"Condemned to Cymru is Rabelaisian in every sense of the word: it’s gross, it’s droll, there’s sex and violence and jokes. M.J. Nicholls has written a clever, surprising story, equal parts funny and despairing, sharp enough to keep you reading a literal alphabetical list of Welsh towns, parsing a tangled story overheard in a pub for deeper meanings, or trying to find the metacommentary behind a giant rampaging buttocks smashing the local sheep to smithereens." -Eric Williams, Heavy Feather Review
".So funny, so bitter, so ingenious, so culturally literate (especially on rock music), so politically astute, so Swiftian/Sorrentinoesque/Flann O’Brieny, so lovelorn, so raunchy and gruesome, so outraged at the literary scene, so surprising an ending . . . so many high-calorie maximalist sentences, so many off-the-wall metaphors, so many show-stopping arias . . . so satisfying a read, so reaffirming that Nicholls is one of the cleverest metafictionists alive. Only he could pull off a study in despair in the form of a Welsh gazetteer." - Steven Moore, author of The Novel: An Alternative History
"Scotland’s Mark Leyner returns with sentences up the wazoo, carefully composed cockrammed phrases, each in easily consumable alphabecedarian units ... it may be no more than stomach gas for him but MJ has never written better in his life" - Lee Klein, author of Neutral Evil ))) and Chaotic Good