“Treuer’s edgy romance celebrates our love for each other, love for the earth and love of story, the way we make sense of life in all its wildness.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“[David Treuer] is mounting a challenge to the whole idea of Indian identity as depicted by both Native and white writers.”—New York Times

“A myriad of false documents, questionable authorships, stalled sexual encounters, and narrative disjunctions, Dr Apelles is not to be mistaken, like the books that take the most heat in Treuer’s essays, for an anthropological project. To the contrary, Treuer pushes the metatextual games of writers like J.M. Coetzee and A.S. Byatt past the point of parody.” —Village Voice

“Treuer juggles multiple elements with skill and confidence: literary satire, metafictional gamesmanship and cultural truth-telling. Each on its own would be of interest to different kinds of readers, but the love story alone would appeal to anyone, even the most cynical….The last few pages let you know that what you have read is a story, and the satisfied sigh you utter when you read the last sentence is neither silly nor a delusion of sentiment.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“David Treuer’s third novel is certain to win comparisons to the work of Jorge Luis Borges…[Treuer] delights in the pleasures of the text and demonstrates a thoroughly developed appetite for vertiginous plots.” —TimeOut New York

"Dr Apelles...provides new layers of information and meaning with every pass. This Escher-esque craftsmanship dazzles even as it confounds."—The Seattle Times

“Treuer celebrates the power of imagination.”—Minnesota Monthly

“Beautiful prose—Flaubert in some places, Chekov in others, grabs and holds attention.”—Publishers Weekly 

“Treuer’s novel comprises an intricate and provocative labyrinth.”—Booklist 

“The power of imagination, love, and the written word come across in this engaging tale.”—Library Journal

“This book describes itself as ‘a love story,’ and it is certainly that, but its ambitions are larger than usual: as a novel, it has elements of satire (of Hemingway, among others), metaphysical whodunit, and urban legend. The miracle of this book is that it makes two seemingly incompatible stories into a hybrid, a story about stories of death and rebirth. Formally daring, The Translation of Dr Apelles may be David Treuer’s best book; it is certainly his most courageous.” —Charles Baxter

“This is a novel that juxtaposes the bucolic life of a young, beautiful Native American couple against the lonely existence of a translator and researcher. Both are stories about Indians and both are about the torment and bliss of love. But the alienation of Dr Apelles the translator has a post-Edenic starkness when contrasted with the prelapsarian paradise of the story he is translating. Imagine Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha written by Nabokov and you will get some idea of the linguistic fireworks and the suavity of the prose in this extraordinary book.” —Edmund White