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Lorrie Moore reviews Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You in
"Deliciously vital right from the start...Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is a piece of vocal virtuosity and possibly Cameron's best book: it retains the lucid and unlabored prose of his previous ones but wastes less time; it may be his most successful novel on its own terms -- terms that are not as modest as they may initially seem...What Peter Cameron has done is written a sophisticated and adult book. Neither young adult literature, nor even really a coming-of-age story, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is most surprisingly of all the subtlest September 11 novel yet written. So accomplished is its subtlety that one is not even aware of this novel's true subject until three quarters of the way through, and then its mention...rises up out of the story's barely submerged anxiety and casts on the book a sudden, brilliant light. It is a bravura performance, and Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is a stunning little book."
 "His best work — it’s terrific, piercing and funny. The novel demonstrates every kind of strength...He will make a large portion of his audience, especially those who look for relief in books, feel excitingly understood. And he has a rarer ability: he will make many of them itch to write."
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You in the  "The book both fits within and smashes any number of literary molds: coming-of-age novel, New York novel, 9/11 novel. From the first sentence, you'll be snagged by its precocious, funny-sad narrator and his you'd-pay-to-hear-him-read-the-phone-book voice." Michael Lowenthal is the author of Charity Girl, which is now available in paperback.
 "Peter Cameron's novels and story collections - such as The Weekend andThe City of Your Final Destination - are kept on the fiction shelves of your local library or bookstore, but you'll most likely find his new novel, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, in the young adult section. Cameron didn't set out to write a young adult novel, but his publisher is cross-marketing the book to teenagers because its narrator is a troubled 18-year-old boy. Was this a good idea? Grown-ups may be resistant to the idea of reading a young adult book. Teenagers, on the other hand, might not be able to single the book out from a genre stuffed with badly written "issue" fiction. Either way, it will be a shame if Cameron's book doesn't find a following on both sides of the age divide. It's the kind of novel that could be a great solace to an 18-year-old...His highly cultured, dryly funny voice, which seduces the reader from the first page on, makes Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You appealing to adult readers as well."
Kristin Kloberdanze reviews The Chicago Tribune
James Sveck likes his grandmother and the late introverted British author Denton Welch. That's about it. He has no friends, his family doesn't get him, and he can't quite wrap his mind around his awkward attraction to John, an older gay colleague at his mother's dull Manhattan art gallery. He is antisocial, cynical, prone to anxiety attacks and a little bit depressed -- and his narration of life is quite droll and affecting...James Sveck is a brilliant wit of a character whose voice will echo long after his story ends."
Peter Gadol reviews
"For the life of me, I cannot figure out why Peter Cameron’s astonishing novel is being sold as a Young Adult novel. Granted, the charmingly neurotic and endearing, proto-gay, boy-genius, first-person narrator, James Sveck, is 18 and muddling through a long hot summer before he’s supposed to matriculate at Brown (and, of course, he doesn’t want to go), which is to say a ripe angsty hero for YA readers; and granted, as YA fiction (where lately so much innovative and risky literature is being published), the book will open up city living, the gallery world, online dating, existential geekdom and the conundrum of sexual identity for its target audience in fresh new ways. But my fear is that Adult Adult readers will overlook what is possibly one of the all-time great New York books, not to mention an archly comic gem (that’s LOL to the YA set). Sveck leapfrogs Holden Caufield into the 21st century, and it’s about time Peter Cameron, the urbane, astutely observant author of Andorra, The City of Your Final Destination and The Weekend gained the wider audience he richly deserves. So I take back what I said: With young folk facebooking each other about STPWBUTY, maybe they’ll end up igniting a Cameron craze."
Julia Alvarez Recommends
from Critical Mass (the blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors): "Billed as a young adult book, Peter Cameron's SOMEDAY THIS PAIN WILL BE USEFUL TO YOU is a wonderful little gem of a book--funny, smart, and totally engaging. A sort of 21st century CATCHER IN THE RYE. I only picked it up because I'm working on a Y.A. title and so I look for books in the same category that might serve as an inspiration and a challenge. This one is certainly both! Hopefully, its "label" (of Y.A.) won't keep it only in the hands of librarians and teens. It deserves a wider readership." Julia Alvarez was a National Book Critics Circle award finalist for In the Time of the Butterflies. Her latest books include Saving the World and Once Upon a Quinceanera.
Publishers Weekly
Kirkus Reviews Amazon.com Horn Books all select "With its off-balance marriage of the hilarious and the tragic, Cameron's YA debut holds readers in the grip of its narrator, a desperately alienated, hyper-articulate 18-year-old Manhattanite." -- Publishers Weekly “'I only feel like myself when I am alone,' says James, and Cameron draws his heartbreaking isolation with empathy and acuteness. The book’s first-person depiction of a privileged but disaffected young protagonist at sea in affluent Manhattan makes it seem very much an “old school” YA novel, but it has an unmistakably contemporary sensibility and respect for teen readers." -- Horn Book Fanfare
"The promo bumph for Peter Cameron's Someday this Pain Will be Useful to You is all about how it's like J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. Not altogether, in fact. Although Someday might draw a smaller, more demanding audience than Salinger's novel, it's considerably more sophisticated, subtle and rewarding... This is an outstanding novel."
"Peter Cameron is without question one of the finest contemporary American gay writers - yet his name is hardly a gay household world. If there is justice in this world, that will change with his enthralling new novel, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You, just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It is the story, told in the first person, of James Sveck, a precociously cynical gay kid from Manhattan who has just turned 18. The novel has been compared by critics to the J.D. Salinger classic, Catcher in the Rye - indeed, Cameron's James is the most unforgettable adolescent in American fiction since Holden Caulfield. Now, with Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You, Cameron has created an insightful, captivating, and frequently surprising novel whose youthful gay hero employs sparkling intelligence to grapple with life and love."
*Publishers Weekly James's elaborate daily entries interlace with a series of flashbacks to gradually reveal the recent panic attack that has landed him in psychotherapy. Descriptions of these sessions offer not only more fodder for James's sardonic critiques of a self-indulgent society, but also an achingly tender portrait of a devastatingly alienated young man. A single reference yields something of an explanation: James saw, at close range, the planes crash into the Twin Towers. The closest he can come to commenting is to turn to a story about a woman whose disappearance after 9/11 went unnoticed for a month: “[It] didn't make me sad. I thought it was beautiful. To die like that… to sink without disturbing the surface of the water.” With its off-balance marriage of the comedic and the deeply painful, its sympathetic embrace of its characters and its hard-won hope, this smart and elegantly written novel merits a wide readership. *Kirkus Reviews *Booklist
“Think of the exuberant stasis-shattering of Captain Shotover in SHAW'S Heartbreak House. As for style...think of MURIEL SPARK.” (NY Times) "Cameron's immense narrative drive suggests that the 21st century may have found its very own HENRY JAMES." (The Times, London) “ELIZABETH BISHOP...[with] her reticence and her incredible eye for detail, must have been a guiding presence in the writing of Cameron’s book. Like BISHOP, Cameron never gives too much away at once, preferring to watch his subjects closely and carefully, rewarding his readers with the steady authenticity of every observation made along the way.” (Time Out New York) “The novel has the dream-like mistiness of somewhere in one of SHAKESPEARE'S late plays. Indeed, the whole shift of the novel reminds me of the late comedies.” (The London Times) Peter Cameron’s novel possesses all the intriguing and playful elements of a BORGES fiction.” (Daily Telegraph) 
Noel Coward “A cross between a West End Edwardian play and a MERCHANT-IVORY production.” (Los Angeles Times) “Has the lightness and airiness of SHAKESPEARE'S A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” (Raleigh News & Observer) “As with JANE AUSTEN, who would appear to be a big influence, there is a great deal that can be seen through the focused prism of love.” (TLS) “This theatricality, a touch of RATTINGANor WILDE, rather suits the peculiar menage.” (NYTBR) “HENRY JAMES would have liked Peter Cameron.” (Publishers Weekly) “Think A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM via Montivideo.” (USA Today) "It is like a tale from DICKENS or ISAK DINESEN-- real, but not real, with a touch of HENRY JAMES' love of human relationships as a series of chess maneuvers." (Frontiers) “Cameron’s novel is a teasing blend of genres – the modern parables of CAMUS or GIDE, a CHATWIN travel narrative – and an enigmatic literary daydream.” (Creative Loafing, Atlanta) “A deliciously unsettling mix of social comedy and persecution nightmare (think NOEL COWARD as rewritten by FRANZ KAFKA).” (The Seattle Times)
Franz Kafka “Cameron nods to his predecessors – PROUST, AUSTEN, ROSE MACAULAYand TENNESSEE WILLIAMS – while whipping up a wholly original concoction.” (Raleigh News & Observer) “A romp through human perception and imagination in the same rich vein as, and with equal skill to, past masters VIRGINIA WOOLF and HENRY JAMES.” (San Antonio Express-News) “A writer of remarkable clarity and restraint (his writing is reminiscent of a certain style of emotionally potent British modernism – ELIZABETH TAYLOR say, or even KATHARINE MANSFIELD).” (TLS) “There is a delicate hint of JOHN FOWLES' The Magus in this book.” (Newsday) “At its best moments, The Weekend echoes VIRGINIA WOOLF, E. M. FORSTER, D. H. LAWRENCEand F. SCOTT FITZGERALD.” (NYTBR) 
E. M. Forster “Cameron is shaping up to be an E. M. FORSTER with his novels – that is, he provides well-worked-out plots involving affluent characters with a variety of sexualities.” (MetroSource) “With its literary framing device, its redolence of KAFKA and BUZATI and NABOKOV, and its alluringly revealed intricacies, Andorra is the very book I would trade for in the Andorran Biblioteca.” (Washington Post) “It is a playful literary explanation that places Andorra on the same map with NABOKOV and BORGES.” (Boston Sunday Globe)
“The Weekend is infused with irony, grace, and NOEL COWARD-like sensibility.” (Elle) “The Weekend seems to inhabit the same graceful and leisurely space as a HENRY JAMES or EDITH WHARTON novel.” (Gay Community News) “A playful phrase of MILAN KUNDERA'S, ‘the textbook of existential mathematics,’ can be applied to . . . his superb novella, The Weekend, because the work is so rich that it seems to touch on every facet of existence. Like the Czech master’s fanciful textbook, Cameron’s books have the power to describe the conditions of human existence with the elegance and precision normally expressed in mathematical equations.” (Lambda Book Report)
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 Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You winner of The Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction awarded by
Peter Cameron, Stephen Greco, and Sara Van Arsdale at the Publishing Triangle Awards
 
Paura della matematica a collection of stories published in June 2008 by Adelphi recommended by Antonio Gnoli of la Repubblica
Un jour cette douleur te servira published in France in June 2008 by Rivages Du wirst schon sehen wozu es gut ist will be published in Germany in September 2008 by Knaus
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“Like the late British novelist BARBARA PYM, Peter Cameron has the rare ability to take an ordinary event and invest it with heart and significance.” (Los Angeles Times)
