In English disparate means "different" or "miscellaneous"-apt descriptors of these essays by Patrick Madden. In Spanish, however, disparate means "nonsense," "folly," or "absurdity,"-words ...appropriate to Madden's goal of undercutting any notion that essays must be serious business. Thus, in this collection, the essays are frivolous and lively, aiming to make readers laugh while they think about such abstract subjects as happiness and memory and unpredictability. In this vein, Madden takes sidelong swipes at weighty topics via form, with wildly meandering essays, abandoned essays in honor of the long tradition of essayists disparaging their own efforts, and guerrilla essays-which slip in quietly under the guise of a borrowed form, abruptly attack, and promptly escape, leaving laughter and contemplation in their wake. Madden also incorporates cameos from guest essayists, including Mary Cappello, Matthew Gavin Frank, David Lazar, Michael Martone, Jericho Parms, and Wendy S. Walters, much like a musician features other performers.Disparates reflects the current zeitgeist by taking on important issues with a touch of cleverness, a dash of humor, and a little help from one's friends. Read Chapter 1.
In his third book of essays, David Lazar blends personal meditations on sex and death with considerations of popular music and coping with anxiety through singing, bowling, and other distractions. He ...sets his work apart as both in the essay and of the essay by throwing himself into the form's past-interviewing or speaking to past masters and turning over rocks to find lost gems of the essay form. I'll Be Your Mirror further expands the dimensions of contemporary nonfiction writing by concluding with a series of aphorisms. Surreal, comical, and urban moments of being, they are part Cioran, part Kafka, and part Lenny Bruce. These are accompanied by Heather Frise's illustrations, whose looking-glass visions of motherhood-funny and grotesque-meet the vision of the aphorist in this most unusual nonfiction book.
Traditional histories of the American transcendentalist movement begin in Ralph Waldo Emerson's terms: describing a rejection of college books and church pulpits in favor of the individual power of ..."Man Thinking." This essay collection asks how women who lacked the privileges of both college and clergy rose to thought. For them, reading alone and conversing together were the primary means of growth, necessarily in private and informal spaces both overlapping with those of the men and apart from them. But these were means to achieving literary, aesthetic, and political authority- indeed, to claiming utopian possibility for women as a whole.
Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalismis a project of both archaeology and reinterpretation. Many of its seventeen distinguished and rising scholars work from newly recovered archives, and all offer fresh readings of understudied topics and texts. First quickened by the 2010 bicentennial of Margaret Fuller's birth, the project reaches beyond Fuller to her female predecessors, contemporaries, and successors throughout the nineteenth century who contributed to or grew from the transcendentalist movement.
Geographic scope also widens-from the New England base to national and transatlantic spheres. A shared goal is to understand this "genealogy" within a larger history of American women writers; no absolute boundaries divide idealism from sentiment, romantics from realists, or white discourse from black. Primary-text interludes invite readers into the ongoing task of discovering and interpreting transcendentally affiliated women. This collection recognizes the vibrant contributions women made to a major literary movement and will appeal to both scholars and general readers.
Randon Billings Noble has collected a range of lyric essays in a variety of forms that showcase the essay's openness to experimentation, reliance on authentic voice, and potential to explore complex ...subject matter.
