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Blog posts tagged with "book review"

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Art and National Identity

Art and National Identity By Doug Rutledge   |  May 2, 2018
As her title confirms, Vigderman’s primary concern is the Parthenon. The history she offers of this culturally significant site is enlightening.

Houses of Injury and Healing

Houses of Injury and Healing By Sarah Cheshire   |  April 1, 2018
As the curator of Beautiful Flesh, G'Schwind’s self-proclaimed mission is "to create a body" that weaves individual stories together, forming a larger narrative.
Keywords: book review

The Heart He Hearts Aching Inside Him

The Heart He Hearts Aching Inside Him By Elizabeth Dark   |  March 7, 2018
A hybrid of poetry and prose, Lemon’s Feverland reads nothing like a chronological narrative. Rather, it’s a fully choreographed set of movements that, in their abrupt turns, mimic the abrupt moments, episodes, and periods of Lemon’s life.

Of Poets, Police Dogs, and Their Handlers

Of Poets, Police Dogs, and Their Handlers By Amber Anderson   |  February 6, 2018
In a journey through four countries, pursuing canine law enforcement units and their stories, Rose delivers a multi-faceted immersion memoir: observations, interviews, analysis, criticisms, and praise of how different nations approach policing with and without dogs.

The Country Cousin to Love

The Country Cousin to Love By Katy Major   |  January 9, 2018
When a friend of Kate Carroll de Gutes remarked about how often the positive aspects of others' lives are mentioned on Facebook, as opposed to the negative, de Gutes, in the essayist's quintessential way, got to thinking. What her musings sparked is The Authenticity Experiment...

Slim & Sublime

Slim & Sublime By Renée E. D’Aoust   |  December 1, 2017
In On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction, William Zinsser extols the memoir form: "For me, no other nonfiction form goes so deeply to the roots of personal experience--to all the drama and pain and humor and unexpectedness of life."

The Dead Baby Lives

The Dead Baby Lives By Marilyn Bousquin   |  November 9, 2017
Jennifer Sinor's birth, which is anything but ordinary, sets up the thematic trajectory of Ordinary Trauma, a coming-of-age memoir that doubles as a father-daughter story...

Words and Their Users: Wrestling with John D'Agata's Canonry

Words and Their Users: Wrestling with John D'Agata's Canonry By   |  October 4, 2017
I suppose it was inevitable. The age of self-disclosure-memoir writing, celebrity tweets, one-person Broadway shows, jihadist pre-bomb goodbye videos-would give way to one editor's need to order up a new hegemony for that intractable thing we call the essay...

The Art of Voids

The Art of Voids By Jennifer Ochstein   |  September 1, 2017
Sinor apprentices herself to O'Keeffe’s artistry. By doing so, Sinor examines the reaches of art itself, what art does, or what art should do. She pushes the stories onto the page as O'Keeffe "pushed paint on the canvas"...

What Also Matters? The Voices of Women of Color.

What Also Matters? The Voices of Women of Color. By Krystal Sierra   |  August 7, 2017
The Crunk Feminist Collection is a much-needed anthology of short essays written by black women and women of color. Its narratives center on race, gender, pop culture and current events. The collection blends writers who specialize in personal anecdote with razor-sharp critique and who employ a conversational tone as complex issues are carefully dissected and taken to task.

Must Hard Stories Be So Hard?

Must Hard Stories Be So Hard? By N. West Moss   |  July 1, 2017
Book Review of Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma by N. West Moss

Happier Than He Has Any Right to Feel

Happier Than He Has Any Right to Feel By Karen Donley-Hayes   |  June 1, 2017
It may seem a foregone conclusion that Should I Still Wish, by John Evans, would make worthwhile reading. Evans is a Stanford University lecturer, memoirist, and winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize for Young Widower: A Memoir, in 2014. His writing has set him apart. What is not unique, however, is the subject of this memoir: death. Unfortunately, just about everyone has the misfortune of knowing and loving someone who has died or is dying, and more than a few of us have been compelled to write about our experiences. It’s an arguably over-worn subject, but Evans’s story doesn’t disappear into the middle of the pack.

One Era Ends. Another Begins.

One Era Ends. Another Begins. By Sebastian Sarti   |  May 5, 2017
When the past doesn’t suit you, from what do you build the future? It’s a question that lumps at the throats of many twenty-somethings who know their lives will not follow those of their parents. Though Leslie Lawrence is well past her twenties, she uses the same question to animate her book of essays, The Death of Fred Astaire, an eclectic collection that ranges over decades of its author’s unexpected life.

The Kingdom of the Sick

The Kingdom of the Sick By Elizabeth Dark   |  April 7, 2017
My best childhood friend, Vanessa, suffers from debilitating chronic pain. She has seen multiple specialists, tried numerous treatments, and been diagnosed with a handful of conditions, all of which perhaps come close to naming her experience, but never fully...

A Life Story, Buried and Unburied

A Life Story, Buried and Unburied By Jo Scott-Coe   |  March 2, 2017
I seek out some nonfiction knowing I will find the author's train of mind as compelling as his subject. This was certainly true with John Edgar Wideman's latest book, Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File.

Why We Need Literature More Than Ever

Why We Need Literature More Than Ever By D.L. Hall   |  February 7, 2017
Flesh and Stones: Field Notes from a Finite World by Jan Shoemaker
Keywords: book review

Stitched Together

Stitched Together By Heather Gemmen Wilson   |  January 13, 2017
Body Memory is comprised of five, intimately connected essays. All of the essays, together, weave a story, simultaneously sad and expectant, of a man bereft.
Keywords: book review

A Craft He Would, Thankfully, Never Learn

A Craft He Would, Thankfully, Never Learn By Michael Steinberg   |  December 8, 2016
In the 1970s and 1980s, freshman composition was a province of nonfiction writing. In those days, teachers who taught comp--myself among them--learned our craft largely from the primers of people like Peter Elbow, Toby Fulwiler, Wendy Bishop, and Donald Murray, four of that period's more formidable, most passionate teacher-writers...

Growing Up With Doomsday

Growing Up With Doomsday By Mimi Schwartz   |  November 1, 2016
Memoir, in the hands of its best practitioners, enables readers to enter a world quite different from their own--and find common ground. No writer does this better than Jerald Walker, author of The World in Flames, A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult.
Keywords: book review

True Grits

True Grits By Richard Gilbert   |  October 6, 2016
Harry Crews begins his classic memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place by conjuring in intimate detail someone he doesn't remember...

The Importance of Being Outside

The Importance of Being Outside By Margot Kahn   |  September 1, 2016
Gail Folkins' collection of essays was just the impetus I needed to unearth our family's old camping equipment and plan a trip into the mountains. We hadn't gone backpacking since before our son was born, and as I sifted through stuff sacks, headlamps, and cookware, neglected parts of myself reawakened...

For You, the Universe on a String

For You, the Universe on a String By Art Edwards   |  August 12, 2016
Whenever I hear someone has writer's block, I recommend writing about one's parents. It's a loaded subject for anyone, conjuring feelings we might otherwise repress...

Thought Paths

Thought Paths By Lanie Tankard   |  July 1, 2016
"Spit" is Patrick Madden's lead essay in his latest collection, Sublime Physick. The next eleven pieces (seven previously published) shift from forceful ejection of saliva to empathy, recognition, physics, and elevators. Three compositions focus on lost children. Cave paintings, Tarot cards, time, voyages--these subjects, too, with a little music and mortality thrown in plus photos and illustrations. Male zipper negligence? Why not?! The topics range far and wide, proving no theme is off limits for this wordsmith.

The Uncomfortable Place Between Vulnerability and Voyeurism

The Uncomfortable Place Between Vulnerability and Voyeurism By Carolee Bennett   |  June 14, 2016
B.J. Hollars means it when he says, "This is a test." He tests us from the opening essay when he puts us in the middle of a tornado in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. More specifically, he puts us in a bathtub in the middle of a tornado in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. We huddle there with Hollars, his pregnant wife and his dog. All: vulnerable...
Keywords: book review  |   8 comments

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

The Sincerest Form of Flattery By Robert Lunday   |  May 2, 2016
The essayists in After Montaigne react to a particular one of the Essays. Our review examines the book as a whole and discusses the work therein by E.J. Levy, Lia Purpura, Mary Cappello, Wayne Koestenbaum, Danielle Cadena Deulen, Nicole Walker, Steven Church, Robert Atwan, Chris Arthur, Elena Passarello, Maggie Nelson, and Philip Lopate.

Faith, Fear, and Fractals

Faith, Fear, and Fractals By Tarn Wilson   |  April 8, 2016
I want to hook you by claiming that William Bradley's book of essays, Fractals, is about his near fatal battle with Hodgkin's Disease in his early twenties. And it is... But the book is also much more...

Out of Sight

Out of Sight By Richard Gilbert   |  March 1, 2016
A wizard behind the U.S. space program, German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, once likened space missions to the ocean voyages of ancient mariners. The analogy seems perfect, but the sea, while harsh, isn't instantly fatal to shipwrecked sailors.

Legacy of Lobotomy

Legacy of Lobotomy By Denise Wilkinson   |  February 4, 2016
Janet Sternburg grew up in a tight-knit, lower-middle-class Jewish family, in Boston, the niece of a lobotomised uncle and aunt.

Each and Both

Each and Both January 19, 2016
Garth Evans and Leila Philip's Water Rising calls to mind the way Merce Cunningham and John Cage worked side by side while living together as life partners. Cunningham and Cage joined dance and music by intentional collaborative chance. How do you produce a work of art that exists in two minds and media yet is created independently and concurrently? Somehow, Garth Evans and Leila Philip, who are married, have done this -- and more.

A Wildly Funny Life Story -- I, Too, Admire Your Shoes!

A Wildly Funny Life Story -- I, Too, Admire Your Shoes! By Glen Retief   |  December 1, 2015
"I want to write the moral history of the men of my generation," wrote Flaubert to his friend Mademoiselle Leroyer in 1864, talking of what would become his semi-autobiographical novel, Sentimental Education....Substitute women for men, memoir for novel, feminism for nineteenth-century bohemianism, and place our young-to-middle-aged protagonist in a green miniskirt in a Sun Belt college town. There you have, more or less, the themes and plot of Debra Monroe's new memoir, My Unsentimental Education, which updates Flaubert's novel for our own suburban, gender-redefining times.

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