SOURCE: Yardley, Jonathan. “Canin's Mature Miracles.” Book World—The Washington Post (20 January 1988): C2.

In the following review, Yardley considers Emperor of the Air to be an auspicious debut.

For this slender volume of short stories, Ethan Canin, a 27-year-old student at Harvard Medical School, has been awarded a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship: an honor bestowed irregularly by the Boston publisher to a notable first work of fiction. The prize, which consists of a generous cash award and publication of the work by Houghton Mifflin, has gone to a number of writers who went on to distinguished careers, among them Robert Penn Warren, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Roth and Ellen Douglas. On the evidence of Emperor of the Air, Canin has the talent to circulate in such company.

The phrase “auspicious debut” has for so long been used so casually and frequently by reviewers that it no longer means anything...