[An] important book. anyone with a stake in the power of literature will learn from this carefully reasoned and impeccably researched book.

Margaret Scanlan, Modern Philology 103:1 (2005)

It is to its considerable credit that [Terrorism and Modern Literature] neither exploits nor manifestly fails the challenge of its own moment in the political and cultural history which its main title denominates. For this study constructs an account that fits events of [11 September 2001] as no exception, rather as an all-too-logical consequence and extension of pressures escalating in the intellectual and political culture of the preceding century. The steady exposition that Alex Houen conducts of developments in particular in the scientific thinking of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries offers an illuminating, useful heuristic for the growing dominance of the extreme-case option as a means of effecting political (usually 'anarchist') agendas.

Vincent Sherry, Modernism/Modernity 11: 2 (2004)

[A] timely and challenging book. ambitious and scholarly, encouraging new readings of the cultural impact of terrorism, the media's complicity, and the ways in which responses to political violence have necessitated new literary approaches. compelling and original.

Douglas Field, The Cambridge Quarterly 33:1 (2004)

Analysis of terrorism must attend to the interplay between representation and reality because all that most of us will ever know about it will be mediated. A major virtue of Alex Houen's ambitious book lies in its insistence on this issue.

Andrzej Gasiorek, Textual Practice 17:3 (2003)

...timely and very interesting book...

American Literary Scholarship

... intriguing and timely book.

English Literature in Transition