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 memoir; writing; the essay itself; and Michael Martone's friendship with the writers David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Kurt Vonnegut. Throughout the essays, Martone's style expands with the incorporation of new technological platforms. Several of the pieces were written specifically for online venues, while the essays on the death of Martone's mother and father were written on Facebook while the events happened. One essay about using new technologies in the classroom was written solely in tweets.
Brooding-the book's title and the title of an essay-draws a parallel between the disappearance of early browsers and the emergence, after seventeen years, of a brood of cicadas. Throughout these essays Martone's words inhabit spaces where the reconnection to people in the past and the metaphors of electronic memory converge.
"Michael Martone, an accomplished essayist and éminence grise of the American form, has no patience for stultified tradition. A beloved trickster and serial disrupter, he prefers to find the materials for art not in the 'sanctioned precincts of appreciation' but at 'crosswalks and . . . crossroads.' And his latest collection, Brooding, is less a curio cabinet filled with Victoriana-as his title wo
Julie Checkoway, author of The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui's Sugar Ditc
"Contains an astonishing amount of hitherto unpublished information and makes a very significant contribution to the history of the American South in general and to black history in particular. Horace King's interactions with his fellow southerners-first as a slave, then as a freedman, and finally during Reconstruction as a politician-will make reading the book a rewarding experience for general r
Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs
"Michael Martone's effervescent new book is witty, whimsical, wise, and a little wicked. His short musings form an engaging intellectual and artistic memoir as Martone writes about everything from the school debate team to his favorite movies, the nature of keys, and the deaths of his parents. At once erudite and plainspoken, Brooding draws us in with Martone's wry curiosity. His chapters are writ
Valerie Miner, author of Traveling with Spirits and The Low Road
