Seeing Red
One evening in New York, Lina Meruane’s body “seize[s] up” and leaves her “paralyzed, [her] sweaty hands clutching at the air.” Just as she reaches to her purse to pick up an insulin shot, a “firecracker” goes off in her head . . .
Resident Alien: On Border-crossing and the Undocumented Divine
Through his poetic practice, Ali argues for identifying chief concerns facing humanity and embracing the possibilities inherent in discovering further truths for resolving many current crises.
The Inventors
To write a memoir is—on the surface—to undertake a contrasting examination of both the profound and banal of one’s life and cobble together a sort of meaning out of it.
Portrait of a Family, Crooked & Straight
My mother and father didn’t want to dance with each other at this wedding—and they wouldn’t—and there would be no portrait from this wedding of the father and the mother and the two daughters together, no portrait for my wall.
White Matter: A Memoir of Family and Medicine
Janet Sternburg’s White Matter is a disquieting read. How could it not be? In it, Sternburg explores her family’s decisions to lobotomize not one but two family members—her mother’s brother Bennie in 1940 and mother’s sister Francie in 1958—and the repercussions of those decisions. White Matter is part memoir and family history; part reporting on […]
Good Girl
Tomlinson’s story tumbles forth with the rapid urgency of a young woman searching for meaning and perhaps a bit of insight amid the chaos of unexpected wounds created by her neglectful, self-centered father.
Flock Together: A Love Affair with Extinct Birds
As a memoirist, and therefore a character in his own book, Hollars is appealingly capable of wonder and longing. One has the feeling he would be good company on a tramp through the woods: “Some snowy evenings, while walking home from work, I march up the hill desperate for a bird or an owl to give me some sign and sometimes—when I’m lucky—one does.”
Changing the Subject
Birkerts writes particularly insightful essays about the multiple ways ongoing technological changes in our culture narrow our sense of aura, singularity, and mystery. In Changing the Subject, he examines technology with a sizable dose of skepticism and outright dread.
Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape
As Lauret Savoy traces her own life along with her parents’ lives and attempts to at least place dots on the spots where her ancestors may have lived on this earth, she asks us to try to see what has faded and almost vanished to invisibility and to “wail the right questions” into the darkness. She has begun the difficult, important task of uncovering the answers to “choir the proper praise.”
The Telling
There is a sense while reading that the simplicity of a rote recounting is exactly what Zolbrod doesn’t need, that its pat reassurances do her no good.