Richard Wiley

“Richard Wiley is one of our best writers. These stories satisfy in the way that brilliant short fiction always satisfies; one feels as if one has absorbed the expansive vision and drama of a novel. Read slowly, and I bet you’ll want to read again.”


“It’s a strange and winsome feeling I have, reading Tacoma Stories, the blue sensation that Richard Wiley has made me homesick for a place I’ve never been, mourning the loss of friends I never had, in a life where each and every one of us is loved, however imperfectly. Think Sherwood Anderson inhabiting Raymond Carver’s Northwest and you’ll have a clear picture of Wiley’s accomplishment.”

A witty, roller-coaster ride of uncertain identity set against the gritty certainties of New York City. In compelling, unadorned prose, Richard Wiley gives us a bewitching and ultimately moving tale.

Strange, riveting work—with an albino rapist speaking, at times, a kind of Shakespearean rap. Wiley gets across the unconscionable violence and poverty that permeates some sectors of Nigerian society, and paints a compelling portrait of the entitled impotency deadening the American middle class. We end up feeling empathy for the deranged Nigerian, and irritation, even repugnance, for the American characters. In the end, none of the lot are really good or bad—the situations make them so. From the opening rape scene with its uncomfortable comedy, to the absurd tragedy of the bullet at the end, a gripping, entertaining book—who can forget Mrs. Beaver?—endowed with the truth of human nature than only a novel can claim.

"Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show takes us to mid-nineteenth-century Japan and makes it contemporary and intimately familiar. It's a wryly told tale, full of wonders and surprises, written with grace and authority. If there is such a thing as global fiction, Richard Wiley is writing it."
This absorbing and immensely pleasurable book achieves momentum through Wiley's fluid style, the lightness with which he bears his learning, and the vitality and wit with which he brings a vanished world to life.

Easily the most original piece of American fiction to appear in years.
Masterful, emotionally searing... a hauntingly elegiac novel of tarnished honor and hollow revenge.
Wonderful... original... haunting... reading Soldiers in Hiding is like watching a man on a high wire!

Wiley delivers a wonderful, ethereal second novel, filled with haunting images built of graceful, haiku-like prose.
Wiley not only knows all the technical details about existence in that place during that time, which gives his novel authentic, compelling upholstery, but he also understands the psychology of the kind of individual who would seek personal satisfaction by going to Alaska to strike it rich. This is not the kind of excitement-filled novel that will leave the reader breathless at the turn of every page, but its vividly realized atmosphere supplies its own rewards.

Richard Wiley writes as if he was born and raised everywhere... in Festival for Three Thousand Maidens Wiley immerses us in non-western cultures--and unique characters--we desperately need to know more about if we hope to create a globally conscious American fiction for the next century.
Richard Wiley has given us a fascinating and utterly convincing portrait of a young man caught between two cultures and struggling to understand both.

Provocative and memorable... a richly layered exploration of cultural awareness, moral conflict and racial identity.
Wiley's novel recalls Graham Greene's work in its depiction of a Westerner immersed in a foreign culture he only half understands, coming to new self-knowledge as a result. Neal is a particularly satisfying creation, a genuinely decent man who makes the most of the opportunity to change his life.

Straddling the genres of adventure novel and potboiler, the book is nothing short of an exotic page-turner.
Wiley writes with a vividly pictorial eye and evokes the burgeoning sophistication of Nairobi, as well as the wilderness forever tearing at its boundaries.