Blog : Articles
The Past Is Unpredictable

Still Life At Eighty, Abigail Thomasâs 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

Sarah Cheshireâs 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.
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The Fire That Burns the Hurt Away

The memoir thread is anchored in Macdonaldâs 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

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.
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A Strangely Beautiful Remembrance

"I can't remember how old I was the first time I saw my father cook," writes TomĂĄs Q. MorĂn 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 MorĂn is huddled in the passenger seat of the family car
Keywords: book review
One Womanâs Testament to Why âHomeâ Eludes Us

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 FamilyâIntentionally Chosen

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? Â Â

The themes of Kandelâs memoir are twofold. First, as a young married couple, she and Johan, her husband, must adapt not only to each otherâs culturesâshe is American, he is Dutchâas 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 Kandelâs family.
Keywords: book review
Sonnet 29: Word for Word

The Fact of Memory is an unusual prose experiment. Using Shakespeareâs âSonnet 29,â which begins with the famous line, âWhen, in disgrace with fortune and menâs eyes,â 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

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

This enduring presence is no small feat, especially whenâas Saterstrom intimates by way of, or rather in lieu of, closureâthe dominant cultural narrative is that which comes after: the meaning-of, the healing-from, the accounting-for, the reckoning-with.
Keywords: book review
Attention Maximally Paid

The author chooses one very specific day in her recent pastâNovember 19, 2019âto write a âmemoirâ about. The day âsticks in my head,â Huber writes, âbecause of the chemistry of adrenaline, downtime, and notes made in a journal.â
Keywords: book review
Celebration and Lamentation in Place and Time

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 weâre living through now.
Keywords: book review
Meditative, Lyric, Useful: Two New Books on Writing

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

Tarn Wilsonâs memoir in essays, In Praise of Inadequate Gifts, has things to teach us about unusual topics.
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Noticing as Rebellion, as Resistance

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.

David Lazarâs latest collection, The Celeste Holm Syndrome: On Character Actors from Hollywoodâs Golden Age, is an artfully attuned set of essays that analyzes the delightful nuances of cinemaâs Golden Age and the authorâs love of its movies.
Keywords: book review
Big Ideas in Bite-Sized Essays

Jason Schwartzmanâs first book, No One You Know, contains sixty-two essaysâmany of them just a few paragraphs longâin 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

John Remberâs essay collection is both delightful and depressing. The ten essays, each divided into ten segments (thus, the âhundred little piecesâ), flesh out his perspective as our civilization and its natural environment crumbles.
Keywords: book review
Essays All: However We Decide to Collect Them

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 âmemoir in essaysâ and not an essay collection, as I thought of the book.
Keywords: book review
Exorcising, Freeing, and Healing Trauma

Extreme. Thatâs one way to describe David Tromblayâs As You Were. Another way is horrific. A memoir that speaks to American Indian art, culture, history, and tradition, is not this one. Instead, Tromblayâs 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

Franklin, the author of another University of Nebraska collection, My Wife Wants You to Know Iâm 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
The People We Once Were

At the heart of Alysia Li Ying Sawchynâs impressive debut is the moment when, after being found by her mother in a state of distress, she winds up, at eighteen, in a locked hospital ward and is diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
Keywords: book review
Meditative Naturalist, Intimate Essayist, Visionary Author

I began reading the essays of Scott Russell Sanders when I encountered âThe Inheritance of Toolsâ in The Best American Essays 1987. Iâve collected his books of essays ever since and, as a life-long resident of Great Lakes states, have felt a strong sense of identification with works like Secrets of the Universe, Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World, Writing From the Center, and Hunting for Hope: A Fatherâs Journeys.
Keywords: book review
Reckoning with Not-Knowing

Two wonderfully readable recent books probe the authorsâ past losses in order to reimagine their and our futures. Dispatches from the End of Ice by Beth Peterson and The Memory Eaters by Elizabeth Kadetsky look towards Norway, France, and the influence Northern Europe has long had on American thought.
Keywords: book review
What It Means to Bless

In 1959, twelve-year-old Orr rises early with his three brothers, heads to the field with their father. They shoot their rifles and kill a deer. Just as they celebrate, Orrâs gun goes off again, this time killing his eight-year-old brother, Peter.
Keywords: book review
The Cadence of an Individual Heartbeat

âIâve always been a hungry reader,â Rebecca McClanahan writes in her newest collection In the Key of New York. Me too. And I often read as I eat: I gobble. But, as with certain transcendent meals, there are books that, from the first page, ask that I slow down and savor: hold the book carefully, turn the pages mindfully. McClanahanâs memoir-in-essays is just such a book. As I read, I found myself asking what qualities define writing that both enlivens and stills the reader.
Keywords: book review
Bathing (Again) at 9600 Feet

Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children has a sub-subtitle that appears only on the title page: Essays from 9600 feet, an ascension to yet another layer, so Winograd. I will begin at that altitude, in the Colorado cabin Winograd built with her husband Leonardâwho features frequently in these pages as voice of reason, asker of crucial questions (âWhere are the bees?â), cracker of jokes, watcher of sky, and bearer of arachnid mercy in the form of an oft-used spider jar.
Keywords: book review
Relighting the Candle

In Sonja Livingstonâs The Virgin of Prince Street: Expeditions into Devotion, the author is drawn to explore her youth in the Catholic Church. She longs to return to the intertwined experience of childhood and faith when the two were inseparable.
Keywords: book review
How to Save Yourself in Nine Steps

I was so immersed in Judith Sara Geltâs memoir Reckless Steps Toward Sanity about her life growing up in a Denver neighborhood in the 1960s and 1970s that I kept entering a time warp. Itâs not fair to Geltâs story that my own memories of living during the same era kept flashing through. Gelt sent my senses hurdling back in time with the mention of TV shows or magazines, filling my head with jingles and laugh tracks and the sound of Stevie Wonderâs voice.
Keywords: book review