This smoothly written and thoroughly tedious collection [Liars in Love] is about people who are apparently meant to be extraordinary doing ordinary things in ordinary ways. Yates is a professional—there's nothing actively wrong with any of these stories—but each is more forgettable than the last. Esquire fiction at its bittersweetest.

Geoffrey Stokes, "Brief Encounters: 'Liars in Love'," in VLS (copyright © 1981 News Group Publications, Inc.), No. 1, October, 1981, p. 3.