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Wailing in Irony and Sorrow: Masters of the Early Blues

Wailing in Irony and Sorrow: Masters of the Early Blues By Richard Terrill   |  September 8, 2023
Blackwood’s homage to early black music begins and ends in an imagistic but unlikely fashion.
Keywords: book review

Grief and Its Guesswork

Grief and Its Guesswork By ReneĂ© E. D’Aoust   |  May 5, 2023
Anne Pinkerton’s Were You Close? explores the complexities of grief after the death of her adult sibling, her older brother, David.
Keywords: book review

Sarah Capdeville Wins River Teeth's 2022 Literary Nonfiction Book Prize

Sarah Capdeville Wins River Teeth's 2022 Literary Nonfiction Book Prize By Jill Christman   |  April 14, 2023
We are delighted to announce that Sarah Capdeville has won the 2022 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize. Her manuscript, Aligning the Glacier's Ghost, will be published by the University of New Mexico Press in spring 2024.

Choose Your Own Adventure. Two Books or Two Books in One?

Choose Your Own Adventure. Two Books or Two Books in One? By Briana Avenia-Tapper   |  April 7, 2023
In Moscow, where I taught English in 2001, Americans were rare. This meant we enjoyed a certain celebrity. I was often the first American my students met. At least, that’s what they told me. But not Yulia. I was Yulia’s second American.
Keywords: book review

What Do You Want from Nature Writing?

What Do You Want from Nature Writing? By Jeff Darren Muse   |  March 17, 2023
What’s the situation in Conversations? Kumar’s passion for birds. Their biology, their lifeways, how she celebrates diverse species while also highlighting pernicious and ever-growing threats. In terms of plot, her book follows mile after mile of Kumar and her family pursuing eagles and hawks, owls and woodpeckers, whatever resides in or migrates through the American Southwest, especially New Mexico, her adopted state.
Keywords: book review

Chocolate and Wine

Chocolate and Wine By Beth Alvarado   |  February 10, 2023
In “What Would John Williams Do?”—Williams was the author of the lately renowned novel Stoner—Frank recounts a conversation she had at a cocktail party with another writer who was describing “rampant writerly success. Travel, publication, money.” After this other author’s good fortune with a new book, the author had snagged a top-tier agent who’d sold the next book for a high five-figure advance. This writer, tall and smiling, teeth flashing in the late afternoon sunlight, hoped for six figures. Frank confides to the reader that she wanted to disappear. The only thing she was hoping for? A “handful” of her husband’s Ativans.
Keywords: book review

2021 - Disequilibria by Robert Lunday

2021 - Disequilibria by Robert Lunday February 1, 2023
Winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction PrizeDisequilibria: Meditations on Missingness is a hybrid memoir that recounts the 1982 disappearance of the author's stepfather, James Edward Lewis, a pilot and Vietnam veteran. Recounting his family's

The Past Is Unpredictable

The Past Is Unpredictable By Jan Shoemaker   |  January 2, 2023
Still Life At Eighty, Abigail Thomas’s smart, tender, acerbic new collection of short essays, gives us all that. She is writing at eighty but these essays are anything but still. They recount and inquire. They celebrate the familiar contours of her own beloved place while nudging the edge of mystery. They are frank and fearless.
Keywords: book review

A Student/Professor Affair in Fact and Fiction

A Student/Professor Affair in Fact and Fiction By Jen Anne Becker   |  December 9, 2022
Sarah Cheshire’s chapbook, Unravelings, published in 2017 by Etchings Press, is a work of creative nonfiction in which the author blurs facts so creatively that it is difficult to know what is fiction and what is truth.
Keywords: book review

The Fire That Burns the Hurt Away

The Fire That Burns the Hurt Away By Robert Root   |  November 4, 2022
The memoir thread is anchored in Macdonald’s response to the unexpected death of her father on a London street. Father and daughter were close; his loss capsizes her sense of herself in the world and haunts her throughout the book.
Keywords: book review

What's Hidden Beneath

What's Hidden Beneath By David MacWilliams   |  October 7, 2022
In her memoir, Sinkhole, Patterson explores the potential causes of the suicides in her family and the links between suicide and the historical moments, geography, and personal lives that are inextricably bound to one another. Her project, however, develops into an exploration of the responses suicide creates in survivors.
Keywords: book review

A Strangely Beautiful Remembrance

A Strangely Beautiful Remembrance By Mark Neely   |  September 11, 2022
"I can't remember how old I was the first time I saw my father cook," writes Tomás Q. Morín in his gripping memoir about growing up in a small town in South Texas. In another family's story we might find the father manning the grill at a barbecue. But in this case, the elder Morín is huddled in the passenger seat of the family car
Keywords: book review

One Woman’s Testament to Why “Home” Eludes Us

One Woman’s Testament to Why “Home” Eludes Us By Ashley Espinoza   |  July 15, 2022
This Way Back is a collection of seventeen essays about identity. Johanna Eleftheriou was born in New York City, partially raised there and partially raised on the Greek island of Cyprus; she struggles to accept her identity as an American and a Cypriot, a lesbian, a member of the Greek Orthodox Church, and one who lives on the southern half island under the control of the Cypriot government whose origins are Greek.
Keywords: book review

A Life, A Marriage, A Family—Intentionally Chosen

A Life, A Marriage, A Family—Intentionally Chosen By Jessie van Eerden   |  June 14, 2022
In American Honey, a memoir-in-essays, Sarah Wells tells the story of a woman becoming a whole version of herself while navigating marriage and embracing a definition of love that abides mistakes and failures.
Keywords: book review

Whose Family Is It: Mine or My In-Laws?    

Whose Family Is It: Mine or My In-Laws?      By Carole Mertz   |  May 6, 2022
The themes of Kandel’s memoir are twofold. First, as a young married couple, she and Johan, her husband, must adapt not only to each other’s cultures—she is American, he is Dutch—as well as the unfamiliar cultures of people among whom they live and work in very different parts of the world. Second, she must deal with her inability to understand the personality of her father-in-law, Izaak, and the dominance he exerts over his wife and Kandel’s family.
Keywords: book review

Sonnet 29: Word for Word

Sonnet 29: Word for Word By Cyndie Zikmund   |  April 8, 2022
The Fact of Memory is an unusual prose experiment. Using Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29,” which begins with the famous line, “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,” the author Aaron Angello takes each word of the sonnet, 114 in total, and uses each word as a springboard for a short ruminative essay.
Keywords: book review

The Writer-on-Writer Memoir

The Writer-on-Writer Memoir By Thomas Larson   |  March 15, 2022
Emerging in the midlife of the ongoing memoir explosion is what is variously called the bibliomemoir, the memoir/biography, or the writer-on-writer memoir.
Keywords: book review

The House That Rape Built

The House That Rape Built By Emily Waples   |  February 4, 2022
This enduring presence is no small feat, especially when—as Saterstrom intimates by way of, or rather in lieu of, closure—the dominant cultural narrative is that which comes after: the meaning-of, the healing-from, the accounting-for, the reckoning-with.
Keywords: book review

2020 - What Cannot Be Undone by Walter M. Robinson

2020 - What Cannot Be Undone by Walter M. Robinson February 4, 2022
Finalist for the 2020 Big Other Book Award for Nonfiction Through the author's travels in Europe and the United States, Try to Get Lost explores the quest for place that compels and defines us: the things we carry, how politics infuse geography,

Attention Maximally Paid

Attention Maximally Paid By Sebastian Matthews   |  January 7, 2022
The author chooses one very specific day in her recent past—November 19, 2019—to write a “memoir” about. The day “sticks in my head,” Huber writes, “because of the chemistry of adrenaline, downtime, and notes made in a journal.”
Keywords: book review

Celebration and Lamentation in Place and Time

Celebration and Lamentation in Place and Time By Robert Root   |  December 10, 2021
Robert Miltner is best known as a prose poet and most of the pieces here reflect in their brevity the concentrated lyricism of his poetry even as their perspectives are expanded and enhanced. If Robert Miltner gives us intimate reflections on interrelations in place, Barbara Hurd offers a most expansive perspective on existence. In The Epilogues: Afterwords on the Planet, her reflections are separated by brief comments about the extinctions the planet has witnessed since its creation, including the sixth extinction that we’re living through now.
Keywords: book review

Meditative, Lyric, Useful: Two New Books on Writing

Meditative, Lyric, Useful: Two New Books on Writing By Marcia Meier   |  November 5, 2021
From Michigan and Milkweed come two new books about writing, personal explorations on self, identity, and nonfiction form.
Keywords: book review

The Weight of Grief Goes Round and Round

The Weight of Grief Goes Round and Round By Penny Guisinger   |  October 1, 2021
Tarn Wilson’s memoir in essays, In Praise of Inadequate Gifts, has things to teach us about unusual topics.
Keywords: book review

Noticing as Rebellion, as Resistance

Noticing as Rebellion, as Resistance By Emily Dillon   |  September 10, 2021
In his new book, Diary of a Young Naturalist, McAnulty, who is seventeen and lives with autism, writes autobiographically about environmental conservation and activism.
Keywords: book review

We Don't Know Their Names. But We Know Their Character.

We Don't Know Their Names. But We Know Their Character. By Katy Major   |  August 13, 2021
David Lazar’s latest collection, The Celeste Holm Syndrome: On Character Actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age, is an artfully attuned set of essays that analyzes the delightful nuances of cinema’s Golden Age and the author’s love of its movies.
Keywords: book review

Big Ideas in Bite-Sized Essays

Big Ideas in Bite-Sized Essays By Rebekah Hoffer   |  July 2, 2021
Jason Schwartzman’s first book, No One You Know, contains sixty-two essays—many of them just a few paragraphs long—in a concise 155 pages. Each tiny essay in this fragmented collection illustrates a brief, memorable interaction with a stranger, creating the effect of a photo collage.
Keywords: book review

We Might As Well Die Laughing

We Might As Well Die Laughing By David MacWilliams   |  June 4, 2021
John Rember’s essay collection is both delightful and depressing. The ten essays, each divided into ten segments (thus, the “hundred little pieces”), flesh out his perspective as our civilization and its natural environment crumbles.
Keywords: book review

Essays All: However We Decide to Collect Them

Essays All: However We Decide to Collect Them By Beth Alvarado   |  May 4, 2021
When I was sending out an early version of my manuscript, Anxious Attachments (2019), several agents, who were all interested in the book, asked me to revise it so it would be a “memoir in essays” and not an essay collection, as I thought of the book.
Keywords: book review

Exorcising, Freeing, and Healing Trauma

Exorcising, Freeing, and Healing Trauma By Krystal Sierra   |  April 2, 2021
Extreme. That’s one way to describe David Tromblay’s As You Were. Another way is horrific. A memoir that speaks to American Indian art, culture, history, and tradition, is not this one. Instead, Tromblay’s is a discovery of self only after he has lived to tell the tale, centering his trauma and survival as explicit indicators of his character.
Keywords: book review

Next Stop, Middle-Aged Fatherhood

Next Stop, Middle-Aged Fatherhood By Cyndie Zikmund   |  March 2, 2021
Franklin, the author of another University of Nebraska collection, My Wife Wants You to Know I’m Happily Married, is the father of three boys and is about to turn forty. He has challenges teaching his children how to become good men while he struggles with more global concerns such as social injustice, the meaning of life, and the American mythologies we impart to our children.
Keywords: book review

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