Festival Days
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- $229.00
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- $229.00
Descripción editorial
A searing and exhilarating new collection from the award-winning author of The Boys of My Youth and In Zanesville,who “honors the beautiful, the sacred, and the comic in life” (Sigrid Nunez, National Book Award winner for The Friend).
A New York Times Notable Book
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A Boston Globe and LitHub Best Book of the Year
When “The Fourth State of Matter,” her now famous piece about a workplace massacre at the University of Iowa was published in The New Yorker, Jo Ann Beard immediately became one of the most influential writers in America, forging a path for a new generation of young authors willing to combine the dexterity of fiction with the rigors of memory and reportage, and in the process extending the range of possibility for the essay form.
Now, with Festival Days, Beard brings us the culmination of her groundbreaking work. In these nine pieces, she captures both the small, luminous moments of daily existence and those instants when life and death hang in the balance, ranging from the death of a beloved dog to a relentlessly readable account of a New York artist trapped inside a burning building, as well as two triumphant, celebrated pieces of short fiction.
Here is an unforgettable collection destined to be embraced and debated by readers and writers, teachers and students. Anchored by the title piece––a searing journey through India that brings into focus questions of mortality and love—Festival Days presents Beard at the height of her powers, using her flawless prose to reveal all that is tender and timeless beneath the way we live now.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This imaginative and precise collection shows Beard (The Boys of My Youth) at her best. The nine entries vary in scope and subject, but loss and melancholy bridge the collection. "Last Night" captures her final moments with her beloved, terminally ill dog, and "Maybe It Happened" reflects on the unreliability of human memory. The title essay interweaves Beard being left by her partner and her grief after the death of a friend: "In less than five minutes, we don't have her anymore. She's gone." Beard can evoke many emotions in a single stroke: "The Lab lived to be fifteen too. The marriage, fourteen," she writes of losing both a dog and a relationship. She's also cunning with surprising metaphors and details, as in "Close," where she compares writing to sitting on a sled: writing a book is like "the snow has melted and there's just grass and gravel. It takes a lot to get the sled moving, and then it goes only a few inches." These sharp essays cement Beard's reputation as a master of the form.
