"For alongside its thought-provoking and finely sociological account of misfit sexualities in and around the literary field of twentieth-century France, Someone is also a finely crafted and aesthetically sensitive work of literary criticism. . . . The result is a book that requires attention, certainly, but rewards that attention so richly that the process of reading it feels like a working together, rather than a working against. I do not often find this in academic books; I do not believe many of us do. A book that creates that feeling is a precious thing indeed. Someone is one of those books."

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

"Lucey proves himself adept at the detective work necessary to ascertain how the nonpropositional aspects of language communicate meaning, moving effortlessly among literary texts, letters, journal entries, newspaper articles, and sociological and linguistic theory to carefully reconstruct the contexts of a text’s production and reception... Someone is, above all, a rigorous and instructive study of methods of reading—it offers a wealth of insight to those who would study what nondenotative language can signal about social positionings and sexual worlds."

Journal of Modern History

"Enlightening. . . The most insightful way to write about misfit sexualities, Lucey’s whole book suggests, is to display their hesitation and inconsistency at work—without defiant proclamations and without fuss."

Journal of the History of Sexuality

"Simply spectacular. Lucey proposes a whole new way of problematizing sexual identity and upends in the process many conceptual frameworks that hold sway over contemporary scholarship. His constant, generous attention to the peculiar, the odd, the idiosyncratic that goes hand in hand with the realities of sexual desire makes his work uniquely humane, ethical even. Someone is an outstanding accomplishment."

David Caron, author of The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV

“Michael Lucey is far and away the best critic of modern French literature writing today. Someone is a riveting analysis, through Bourdieu, of the relation between sexuality, writing, and the social world. In attentive, rigorously contextualized, and casually assured readings, Lucey invites us to return to Colette, Genet, and Simone de Beauvoir, to Duras, Leduc, and Guibert, and to know them again, as if for the first time.”

Emma Wilson, University of Cambridge