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When Marcia Aldrich's friend took his own life at the age of forty-six, they had known each other many years. As part of his preparations for death, he gave her many of his possessions, concealing his purposes in doing so, and when he committed his long-contemplated act, he was alone in a bare apartment. In Companion to an Untold Story, Aldrich struggles with her own failure to act on her suspicions about her friend's intentions. She pieces together the rough outline of his plan to die and the details of its execution. Yet she acknowledges that she cannot provide a complete narrative of why he killed himself. The story remains private to her friend, and out of that difficulty is born ...
Waveform celebrates the role of women essayists in contemporary literature. Historically, women have been instrumental in moving the essay to center stage, and Waveform continues this rich tradition, further expanding the dynamic genre’s boundaries and testing its edges. With thirty essays by thirty distinguished and diverse women writers, this carefully constructed anthology incorporates works ranging from the traditional to the experimental. Waveform champions the diversity of women’s approaches to the structure ofthe essay—today a site of invention and innovation, with experiments in collage, fragments, segmentation, braids, triptychs, and diptychs. Focused on these explorations of ...
"HAIR-sterical! Hair-A-Baloo will make you laugh and cry, much the way you do on your worst hair day. Who needs Dr. Phil when we have Patricia Wynn Brown--the hair doctor. Her wit and wisdom make us realize that hair really does make the world go round." --Tim Bete (Director of the Erma Bombeck Humor Conference and author of In the Beginning...There Were No Diapers.) Hair-A-Baloo proves it: "It's all about the hair." Hair can make us laugh...cry...and a single strand can send us to prison for life! Who hasn't experienced a touch of hair envy or left the hair salon with a poodle perm? We spend so much time with the mops on top of our heads that it's become a subject for movies, musicals, and gossip columns. We copy celebrity hairstyles, spend hundreds on hair products, and constantly concoct homemade hair treatments in our kitchen. Hair has even played a major role throughout history. Who could forget Samson and Delilah or the 1920s, when every woman in America wanted to bob her hair? This forty-billion-dollar industry is given the royal "treatment" with Brown's wicked sense of humor. Take a break from the blow dryer and curl up with Hair-A-Baloo.
A diverse collection of essays and companion interviews that offer insight into the inspiration, drafting, and revision process. With a title that suggests both the genre and the process of composing it, Creating Nonfiction is a collection of essays and interviews that aims to open readers and writers eyes to the formal possibilities of creative nonfiction. Included are memoirs, personal essays, literary journalism, graphic essays, and lyric essays, and the content is equally diverse, with topics ranging from childbirth to child labor, from dandelions to domestic violence. Whereas most anthologies leave readers to speculate about the evolution of each contribution, Creating Nonfiction pr...
Contemporary discussions on nonfiction are often riddled with questions about the boundaries between truth and memory, honesty and artifice, facts and lies. Just how much truth is in nonfiction? How much is a lie? Blurring the Boundaries sets out to answer such questions while simultaneously exploring the limits of the form. This collection features twenty genre-bending essays from today's most renowned teachers and writers--including original work from Michael Martone, Marcia Aldrich, Dinty W. Moore, Lia Purpura, and Robin Hemley, among others. These essays experiment with structure, style, and subject matter, and each is accompanied by the writer's personal reflection on the work itself, illuminating his or her struggles along the way. As these innovative writers stretch the limits of genre, they take us with them, offering readers a front-row seat to an ever-evolving form. Readers also receive a practical approach to craft thanks to the unique writing exercises provided by the writers themselves. Part groundbreaking nonfiction collection, part writing reference, Blurring the Boundaries serves as the ideal book for literary lovers and practitioners of the craft.
It happens to us all: we think we've settled into an identity, a self, and then out of nowhere and with great force, the traces of our parents appear to us, in us--in mirrors, in gestures, in reaction and reactivity, at weddings and funerals, and in troubled thoughts that crouch in dark corners of our minds. In this masterful collection of new essays, the apple looks at the tree. Twenty-five writers deftly explore a trait they've inherited from a parent, reflecting on how it affects the lives they lead today--how it shifts their relationship to that parent (sometimes posthumously) and to their sense of self. Apple, Tree's all-star lineup of writers brings eloquence, integrity, and humor to topics such as arrogance, obsession, psychics, grudges, table manners, luck, and laundry. Contributors include Laura van den Berg, S. Bear Bergman, John Freeman, Jane Hamilton, Mat Johnson, Daniel Mendelsohn, Kyoko Mori, Ann Patchett, and Sallie Tisdale, among others. Together, their pieces form a prismatic meditation on how we make fresh sense of ourselves and our parents when we see the pieces of them that live on in us.
From memoir to journalism, personal essays to cultural criticism, this indispensable anthology brings together works from all genres of creative nonfiction, with pieces by fifty contemporary writers including Cheryl Strayed, David Sedaris, Barbara Kingsolver, and more. Selected by five hundred writers, English professors, and creative writing teachers from across the country, this collection includes only the most highly regarded nonfiction work published since 1970. Contributers include: Jo Ann Beard, Wendell Berry, Eula Biss, Mary Clearman Blew, Charles Bowden, Janet Burroway, Kelly Grey Carlisle, Anne Carson, Bernard Cooper, Michael W. Cox, Annie Dillard, Mark Doty, Brian Doyle, Tony Earl...
"Entering the Real World: VCCA Poets on Mt. San Angelo", edited by Margaret B. Ingraham and Andrea Carter Brown, is a labor of love by poets who have been to VCCA and by the Fellows' Council to celebrate VCCA's 40th Anniversary. It contains over sixty previously published poems by VCCA Fellows, all written about or inspired by their residencies at VCCA. The poets are from throughout the United States, around the world-and across the decades. Kelly Cherry, Poet Laureate of Virginia, describes "Entering the Real World" as, "this splendid, intriguing anthology." Editor Margaret B. Ingraham writes, "This anthology is at once a work of literary merit, a celebratory offering, and an historical record of a hallowed place."
Presents an anthology of the best literary essays published in 2014, selected from American periodicals.