“Ever the intrepid newsman, Portis plays tourist throughout his Collected Works. The volume alludes to tacky traps like Chattanooga’s mountain lookout, Rock City, and rotating restaurants such as the one atop Atlanta’s Peachtree Plaza. . . . These set pieces may read like hieroglyphs to non-southerners, but Collected Works is a Rosetta stone, deciphering a region and a history that spans from the colonial era through slavery, Jim Crow, and the present day.” —Hamilton Cain, The Atlantic

“It’s absurdly fun to follow his oddballs and their odysseys, but something more than fun, too. Portis’s genius went beyond character in the strictly literary sense, to reveal something about moral character and many somethings about the character of this country.”—Casey Cep, The New Yorker