"Spectacular."
- The New Yorker,
"Hoffmann is not just a good writer but a great one, with the ability to find, in the moment-to-moment dislocation of daily existence, epiphanies of revelatory force. What Hoffmann has achieved is a kind of magic."
- David Ulin - Chicago Tribune,
"Hoffmann’s subject is the miracle of this most ordinary thing, and his prose is its revelation and praise."
- Jenny Hendrix - Forward,
"Hoffmann’s meandering is intensely personal, yet his hope that the cataloguing of thoughts and feelings will lead to some kind of larger understanding beyond the self is entirely universal."
- Publishers Weekly,
"Hoffmann writes in a language of miracles."
- American Book Review,
"Hoffmann's is an exile literature in exile from itself: self-consciously historicized, yet with none of its homage presented obviously. It's a miracle of Peter Cole's sinuous, sensitive English translation of Moods that Hoffmann seems even more 'himself': a magus, a sphinx, the Kohen of the koan, the Grand Rabbi of Kyoto–a genius."
- Joshua Cohen,
"Reading Moods is not unlike the experience of reading the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, as it compels an immediate reassessment upon conclusion, and rewards an immediate rereading."
- Full Stop,