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BETWIXT-AND-BETWEEN

ESSAYS ON THE WRITING LIFE

Graceful meditations on love, loneliness, and the magic of words.

A poet and essayist likens writing to witchcraft, love, and “the craft of getting someone to love me.”

As a teacher, Boully (Creative Writing and Literature/Columbia Coll. Chicago; of the mismatched teacups, of the single-serving spoon: a book of failures, 2012, etc.) was visited by a textbook representative who offered her many books to help teach her students the craft of poetry or nonfiction writing. Horrified, she recalled the exercises she had encountered as an undergraduate, which resembled “therapy: confronting an experience with the goal of moving beyond it to free oneself from buried trauma.” For Boully, the process is far different, rooted in a philosophical journey for meaning, sincerity, and, not least, love. “I expect my students to essay fiercely and obsessively,” she writes. In her own work, an essay “may begin with a suspicion. I follow that suspicion until it gives me something I might have been searching for.” The pieces in this captivating collection—versions of which were previously published in literary journals—reflect Boully’s discomfort with genre: some are prose poems, some collages of fragments, bits of “veiled memoir,” and evocative digressions. “It seems to me,” she writes ruefully, “that the inability to accept a mixed piece of writing is akin to literary discrimination.” The author’s prose is reminiscent of Lydia Davis’—spare, elliptical, unexpected—and sometimes, in her rhythmic cadences, of Gertrude Stein’s. In the literary world, Boully confesses, her genre-bending often causes consternation. “I may look like an essay, but I don’t act like one,” she writes. “I may look like prose, but I don’t speak like it.” She may look like a poet, too, or a fiction writer: “The need to write fictions,” she offers, “arises from the desire to say one thing and mean another.

Graceful meditations on love, loneliness, and the magic of words.

Pub Date: April 3, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-56689-510-1

Page Count: 140

Publisher: Coffee House

Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist

A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.

Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.

Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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