"Like our best women writers (Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates), Owens is not afraid to take risks.Owens is a highly intelligent writer and a fiendishly sardonic one--to the extent that her outrageous wit rescues her freaky Jewish anti-heroine from becoming a pain in the Asphalt Jungle. On every page wisecracks explode like anti-personnel mines. We laugh, nervously perhaps, but often." - Newsweek “One of the earliest portraits of the female antihero, a sort of distaff Notes From Underground. It was very funny” -Anatole Broyard, The New York Times “A very funny book by a exhilarating talent.” - The New York Times “&like watching a woman depilate with an acetylene touch.” -Newsweek “Good enough to have convulsed the late Oscar Levant, barbed, bitchy and hilariously sour.

” -Kenneth Tynan “Spiky with mockery, carbon steel wit and mature observation.” - Village Voice “Owens, under the name of Harriet Daimler, was a prominent Parisian pornographer for Olympia Press&[who] as 'Harriet Daimler', became one of Girodias's most celebrated pornographers, someone who struggled 'against her impossible tendency to write more explicitly than the courts will tolerate’” - Bloomsbury Magazine “To characterize After Claude as the inevitable lightly veiled autobiography of a ‘first’ novel is to deny Ms. Owens her due both as a savagely accurate reporter of the current Greenwich Village-Chelsea Hotel scene, and as a gallow humorist of major order.After Claude. is said, with biting verve and accuracy for New York that Mary McCarthy and her reliance on ‘facts’ would well envy.” -Eleanor Rackow Widmer, Arts and Society “ After Claude is a very funny book saved from off-putting vulgarity by an exhilarating talent and intelligence.” -Leonard Michaels, The New York Times Book Review “Miss Owens has created a new kind of monster for your compassion. And isn't that, after all, one of the classical functions of contemporary fiction?” -Anatole Broyard, The New York Times "Novels like Fear of Flying and After Claude created a fresh voice that made us want to laugh out loud, pass the book around, read funny bits to our friends.

" -Morris Dickstein, The New York Times “Harriet tells her story like a female Lenny Bruce&while I was reading&I was laughing too hard to see the page.” -John Lahr, Women’s Wear Daily.