Harvard Review
The satire of academia in Weinstock Among the Dying succeeds in the hilarious footsteps of Nabokov's Pnin. In the end, however, wit and cynicism join hands with grief and growth, and enable Weinstock to bury his despair. His journey toward emotional fulfillment was a pleasure to follow for this reader. In turns humorous and sad, but consistently engaging, Blumenthal has written an eloquent, compelling, richly textured first novel.
—Jhumpa Lahiri
Boston Herald
Michael Blumenthal's Weinstock Among the Dying, is a glorious home run, gratifying on several levels. It's a funny, satirical story of a young guy grappling with the Harvard mystique - a writer smart enough to get into Harvard and teach but seemingly not smart enough to get out. . . . Weinstock has already been compared to the work of Philip Roth, but Blumenthal's playful, witty, effortless prose has none of the heavy, Nixonlike smugness of Roth. WATD ranks in the A-category of sophisticated first novels.
—Steve Kykes
The Jerusalem Report
The best of Weinstock is a devastating, idiosyncratic satire of Harvard, where Blumenthal formerly served as director of creative writing, the very post occupied by Weinstock. Mercilessly he bangs away at the pretensions of academe. . . . Blumenthal's Harvard is "the only place in America where you have to study for dinner," a temple of "Best-0in-the-World" elitism that Jewish faculty - even if their Jewishness is considered "an ugly blemish on the smooth, homogenizing hide of intellectual achievement - would never dream of leaving, for it is their "one chance in life to become the thing every Jew, deep in his heart of hearts most wants to be . . . The Great Goldberg. . . . Blumenthal insists that Harvard is no more nor less than "a dusty archival tomb, in which the collected letters, papers, manuscripts and miseries of the dead were far more significant than the real, passionate, life-giving triumphs and tribulations of the living.
—Stuart Schoffman
The Bookpress
The book sports some of the broadest satire I've ever read of academic existence - Blumenthal would never stoop to calling it "life" - and is as fizzy with one-liners as a George Carlin HBO special.
—Mark Shechner
