Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction
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The Wet Wound
An Elegy in Essays
by Maddie Norris
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
This debut essay collection is inspired by the grief Maddie Norris experienced in the wake of her father's death from cancer when she was seventeen. Norris uses a medical lens to examine the anguish that followed and likens mourning to wound care.
These linked essays examine grief from different angles, resulting in a multilayered exploration of why, contrary to popular belief, keeping wounds open is the best way to care for them physically and emotionally. Norris approaches the narrative through various topics-the investigation of body preservation, the history of skin grafts, and a deep dive into physical pain-all of them related to how she carries this fundamental loss.
By centering on the importance of mourning (a long-term practice frowned upon in Western culture), the essays unsettle conventional wisdom as the text pushes against the stereotypical notion of "letting go" and "moving on." The Wet Wound: An Elegy in Essays thus unpacks the question: What happens when, instead of following steps prescribed by those outside loss, we let ourselves dwell in grief?
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Your Eyes Will Be My Window
Essays
by Jodi Varon
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
Your Eyes Will Be My Window reclaims the two erasures of Esta Plat. Murdered in Ukraine by Nazi troops in 1942, evidence of the life of Esta Plat was preserved in a bundle of her letters until the letters were tossed into a dumpster and destroyed. Haunted by the inheritance of survivor's guilt and shame in a family that kept no Old World keepsakes except her grandmother's one-sentence memory of Esta Plat, Jodi Varonis compelled to sift through records of Europe's genocidal past.
Pitting grandiose Holocaust memorials against the act of bearing witness, Varon confronts the limitations of history, folklore, archival data, and survivor testimonies. Seeking solace in ritual, she challenges her upbringing as an outlier Jew in the Rocky Mountain West to provide a window to the meaning of cultural displacement in immigrant communities. When an ethnic German woman's corpse was discarded across from Varon's rented flat in Baden-Württemberg, the homemade memorial for Nadine E. prompts a meditation on violence against women and girls as a weapon of suppression and war. The record of unfiltered emotions among Kindertransport survivors in Europe, journalists in Ludwigsburg, and archivists and guides in Jerusalem, Your Eyes Will Be My Window is a defiant exercise in honoring the lost.
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Beneath the Shadow
Legacy and Longing in the Antarctic
by Justin Gardiner
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
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, Gardiner used his experiences on this voyage as the narrative backdrop for Beneath the Shadow, a compelling firsthand account that breathes new life into the nineteenth-century journals of Antarctic explorers such as Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, and Captain Roald Amundsen.
Beneath the Shadow is centered on journal excerpts by eight famous explorers, which Gardiner uses as touchstones for modern-day experiences of harsh seas, chance encounters, rugged terrain, and unspeakable beauty. With equal parts levity and lyricism, Gardiner navigates the distance between the historical and the contemporary, the artistic and the scientific, the heroic and the mundane. The bold and tragic tales of Antarctic explorers have long held our collective imagination-almost as much as the mythically remote land such explorers ventured to-and this book makes those voices come to life as few ever have.
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It Takes a Worried Woman
Essays
by Debra Monroe
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
Debra Monroe has always written about the source of trouble, "that one incident you zero down to and everything bad that happens afterward happens because of it." The illusion that every problem has a clear-cut cause and discernible solution is apparently her gateway drug. It Takes a Worried Woman explores the outer limits of her faith that all past hardship could have been prevented and all future hardship might still be.
Yet one person's trouble is often a small eddy in the outflow of history, and this book becomes a meditation on the price of effort exerted against fixed circumstances. Dense with history, lyrical, at times darkly funny, these essays explore sexism, racism, hate speech, violence, Monroe's grief about dwindling access to the natural world, and her fears as her daughter's adult life unfolds. Whether depicting the ubiquitous pressure to marry, the search for a shape-shifting familiar old enough to be her mother, or childcare as a game of risk, Monroe takes a measured look at problems that could be solved, problems that may never be, and at all the ways that trouble is big but hope, new strategies, fresh patience, and endurance are eventually big enough.
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Hoop
A Basketball Life in Ninety-Five Essays
by Brian Doyle
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
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 ferociously-competitive-without-being-sociopathic of sports, has not produced rafts of good books, like baseball and golf and cricket and surfing have . . . Where are the great basketball novels to rival The Natural and the glorious Mark Harris baseball quartet and the great Bernard Darwin's golf stories? Where are the annual anthologies of terrific basketball essays? How can a game full of such wit and creativity and magic not spark more great books?" "'Why don't you write one?' said my dad, who is great at cutting politely to the chase." And so he has. In this collection of short essays, Brian Doyle presents a compelling account of a life lived playing, watching, loving, and coaching basketball. He recounts his passion for the gyms, the playgrounds, the sounds and scents, the camaraderie, the fierce competition, the anticipation and exhaustion, and even some of the injuries.
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Entry Without Inspection
A Writer's Life in El Norte
by Cecile Pineda
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
Cecile Pineda-award-winning novelist, memoirist, theater director, performer, activist-felt rootlessness throughout much of her life. Her father was an undocumented Mexican immigrant; her mother a French-speaking immigrant from Switzerland. Pineda, born in New York City, felt culturally disconnected from both of her parents, while also ill at ease in U.S. culture. In her life, we see the strange intersection of immigrant politics, troubles with ethnic identity, and the instability of family ties.
In Entry without Introspection, Pineda brings it all together, reconciling her past (much of which she had to piece together from vague memories and parental clues) while tracing how she formed her own identity through prose and theater in the absence of known roots. But as Pineda discovers, her life story doesn't belong solely to her but is interwoven with those of her families, whether biological or chosen, and of the world around her. Because of this, Pineda's memoir features parallel stories, that of her life running alongside and being informed by those of other immigrants.
Pineda traces her story while also documenting the work of the first whistleblower to reveal an immigrant death in detention, in 2009, with the storylines converging to reveal the lasting effects of U.S. immigration policy. She explores the ripple effect of these policies over generations, revealing the shocking truths of marginalization and deportation. Pineda exposes both the cultural losses and the traumatic aftereffects of misguided U.S. immigration policy. Entry without Inspection is thus a truly American story in all its historical and emotional complexity, one in which personal ethics and political commentary are necessarily and inextricably interwoven.
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My Last Eight Thousand Days
An American Male in His Seventies
by Lee Gutkind
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
In My Last Eight Thousand Days, Gutkind turns his notepad and tape recorder inward, using his skills as an immersion journalist to perform a deep dive on himself. Here, he offers a memoir of his life as a journalist, editor, husband, father, and Pittsburgh native, not only recounting his many triumphs, but also exposing his missteps and challenges. The overarching concern that frames these brave, often confessional stories, is his obsession and fascination with aging: how aging provoked anxieties and unearthed long-rooted tensions, and how he came to accept, even enjoy, his mental and physical decline. Gutkind documents the realities of aging with the characteristically blunt, melancholic wit and authenticity that drive the quiet force of all his work.
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My Unsentimental Education
A Memoir
by Debra Monroe
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
A woman reflects on her working-class roots, her unsuitable exes, and her accidental road to happiness in a memoir of "many delights" (Atlanta Journal Constitution).
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 be a midwestern housewife continually get scuttled. Fearless but naive, she vaults over class barriers but never quite leaves her past behind. When it comes to men, she's still blue-collar. Negotiating the world of dating, Monroe pays careful attention to what love and sex mean to a woman ambivalent about her newfound status as "liberated."
Both the story of her steady rise into the professional class and a parallel history of unsuitable exes, this memoir reminds us how accidental even a good life can be. If Joan Didion advises us "to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be," Monroe takes this advice a step further and nods at the people she might have become but didn't. Funny, poignant, wise, My Unsentimental Education explores the confusion that ensues when a working-class girl ends up far from where she began.
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This Is One Way to Dance
Essays
by Sejal Shah
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
In the linked essays that make up her debut collection, This Is One Way to Dance, Sejal Shah explores culture, language, family, and place. Throughout the collection, Shah reflects on what it means to make oneself visible and legible through writing in a country that struggles with race and maps her identity as an American, South Asian American, writer of color, and feminist. This Is One Way to Dance draws on Shah's ongoing interests in ethnicity and place: the geographic and cultural distances between people, both real and imagined. Her memoir in essays emerges as Shah wrestles with her experiences growing up and living in western New York, an area of stark racial and economic segregation, as the daughter of Gujarati immigrants from India and Kenya. These essays also trace her movement over twenty years from student to teacher and meditate on her travels and life in New England, New York City, and the Midwest, as she considers what it means to be of a place or from a place, to be foreign or familiar.
Shah invites us to consider writing as a somatic practice, a composition of digressions, repetitions-movement as transformation, incantation. Her essays-some narrative, others lyrical and poetic-explore how we are all marked by culture, gender, and race; by the limits of our bodies, by our losses and regrets, by who and what we love, by our ambivalences, and by trauma and silence. Language fractures in its attempt to be spoken. Shah asks and attempts to answer the question: How do you move in such a way that loss does not limit you? This Is One Way to Dance introduces a vital new voice to the conversation about race and belonging in America.
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Prodigals
A Sister's Memoir of Appalachia and Loss
by Sarah Beth Childers
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
Prodigals, a memoir inessays, explores the life of Sarah Beth Childers'swildly creative brother, who committed suicide at twenty-two, and her life with him and after him, through the lens of the Biblical parable of the Prodigal Son.
This book examines the ways Childers's brother's story was both universal and uniquely Appalachian. While the archetype of the prodigal son carries all its assumed baggage, the Appalachian setting of Prodigals brings its own influences.Childers foregrounds the Appalachian landscape in her narrative, depicting its hardwood forests, winding roads, mining-stained creeks and rivers, hill-clinging goats and cows, neighborhoods and trailer parks tucked between mountains. The Childers family's fervent religious faith and resistance to medical intervention seemsnormal in this world, as doestheir conflicting desires to both escape from Appalachia and to stay forever at home.
Weaving in the stories of other famous prodigals, including Branwell Brontë, the alcoholic brother of the Brontë sisters; Jimmy Swaggart, the fallen televangelist;Robert Crumb, her brother's beloved author of sexist and racist comic books; and even herself, Childers examines the role of the prodigalwithin the intimate tapestry of family life and beyond-to its larger sociocultural meanings.
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Nola Face
A Latina's Life in the Big Easy
by Brooke Champagne
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
Early in Brooke Champagne's childhood, her Ecuadorian grandmother Lala (half bruja, half santa) strictly circumscribed the girl's present and future: become beautiful but know precisely when to use it; rationalize in English but love in God's first language, the superior Spanish; and if you must write, Dios help you, at least make a subject of me. Champagne's betrayal of these confounding dictates began before they were even spoken, and she soon started both writing and hiding the truth about whom she was becoming.
The hilarious, heartbreaking essays in this collection trace the evolutions of this girlhood of competing languages, ethnicities, aesthetics, politics, and class constraints against the backdrop of a boozy New Orleans upbringing. In these essays, Champagne and members of her family love poorly and hate well, whip and get whipped, pray and curse in two languages, steal from The Man and give to themselves, kiss where it hurts, poke where it hurts worse, and keep and spill each other's secrets-first face-to-face, then on the page. They believe and doubt and reckon with the stories they tell about themselves and where they come from, finally becoming most human, most alive, in their connections to one another.
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Learning From Thoreau
by Andrew Menard
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
Learning from Thoreau is an intimate intellectual walk with America's most edgy and original environmentalist. The thrust of the book consists not in learning "about" Thoreau from an intermediary but, as the title suggests, in learning "from" Thoreau along with the author-whose lifelong engagement with this "genius of the natural world" leads him to examine the process of learning from an admired model.
Using both images and text, Andrew Menard offers a personal meditation on Thoreau's thought, its originality, and its influence on the modern environmental movement. He places Thoreau in dialogue with contemporary artists and thinkers and associates him with a rich variety of places: Walden Pond, the Museum of Modern Art, the Rockefeller State Park Preserve in upstate New York, Mormon Mesa northeast of Las Vegas, and the old town of Königsberg, Prussia. Each place, each experience, each writer, and each work of art provides a different line of approach. The author also leads us through an expanding and deepening series of keywords that trigger fresh occasions to learn from Thoreau: Concord, Walden, walking, seeing, nature, wildness, beauty. The result is a deeply nuanced and informed portrait of Thoreau's inner and outer landscape.
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Alpine Apprentice
by Sarah Gorham
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
Sarah Gorham recounts her childhood education as a rebellious, insecure, angry girl shipped overseas to a tiny international school perched on a mountain shelf in Bernese-Oberland, Switzerland. There, boot camp style, she experienced deprivation, acute embarrassment, and keen educational guidance, all in the name of growing up. The Swiss landscape influenced her with its paradoxes: unforgiving slopes and peaks; government-controlled hills and valleys-so, too, the languages she's obliged to learn: one ruffian, the other militaristic.
Though her stay lasted a mere two years, her time there was so crucial in her transition to adulthood that she returns to those years decades later, each and every night in memory and dream. There are brief forays into the science of surviving an avalanche; Sherlock Holmes's faked demise at the Reichenbach Falls; the origins of meringue; and the history of homesickness and its spiritual twin, Sehnsucht. In her travels Gorham tracks an adolescent experience both agonizingly familiar and curiously exotic.
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Let Us Build Us a City
by Tracy Daugherty
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
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 world. The book reads like a master class on writing as practice, while performing a deep reading of art and life and looking to discern why liberal education matters so much to our society.
At its core, Let Us Build Us a City is a work of cultural and literary history, combining memoir (of the author's experiences as a student and teacher of literature and writing) with analysis and speculation. Daugherty exploits a variety of forms to explore literary apprenticeship and mentoring, philosophy, politics, metaphysics, and American history.
In particular, Daugherty focuses on the creative impulse and the diverse ways in which individual writers apply their imaginations to their craft. Along the way, he offers multiple lace of creative practice within it. Let Us Build Us a City is a stirring defense and timely renewal of our national literary vision.
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Lost Wax
Essays
by Jericho Parms
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
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 content and the language of innocence, experience, and loss. Four sections (each borrowing names from the sculptures of Degas, Bernini, and Rodin) frame a series of meditations that consider the boundaries of the discernible world and the extremes of the body and the self. Here Parms draws heavily on memories of a Bronx upbringing in the 1980s and1990s; explorations in Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and the American West; the struggle to comprehend race, love, family, madness, and nostalgia; and the unending influence of art, poetry, and music.
Written largely within the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lost Wax is an inquiry into the ways we curate memory and human experience despite the limits of observation and language. In these essays, Parms exhibits and examines her greatest obsessions: how to describe the surface of marble or bronze; how to embrace the necessary complexities of identity, stillness and movement, life and death-how to be young and alive.
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Pandora's Garden
Kudzu, Cockroaches, and Other Misfits of Ecology
by Clinton Crockett Peters
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
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, part nature writing, part narrative nonfiction, the chapters in Pandora's Garden are like the biospheres of the globe; as the successive chapters unfold, they blend together like ecotones, creating a microcosm of the world in which we sustain nonhuman lives but also contain them.
There are many reasons particular flora and fauna may be unwanted, from the physical to the psychological. Sometimes they may possess inherent qualities that when revealed help us to interrogate human perception and our relationship to an unwanted other. Pandora's Garden is primarily about creatures that humans don't get along with, such as rattlesnakes and sharks, but the chapters also take on a range of other subjects, including stolen children in Australia, the treatment of illegal immigrants in Texas, and the disgust function of the human limbic system. Peters interweaves these diverse subjects into a whole that mirrors the evolving and interrelated world whose surprises and oddities he delights in revealing.
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Exploded View
Essays on Fatherhood, with Diagrams
by Dustin Parsons
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
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 text but also in how that text interacts with the images that accompany it.
Diagrams were an important part of Dustin Parsons's childhood. Parsons's father was an oilfield mechanic, and in his spare time he was also a woodworker, an automotive mechanic, a welder, and an artist. His shop had countless manuals with "exploded view" parts directories that the young Parsons flipped through constantly. Whether rebuilding a transmission, putting together a diesel engine, or assembling a baby cradle, his father had a visual guide to help him. In these essays, Parsons uses the same approach to understanding his father as he navigates the world of raising two young biracial boys.
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 understanding of the piece, giving them a visual anchor for the story, and add a technical aspect to the lyric essays that they hold. This mixture of the machine-like and the lyrical helps the reader understand the author's world more fully-a world where art comes in the form of a welding torch, where creativity involves finding new ways to use old machines, and where delineating between right-brain and left-brain thinking isn't so easy.
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Brooding
Arias, Choruses, Lullabies, Follies, Dirges, and a Duet
by Michael Martone
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
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.
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A High Low Tide
The Revival of a Southern Oyster
by André Joseph Gallant
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
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 as a jumping off point to tell the story of a changing southeastern coast, the bounty within its waters, and what the future may hold for the area and its fishers. With A High Low Tide he places Georgia, as well as the South, in the national conversation about aquaculture, addressing its potential as well as its challenges.
The Georgia oyster industry dominated in the field of oysters for canning until it was slowed by environmental and economic shifts. To build it back and to make the Georgia oyster competitive on the national stage, a bit of scientific cosmetic work must be done, performed through aquaculture. The business of oyster farming combines physical labor and science, creating an atmosphere where disparate groups must work together to ensure its future. Employing months of field research in coastal waters and countless hours interviewing scholars and fishermen, Gallant documents both the hiccups and the successes that occur when university researchers work alongside blue-collar laborers on a shared obsession.
The dawn of aquaculture in Georgia promises a sea change in the livelihoods of wild-harvest shellfishermen, should they choose to adapt to new methods. Gallant documents how these traditional harvesters are affected by innovation and uncertain tides and asks how threatened they really are.
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Fire and Stone
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
by Priscilla Long
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
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? These questions look beyond everyday trivialities to ponder the essence of our origins.
Using her own story as a touchstone, Long explores our human roots and how they shape who we are today. Her personal history encompasses childhood as an identical twin on a dairy farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland; the turmoil, social change, and music of the 1960s; the suicide of a sister; and a life in art in the Pacific Northwest. Here, memoir extends the threads of the writer's individual and very personal life to science, to history, and to ancestors, both literary and genetic, back to the Neanderthals.
Long uses profoundly poetic personal essays to draw larger connections and to ask compelling questions about identity. Framed by four distinctive sections, Fire and Stone transcends genre and evolves into a sweeping elegy on what it means to be human.
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My Withered Legs and Other Essays
by Sandra Gail Lambert
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
My Withered Legs and Other Essays is a collection of personal essays by Sandra Gail Lambert that reflects upon her experience becoming a writer alongside discussions of disability, queerness, and aging. A seventy-year history of disability is threaded throughout these essays and intertwined with writing that celebrates lesbian love, explores the slapstick moments of life, and shares the obstacles and triumphs of becoming a writer later in life.
The essays chronicle times of interruption and then adaptation as the disability skill of always just figuring it out becomes tested with age and with illness. Throughout the book, Lambert engages with topics of ageism and ableism through storytelling rich with wit and contemplation.
From childhood Lambert believed as a disabled person she was "ice floe material" rife for abandonment, and during the pandemic she ticks off the additional comorbidities-age, fatness, cancer, a heart attack-that groups her with the expendable. In the essay "Gimp Humor," she is threatened with a ticket for not coming to a full stop while strolling along in her wheelchair. Underpinning the humor is an analysis of whiteness and the wariness that can be lodged, or not, in a body.
Other essays reimagine the meaning of "Old Lady Dabbler," recount kayaking among a hundred alligators, and tell the romantic, laden-with-power-dynamics tale of two lesbians in their sixties who fall in love. Another essay explores the family story, truth embellished with fiction, of Lambert's mother finding an unexploded bomb nestled in her parents' bed. This tale of the London Blitz delves into the increasingly common experience of "emergence" after a disaster and the necessity of becoming, especially for marginalized communities, our own first responders.
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High Yella
A Modern Family Memoir
by Steve Majors
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
They called him "pale faced or mixed race." They called him "light, bright, almost white." But, most of the time his family called him "high yella." Steve Majors was the white passing, youngest son growing up in an all-Black family that struggled with poverty, abuse, and generational trauma. High Yella is the poignant account of how he tried to leave his troubled childhood and family behind to create a new identity, only to discover he ultimately, needed to return home to truly find himself. And, after he and his husband adopt two Black daughters, he must set them on their own path to finding their place in the world by understanding the importance, of where they come from.
In his remarkable and moving memoir, Majors gathers the shards of a broken past to piece together a portrait of a man on an extraordinary journey toward Blackness, queerness, and parenthood. High Yella delivers its hard-won lessons on love, life, and family with exceptional grace.
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The Age of Clear Profit
Essays on Home and the Narrow Road
by John Griswold
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
At age fifty, when many hope to slow down, and what's left, as the poet Kobayashi Issa once wrote, is "clear profit," John Griswold was starting over, again, in a position he had worked decades to achieve. His family moved down the Mississippi Valley, expecting to create a good life with new friends.
What they found instead was a society "organized tightly by race, church attendance, and family name," which in its corruption, laissez-faire corporatism, gun love, and environmental degradation foretold the heightened problems of the United States in an era of deepening political division.
Taking his cue from classical Asian poets such as Basho, Griswold begins to journey, to gain perspective, and to find his own narrow road. He travels around the rim of the Gulf of Mexico and to writers' homes in Russia and New Mexico, attends the protests at Standing Rock, walks the Basho Trail in Japan, and reports on the wholesale slaughter of a Texas rattlesnake roundup and the cruel weirdness of the Angola Prison Rodeo.
Over eight years, Griswold bears witness, pays homage, and finds he is able to define and speak with gratitude about what is most important to him: his children, wholeheartedness, and the act of trying. In the gap between complexity and a little peace and quiet, there is a way to profit anew.
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Mountain Madness
Found and Lost in the Peaks of America and Japan
by Clinton Crockett Peters
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
With Mountain Madness, Clinton Crockett Peters chronicles his travels and personal transformation from a West Texas evangelical to mountain guide-addict to humbled humanist after a near-fatal injury in Japan's Chichibu Mountains. From 2007 to 2010, Peters lived in Kosuge Village (population nine hundred), nestled in central Japan's peaks, where he was the only foreigner in the rugged town. Using these three years as a frame, this essay collection profiles who he was before Japan, why he became obsessed with mountains, and his fallout from mountain obsession, including an essay on Craig Arnold, the poet who disappeared on a Japanese volcano. Ultimately, the collection asks, how can landscape create and end identities?
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Backvalley Ferrets
A Rewilding of the Colorado Plateau
by Lawrence Lenhart
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
Twice declared extinct, North America's most endangered mammal species, the black-footed ferret (BFF), is making a comeback thanks to an evolving conservation regimen at more than thirty reintroduction sites across the continent. Lawrence Lenhart lingers at one such site in his proverbial backyard, the Aubrey Valley in northern Arizona. He clocks hundreds of hours behind the wheel, rolling over ranch ruts as he shines a spotlight over dusky sage steppe in the hopes of catching a fleck of emerald eyeshine.
The beguiling weasel at the center of this book is more than a charismatic minifauna; it is the covert ambassador of a critical ecosystem that has dwindled to 1 percent of its former size. In a landscape menaced by habitat fragmentation, bacterial plague, settler colonialism, and soil death, a ferret must be resilient. Lenhart investigates the human efforts to sustain the species through monitoring, vaccination, captive breeding, and even cloning.
Lenhart balances this lens of environmental witness with personal essaying that captures the parallel story of his wife's pregnancy as he realizes the ferret's conservation story is dramatically synchronized with her trimesters. In preparing to raise a child in the Anthropocene, Lenhart takes stock of his own ecosystem and finds something is amiss. Through an ethic of "deeper ecology," Lenhart must hone his ecological interest in the black-footed ferret to assure it isn't overshadowed by his own paternal interests.
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Kitchen Arabic
How My Family Came to America and the Recipes We Brought with Us
by Joseph Geha
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
Immigrant children first speak the language of their mothers, and in Toledo, Ohio's ‘Little Syria’ neighborhood where Joseph Geha grew up, the first place he would go to find his mother would be the kitchen. Many of today's immigrants use Skype to keep in touch with folks back in the old country but in those "radio days" of old before the luxuries of hot running water or freezers, much less refrigeration, blenders, or microwaves, the kitchen was where an immigrant mother usually had to be, snapping peas or rolling grape leaves while she waited for the dough to rise. There, Geha's mother took special pride in the traditional Syro-Lebanese food she cooked, such as stuffed eggplant, lentil soup, kibbeh with tahini sauce, shish barak, and fragrant sesame cookies.
As much a memoir as a cookbook, “Kitchen Arabic” illustrates the journey of Geha's early years in America and his family's struggle to learn the language and ways of a new world. A compilation of family recipes and of the stories that came with them, it deftly blends culture with cuisine. In her kitchen, Geha's mother took special pride in the Arabic dishes she cooked, cherishing that aspect of her heritage that, unlike language, has changed very little over time and distance. With this book, Geha shares how the food of his heritage sustained his family throughout that cultural journey, speaking to them, in a language that needs no translation, of joy and comfort and love.
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Ladies Night at the Dreamland
by Sonja Livingston
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
Tales of female daredevils, warriors, killers, and victims: "Radiant essays inspired by 'slivers and bits' of real women's lives...Wise, fresh, captivating."-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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 imagination to conjure figures from history, literature, legend, and personal memory. The result is a series of essays that highlight lives as varied, troubled, and spirited as America itself.
Livingston breathes life into subjects who led extraordinary lives-as rule-breakers, victims, or those whose differences made them cultural curiosities-bringing together those who slipped through the world largely unseen with those whose images were fleeting or faulty so that they, too, remained relatively obscure. Included are Alice Mitchell, a Memphis society girl who murdered her female lover in 1892; Maria Spelterini, who crossed Niagara Falls on a tightrope in 1876; May Fielding, a "white slave girl" buried in a Victorian cemetery; Valaida Snow, a Harlem Renaissance trumpeter; a child exhibited as Darwin's Missing Link; the sculptors' model Audrey Munson; a Crow warrior; victims of a 1970s serial killer; the Fox Sisters; and many more.
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The Sum of Trifles
by Julia Ridley Smith
Part of the Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction series
When Julia Ridley Smith's parents died, they left behind a virtual museum of furniture, books, art, and artifacts. Between the contents of their home, the stock from their North Carolina antiques shop, and the ephemera of two lives lived, Smith faced a mo
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