Sharply written, these intimate and insightful exchanges dispel the myth that perhaps we all, writers or not, have come to believe about our own narratives, our own lives: “The worst story that we can tell ourselves is that we are alone.”
In Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations, Thomas L. Friedman’s title hints at a need for what we’re losing in today’s world. Namely, all the imperfections that make us human. After all, being late and being wrong is what being alive is all about.
Ervick’s un-biography gives us a historical tale that translates into a contemporary one: how women can take possession of their fates, write their stories as they see fit, even when living under the iron fist of societal pressures or men afraid of female power.
If Julia Child and Avis deVoto were here today, they’d be great Facebook friends. Julia and Avis bonded over food—buying it, cooking it and eating it. But since they were without technology, they wrote letters, which Joan Reardon collected into a book titled As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto.
Fasten your seat belts. Andrew Miller’s alternative lit style is about to take you on a bumpy ride. His memoir in essays, IF ONLY THE NAMES WERE CHANGED, vacillates between hyper-masculine and tender in terrain that traverses parental concerns about raising a daughter, drug and alcohol abuse, and how much of a jerk he is.
Throughout her book, Chung reiterates the differences between extroverts and introverts, but eschews any claims of advantageousness. One person exults in a bar with his riotous friends while another broods in a library without anyone interrupting her. They’ll use different taps to distill pleasure from our world, but at the end of the night both find contentment.
You have probably come across Michele Morano’s essay collection, Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain, at nonfiction conferences with presenters hailing it as an exemplary form of nonfiction. One of its essays, “The Queimada,” has been published in many anthologies. This contemporary classic illustrates the heights of the travel memoir genre.
Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders Ed. by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton Workman, Sept.2016 480 pp; $35 Buy: hardcover | eBook Reviewed by Aaron Sommers If you’re like me, then you associate atlases with maps. Maybe it’s part of the larger, more detailed, colorful variety, but an atlas…
Jesmyn Ward introduces The Fire This Time, an anthology of essays and poems of witness and dissent, by expressing her own commingled dismay and hope regarding race relations in America. This book, she says, gathers “the great thinkers and extraordinary voices” of her generation to consider racism, both subtle and egregious.
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