“In this tale about the obsessive relationship between a writer and his voice, Nathaniel Rich finds his own.”
—Men’s Vogue

“Rich delivers a daring, wonderfully weird first novel. The book is divided into two narratives...The stories never cross explicitly, but an electricity arcs between them, inducing an effect as haunting as the reality-collapsing yarns of Paul Auster.”
—Interview
 
“When Rich writes of his characters, their affections, their impulses and failings, he writes generously and movingly...Surprising friendships, small intimacies of fidelity and kindness, large gestures of joy: The
Mayor’s Tongue does all these so well, pointing the way to Nathaniel Rich’s promise as a fiction writer.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Nathaniel Rich's first novel is a coming-of-age story like Pinocchio in reverse: Instead of growing up to become a real boy, the hero of The Mayor's Tongue grows up to find out that he's not real at all. If you're a Pynchon or Fowles fan, it's a novel for you.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

"Rich’s strangely hypnotic novel, brimming with fantastical figures, gently pulls readers into its orbit."
—Booklist

"Nathaniel Rich has written an intoxicating fairy tale...[He] challenges the reader to leave behind the world they know and understand and walk alongside changeling guides through a foreign landscape. It's a bit like watching an early David Lynch film, trying to discern an objective reality in a world engulfed with hallucinations, deception, and the blindness of love."
—The Buffalo News

"Rich is already one of today's literary superstars. His expertise is clear. He knows how to tell a good story, and, more importantly, he knows how to tell a smart one. The monstrous Eakins, swollen with the power he wields over his characters, is a frightening spectacle to any reader with aspirations of writing, and Rich manages to weave a rather abstract theme—the barriers of language, and how much of what we communicate is simply made up on one or both ends of the conversation—through two quite distinct stories...The Mayor's Tongue is a fascinating and engaging read."
—The Columbia Spectator

“I read The Mayor's Tongue with ever-increasing delight, rooting with all my heart for the young protagonist on his near-mythic quest. This is an elegantly-structured, brilliantly-told novel, by turns terrifying, touching, and wildly funny, and always generous and magical. The Mayor's Tongue is about how we talk to each other and how make-believe helps us get on with our lives; most of all, it's about love. Kudos to Nathaniel Rich, who has created a brave book, a novel brimming with brio.”
—Stephen King

“Ambitious, intelligent, hallucinatory, and, most important: heartfelt. Here is a young writer who is not afraid to give literature a kick in the pants, a writer deep in the thrall of language.”
—Gary Shteyngart

“The Mayor's Tongue reminds me of Peter Carey's early work-the highest possible praise. It presents a young writer of deep ambition and imagination working with a kind of unnerving maturity. It's clear from the very first pages that Nathaniel Rich can really write, and he proceeds to unfurl a fascinating Möbius strip of a novel, its dual narratives swerving and twisting until they've come together in a way that seems all at once impossible and endlessly elegant.”
—Colum McCann