Ann Beattie has always displayed keen vision in analyzing contemporary literature; this time she's shown it by selecting Lisa Lenzo's story collection for the University of Iowa Press's 1997 John Simmons Short Fiction Award. Beattie has said she admires stories that yield the ''surprise'' of a recognizable world freshly rendered. In Lenzo's collection, that surprise is everywhere.

--The New York Times

Perfect dialogue—hip, funny, wary stories marked by precision, lucidity, and daring.

--The Grand Rapids Press

Lenzo balances dread with determination, endowing her characters and her prose with offbeat grace and resolve. 

--Publishers Weekly

These stories are achingly lyrical but never sentimental, street-smart without being callous.  Lisa Lenzo's stories have a strong pulse of feeling and a sly intelligence, and her angels, children and lovers have an eerie radiance, a hard-won wisdom, that you can spot on any page of this book.

--Charles Baxter

Make no mistake, the place has a language, Phillip Levine writes of Detroit in his poem Coming Close.  Detroit does have a language, and its skillful articulation is what makes Lisa Lenzo's debut collection such a compelling read.  The subtle violence that propels these stories and the untenable hope that endures is what make Within the Lighted City a haunting and oddly inspiring collection.

--Black Warrior Review

Stories that are at once unsentimental in their honesty and at the same time powerfully empathetic.

--Stuart Dybek

Lenzo writes beautifully.

--The Detroit Free Press