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About
In this perceptive and provocative essay collection, an award-winning writer shares her personal and reportorial investigation into America's search for meaning.
When Jordan Kisner was a child, she was saved by Jesus Christ at summer camp, much to the confusion of her nonreligious family. She was, she writes, "just naturally reverent," a fact that didn't change when she-much to her own confusion-lost her faith as a teenager. Not sure why her religious conviction had come or where it had gone, she did what anyone would do: "You go about the great American work of assigning yourself to other gods: yoga, talk radio, neoatheism, CrossFit, cleanses, football, the academy, the American Dream, Beyoncé."
A curiosity about the subtle systems guiding contemporary life pervades Kisner's work. Her celebrated essay "Thin Places" (Best American Essays 2016), about an experimental neurosurgery developed to treat severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, asks how putting the neural touchpoint of the soul on a pacemaker may collide science and psychology with philosophical questions about illness, the limits of the self, and spiritual transformation. How should she understand the appearance of her own obsessive compulsive disorder at the very age she lost her faith?
Intellectually curious and emotionally engaging, the essays in Thin Places manage to be both intimate and expansive, illuminating an unusual facet of American life, as well as how it reverberates with the author's past and present preoccupations.
When Jordan Kisner was a child, she was saved by Jesus Christ at summer camp, much to the confusion of her nonreligious family. She was, she writes, "just naturally reverent," a fact that didn't change when she-much to her own confusion-lost her faith as a teenager. Not sure why her religious conviction had come or where it had gone, she did what anyone would do: "You go about the great American work of assigning yourself to other gods: yoga, talk radio, neoatheism, CrossFit, cleanses, football, the academy, the American Dream, Beyoncé."
A curiosity about the subtle systems guiding contemporary life pervades Kisner's work. Her celebrated essay "Thin Places" (Best American Essays 2016), about an experimental neurosurgery developed to treat severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, asks how putting the neural touchpoint of the soul on a pacemaker may collide science and psychology with philosophical questions about illness, the limits of the self, and spiritual transformation. How should she understand the appearance of her own obsessive compulsive disorder at the very age she lost her faith?
Intellectually curious and emotionally engaging, the essays in Thin Places manage to be both intimate and expansive, illuminating an unusual facet of American life, as well as how it reverberates with the author's past and present preoccupations.
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Reviews
"Kisner displays an impressive range of narrative modes in [Thin Places], bouncing nimbly between gravity (in her ethnography and her bird's-eye philosophizing) and comic relief, which she peppers in just when our heads are starting to spin . . . In 'The Other City,' about the months she spent reporting on death investigations and autopsies in Cleveland, Kisner writes: 'Leaving the office every night, I'd get breathless rushes of reality.' That's a lot like what these essays feel like, too: reminders of the weird in-between feeling of being alive."
Lauren Christensen, The New York Times Book Review
"With this collection, [Jordan Kisner] takes her place among the next generation of American Transcendentalists, and those true essayists for whom nothing human is too strange to write about . . . She's one of the few contemporary writers who knows how to bridge spiritual and temporal worlds, but who's also able to alter and expand our understanding of the metaphors we live by through immersive research and writing. Reading [Kisner], I always feel my horizons and sense of the world expanding."
Marco Roth, n+1
"Fiercely intelligent and consistently edifying . . . What makes this collection so compulsively readable is Kisner's ability to wield her contagious curiosity and nose for objective reporting to investigate everything from a once bustling, now mostly abandoned lakeside oasis in Southern California ('Good Karma'), to Ann Hamilton's magical and enveloping multimedia installation at New York's Park Avenue Armory in 2012 ('The Big Empty'), to evangelical robocalls ('Phone Calls From the Apocalypse') . . . Kisner is one of the most perceptive, open-minded and capable literary tour guides I've encountered in quite some time, and I'm already looking forward to her next (ad)venture."
Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle