The Los Angeles Times described Tortured Artists as "the funniest book to come out of New York in 2012." The Miami Herald called it "madly clever and cleverly mad." Critic and psychiatrist Jacob Appel heaped praise on the volume in a 2012 review, describing the book as "a surprisingly sophisticated and oddly brilliant work—part popular science and part cultural criticism—that blends comic observation and trenchant insight into a literary treasure as difficult to put down as it is to classify."