Media and Reviews

 

  • Peter Behrens talks about cowboying in Alberta on CBC Radio, April 2016
  • Peter Behrens on "Male Ambition" in the Wall Street Journal, April 2016
  • "Behrens, taking the bare bones of his father’s life and melding it into epic fiction, covers historical ground we might think already well represented but finds new ways into it through the depth of his characters, the strength of his storytelling, and the poetic touch of his prose; Carry Me is a moving meditation on identity and belonging, and a love story to get happily lost in." —Montreal Gazette, May 2016
  • Carry Me Interview on CBC Radio, May 2016
  • "How does brazen hatred acquire such an unbreakable, steel-jawed hold over an entire society? In his new novel Carry Me the Canadian-born, award-winning author Peter Behrens touchingly, tenderly and provocatively asks that question, many compelling variations upon that question, and much more.” —Mordechai Ben-Dat in Canadian Jewish News, May 2016
  • Lorne Matalon and PB talk about CARRY ME on "West Texas Talk," KRTS Marfa Public Radio
  • CARRY ME is "Beautifully composed, and heartbreakingly credible." —Shelf Awareness
  • CARRY ME “thrills” —Washington Post
  • CARRY ME is "staggeringly epic." —Toronto Star
  • Megan O'Grady in Vogue calls CARRY ME "another meditation on history and destiny...that makes the past feel stunningly close at hand."
  • PB's talk "FAMILIES NOVELS HISTORIES" at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard
  • CARRY ME offers "stunning imagery . . . fully realized characters . . . an unusual epic love story. . . . masterly" —Winnipeg Free Press
  • On CBC BOOKS, PB talks about channelling the family ghosts with CARRY ME.
  • "A gifted storyteller . . . Carry Me is a well crafted and true tale of people, families, and love affairs." —The Province (Vancouver)
  • "Peter Behrens is a powerful stylist . . . if exile is Behrens’s obsession, he’s still making it work in his fiction" —The Globe and Mail
  • "Behrens captures his narrator’s naïveté and the casual anti-Semitism of the times with great skill and intelligence . . . as true an observation about human nature as there is." —Dennis Bock, The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, March 20, 2016)
  • "Behrens is a beautiful, lyric writer. His understanding of the age and command of it, moment to moment, is impressive . . . everything is beautiful in the details, in the smallness of personal moments even as we know that no matter how calm, how peaceful the moment, it will not last." —Jason Sheehan, NPR
  • “[CARRY ME] is both poetry and cartography . . . . Behrens has mined truths so skillfully that in reading they can slip by unnoticed; they’re never glaring or contrived. They leave the reader with a feeling Billy describes as he’s driving across Germany . . . . Great writing keeps readers on this threshold, in liminal space, wanting to know and understand more than literature or life will allow, anxious for the next big lesson. CARRY ME is full of this kind of searching, characters looking for a way to map their lives against war and love and change.” —Heidi Sistare, Portland Press Herald
  • "Carry Me is almost as dreamlike as its desert setting." —The National Post.
  • Peter Behrens profiled in the New York Times, March 1, 2012.
  • THE LAW OF DREAMS IS "Absorbing, unsparing and beautifully written . . . a masterly novel. —The New York Times Book Review
  • “The O'Briens is a major accomplishment” —John Vernon in New York Times Book Review
  • “Brimming with character and incident, even more ambitious in scope than its prizewinning predecessor, The Law of Dreams. . . . Supple prose captures both their keening sorrowfulness and their rapturous engagement with the pleasures of the physical world. From the sepia-tinted opening tableau of an old priest waltzing with children to a hand-cranked Victrola to the spectral closing image of a man rowing out of the fog toward voices, Behrens celebrates the warmth of human attachments without pretending they can ever entirely dispel the existential chill of mortality and loneliness.” —The Daily Beast
  • Peter Behrens interviewed by Jacki Lyden on NPR's Weekend Edition in 2012
  • Peter Behrens discusses his novel, The O’Briens, a family story that spans half a century on the Leonard Lopate show, NYC.
  • PB talks about The O'Briens (and the O'Briens) with Shelagh Rogers CBC Radio 1's The Next Chapter.
  • Marc from @CJSW admitted that he had a man-crush on Peter Behrens after this GG Podcast interview. —The GG Podcast, CJSW 90.9 FM
  • "If you were trying to describe Peter Behrens' latest novel, you would use words like "sweeping" and "epic".  —CBC Radio's "All in a Weekend" audio interview with Peter Behrens
  • Peter Behrens' tips for writers, Writers on Writing
  • Jeff Glor talks to Peter Behrens —CBS News Interview
  • PB talks with Michael Silverblatt of NPR's "Bookworm" about The O'Briens (and about director Terence Malick).
  • PB talks about The O'Briens with Michael Enright on CBC Radio's "Sunday Edition," June 24 2012
  • (THE LAW OF DREAMS) The prose is frequently thrilling and always arresting. It is also unsparing in its determination to distil both the precise eternals of a moment and the fierce interiority of the human mind. The dialogue, too, seems to emerge from the mouths of characters who, though well represented in the pages of similar novels, have never been allowed to talk this way before. —Globe & Mail (Toronto)
  • (THE LAW OF DREAMS) In the life of this determined young man, Behrens illuminates one of the 19th century's greatest tragedies and the massive migration it launched. A novel that animates the past this vibrantly should make volumes of mere history blush. "Life burns hot," Fergus thinks, and so do these pages. —Washington Post Book World
  • When I opened Peter Behrens's "The Law of Dreams," last month, I thought, Oy vey, not another bleak, depressing, potato-famine, Irish-persecution, struggling-immigrant story. But I wound up loving this novel. The storytelling is terrific, the writing lyrical, often startling. —The New Yorker Online
  • One of the many fine things about Peter Behrens' stunningly lyric first novel, "The Law of Dreams," is that it is emphatically a story of that "great hunger," a work of richly empathetic imagination that reminds us once again of how powerful historical fiction can be in skilled hands. —Los Angeles Times
  • . . . (THE LAW OF DREAMS) is one of those rare books that comes along from time to time that makes you feel that you are in the presence of greatness: a gifted storyteller with a truly compelling story to tell. —Irish Sunday Independent
  • This is a top-notch historical novel: dramatic, wincingly violent, tender and extremely well-written. —Guardian (London)