"I love Nancy Allen's masterful stories so very much, stories that seem effortless in their beauty, their power, their wisdom, and not least, their humor. Allen, with a poet's ear and eye, gets at the essence of her characters and their landscapes. It seems to me miraculous the way the stories move through time and space, Allen gracefully driving her narratives ever forward to their surprising, their poignant, their beautiful endings."--Jane Hamilton, bestselling author of The Phoebe Variations: A Novel

"This superb story collection marks the debut of a rare and talented writer who should have gotten her due a long time ago. But now, finally, we have in A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes eleven gorgeous stories. Here you will find fireworks both literal and figurative, along with rocket science, gushing oil wells, good sex, mean girls, sun-splitting Mayan ruins, family, love, loss, and pretty much all the rest of the human tumble, delivered in prose that seems to crackle straight from the writer's nerve endings onto the page. This is short fiction of the highest order."--Ben Fountain, winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and finalist for the National Book Award

"Nancy Allen's stunning debut story collection, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, offers us characters made of the most human stuff--parents whose children break their hearts, and children whose parents fail them terribly--but the agony of it all is lifted up high with Allen's keen insight and very artful, vivid language. If I'd written a debut collection this passionate and compassionate, I'd have been scared to write a second."--C. W. Smith, author of Girl Flees Circus and The Museum of Marriage

"A Nancy Allen story is a portal and an invitation to wonder. Across these eleven stories we find ourselves in the Southwest or in Crete, in a women's prison or launched into the poetry of liquid-fuel rocketry, but with every story there is a doorway, then sometimes another, until we're deeply moved by the mystery of personality and memory and time. A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes is a beautifully crafted and powerful debut collection!"--Dominic Smith, author of New York Times bestseller The Last Painting of Sara de Vos and Return to Valetto

"Nancy Allen writes like an angel."--Edward Hamlin, author of Sonata in Wax and Night in Erg Chebbi and Other Stories, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award

"Packed with raw emotional power, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes is intelligent, at times heart-pumping, and always courageous."--Lesley Bannatyne, author of Unaccustomed to Grace