download Matt Sumell’s weird, horrifying, savage new novel, Making Nice. It has nothing at all to do with food (the narrator eats Hot Pockets), and we’ll leave the real reviewing to the big kids in Culture, but it reads in our kitchen as funny and violent and filled with grief and love. (Sam Sifton New York Times)
Indelible...an Everybro for the millennial set. (Entertainment Weekly)