Praise for THE HUE AND CRY AT OUR HOUSE: A YEAR REMEMBERED:

“Benjamin Taylor's memoir is an American classic, but also a Proustian classic: exquisitely attuned to the nuances of adolescence, and to the experience of being an outsider in a world of conventional manners and expectations. It is rare, outside of Proust's fiction, to find such fearless candor in a consummate prose stylist.”—Judith Thurman

“In this lyrical and brilliant memoir, Benjamin Taylor investigates his childhood with piercing clarity and unapologetic nostalgia.  His insights are wise, his sense of humor always in evidence, and his yearning for lost time exquisitely palpable.  Reading this book is like reading all of Proust in just under two hundred pages.  It is an utterly enchanting little masterpiece—Andrew Solomon, author of Far From the Tree

"[A] witty, painful, uninhibited memoir of, ostensibly, one year of childhood. Within his chosen focus, Taylor achieves a necessary feat of autobiography: The child who grew and the adult who more than remembers live together as one on the page. You encounter vitalistic youth; and sense there, also, the wing of mortality. Taylor's Hue and Cry is a vast offer of thanks and glowing triumph, his masterpiece to date."      

—Richard Howard, author of A Progressive Education

“Benjamin Taylor enchanted readers by his Tales Out of School. He has done it again. The Hue and Cry at Our House, a short elegiac memoir that moves gracefully between the fateful year of President Kennedy’s assassination, when Taylor was eleven, and other moments of searing significance in Taylor’s life, is wondrously candid and deeply moving.”—Louis Begley, author of Wartime Limes and Killer, Come Hither

“In his keen focus on the 1963 death of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Benjamin Taylor returns to the morning of the assassination in his hometown of Fort Worth when he had the dazzling experience, as a schoolboy, of shaking the hand of the President, his hero.  This acute, intense memoir achieves the stature of national as well as personal elegy, a breathtaking accomplishment, classical and impassioned.   It belongs to the best American literature of idealism and loss, a profoundly eloquent reading of our mid-century history and its heartbroken legacy to this day.”–Patricia Hampl, author of The Florist's Daughter

"What was it like to be a gifted, gay, upper-middle-class Jewish kid (with a touch of Asperger Syndrome) in 1964 Fort Worth, Texas? The answer is brilliantly explicated in Ben Taylor's memoir, THE HUE AND CRY AT OUR HOUSE, which begins with the assassination of JFK (Taylor shook the president's hand a few hours before Dealey Plaza) and gains momentum from there. That the author will grow up to be one of our most elegant, multifaceted writers is the final turn of the screw."

—Blake Bailey, author of Cheever: A Life and The Splendid Things We Planned

“Reaching the last page of THE HUE AND CRY AT OUR HOUSE, I found myself marveling that such a slender volume could contain so much wisdom and emotion. Benjamin Taylor writes in beautiful, precise prose about his younger self and his older self, about his parents and his friends, about a life lived over time, and about all our lives lived over time.  This is a mesmerizing memoir.”—Margot Livesey

"Memory. History. Loss. Love. These are the themes of Ben Taylor's haunting THE HUE AND CRY AT OUR HOUSE. A beautiful book about finding meaning by sifting through the past."

—David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl and The 19th Wife

“Taylor has painted a gem-like portrait, in delicate colors and with fine detail, of a childhood in genteel Fort Worth at the end of the Kennedy era, and has written an honest and moving account of a frail, mercurial boy's struggle to be himself.”—Caleb Crain