Brian Doyle himself explains it best: “A few years ago I was moaning to my wry gentle dad that basketball, which seems to me inarguably the most graceful and generous and swift and fluid and
In February 2010, with the help of a friend who works as a photographer with a National Geographic–sponsored cruise line, Justin Gardiner boarded a ship bound for Antarctica. A stowaway of sorts, Gard
Brian Doyle himself explains it best: “A few years ago I was moaning to my wry gentle dad that basketball, which seems to me inarguably the most graceful and generous and swift and fluid and ferocious
Oysters are a narrative food: in each shuck and slurp, an eater tastes the place where the animal was raised. But that’s just the beginning. André Joseph Gallant uses the bivalve a
Pandora’s Garden profiles invasive or unwanted species in the natural world and examines how our treatment of these creatures sometimes parallels in surprising ways how we treat each other. Part essay
This memoir distinguishes itself from others in its “graphic” elements—the appropriated diagrams, instructions, and “exploded view” inventory images—that Parsons has used. They help guide the reader’s
In Exploded View “graphic” essays play with the conventions of telling a life story and with how illustration and text work together in print. As with a graphic novel, the story is not only in the tex
This collection of more than twenty-five essays, both meditative and formally inventive, considers all kinds of subjects: everyday objects such as keys and hats, plus concepts of time and place; the m
A misfit in Spooner, Wisconsin, with its farms, bars, and strip joints, Debra Monroe leaves to earn a degree, then another, and another, and builds a career—if only because her plans to
At the Dreamland, women and girls flicker from the shadows to take their proper place in the spotlight. In this lyrical collection, Sonja Livingston weaves together strands of research and im
With Let Us Build Us a City Tracy Daugherty considers the principles of literary art in a series of essays that focus on the nature of artistic vision and the creative individual’s relationship to the
In this coming-of-age memoir, a rebellious, insecure, angry girl is shipped overseas to a tiny international school perched on a mountain shelf in Bernese-Oberland, Switzerland. Here, boot-camp style,
The questions that drive Priscilla Long’s Fire and Stone are the questions asked by the painter Paul Gauguin in the title of his 1897 painting: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
For her collection Lost Wax, Jericho Parms borrows her title from a casting method used by sculptors. As such, these eighteen essays, centered on art and memory, offer an investigation into form and c
In this lyrical collection, Sonja Livingston weaves together strands of research and imagination to conjure figures from history, literature, legend, and personal memory. The result is a series of ess
