Perhaps more than any other genre, memoir relies upon empathy. The memoir writer invites us to enter her world and inhabit her perspective. Our ability to do so largely determines our understanding of the memoir and our satisfaction upon reading it. Sarah Einstein’s Mot is remarkable in that it enacts memoir. Einstein invites us to enter her world as she enters the world of a homeless man named Mot.
The book is honest, brave, and soul-baring in its exploration of grief and clinical depression.
After twenty years of living as an expatriate in the United States, my German husband, Stefan, announced he wanted to go home. And by home he meant the village where he’d grown up, a hamlet of two hundred households tucked into the northwestern edge of the Black Forest, a slice of southern Germany with undulating […]
Colin Ellard’s wide-ranging and absorbing book is both an exploration of how human beings currently use physical spaces, and how space and place may be transformed by technology in the future. Ellard observes that we hardly notice the places we inhabit unless they are beautiful or dreary, but between these two poles are vast […]
Manguso wisely trains her attention on what persists, claiming space in art for motherhood and reminding us that it hasn’t all been said before—not like this.
Image by James Morley Listen to our podcast of this essay here. When I told my uncle Mason that I was gay, my father was back at the house, getting drunk. Earlier that evening I had come out to my parents, and my father didn’t take it well. I knew he wouldn’t, so I […]
Although The Arnogauts is listed on several suggested summer reads lists, it should not at all be mistaken for a light read.
Jacob Appel has been very, very busy. In his early forties, Appel is a lawyer. And a doctor. And a medical ethicist. And, oh yes, according to his author bio, he’s also published more than two hundred stories, collecting numerous writerly awards and accolades along the way. In the last three years alone, he’s released six books: four story collections, a book of essays, a mystery novel, and a literary novel.
The impulse to create and solve puzzles is embedded within us, as is a yearning to go beyond the puzzle—which can be solved—to some deeper mystery—which cannot. The tension between these concepts—puzzle and mystery—forms the center of Turchi’s learned, funny, and uncategorizable book, part writing guide, part literary criticism, and part playful compendium of tricks, games, and problems.
His memoir reflects this attitude of honest examination. His life is marked by dizzying transformation, yet Deen’s solid prose acts as a steady rudder, moving swiftly and cleanly through a series of calamities and fluctuations.