SOURCE: Steinberg, Sybil. Review of Emperor of the Air, by Ethan Canin. Publishers Weekly 232, no. 26 (25 December 1987): 61.

In the following laudatory review of Emperor of the Air, Steinberg asserts that Canin “informs a technical expertise with a keen sense of the dynamics of the human psyche.”

Canin's outstanding debut [Emperor of the Air], winner of a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, gathers nine stories originally published in the Atlantic, Esquire and Ploughshares, among others; two were selected for the Best American Short Stories 1985 and 1986. At 27, the gifted author, a Harvard Medical School student who was a creative writing instructor and an Iowa Review editor, informs a technical expertise with a keen sense of the dynamics of the human psyche. His far-reaching vision encompasses “The Year of Getting to Know Us,” where the protagonist recognizes in himself aspects of his father's disturbing uncommunicativeness, and “American Beauty,” where a teenager cannot escape...