Patrick Madden is a professor at Brigham Young University. He is the author of the award-winning Sublime Physick: Essays (Nebraska, 2016) and Quotidiana: Essays (Nebraska, 2010), and coeditor, with David Lazar, of After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays. His essays have appeared in a variety … Continue reading Patrick Madden at Home: On (not) Writing (much) and the Essayistic in Life
Books Skin Memory John Sibley Williams Praise from River Heron Review: “In reading Williams’s poetry aloud, over-and-over, in an attempt to hear what the poem has to say, its musicality has me feeling as much as, if not more than, … Continue reading News and Reviews
Shannon Bontrager is an associate professor of history at Georgia Highlands College in Cartersville, Georgia. His new book, Death at the Edges of Empire, examines the culture of death, burial, and commemoration of fallen American soldiers in the Civil War, … Continue reading From the Desk of Shannon Bontrager: Keeping the Past in the Present
Julija Šukys is an associate professor of creative nonfiction at the University of Missouri, Columbia. She is the author of Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė (Nebraska, 2012) and Silence Is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout (Nebraska, 2007). Her book Siberian Exile: Blood, … Continue reading From the Desk of Julija Šukys: The Anxiety of Publishing Family Stories
The following is an excerpt from Assembling Moral Mobilities by Nicholas A. Scott (February 2020). 1: Domestic Mobilities Local Tradition, Urban Place, and Good Roads What makes mobilities domestically good? What makes a bike lane good for creating “home”? What domestic lessons … Continue reading Excerpt: Assembling Moral Mobilities
In Apple, Tree: Writers on Their Parents (September, 2019), editor Lise Funderburg gathers twenty-five outstanding writers to deftly explore a trait they’ve inherited from a parent, reflecting on how it affects the lives they lead today. In a starred-review, Publishers Weekly called … Continue reading Writers Talking about Their Parents on Tour
Book Birthdays celebrate one year of a book’s life in tweets, reviews, and more. This month we’re saying Happy First Birthday to Exiled: From the Killing Fields of Cambodia to California and Back (Potomac Books, 2018) by Katya Cengel. About the Book: San … Continue reading Happy Book Birthday to Exiled!
From classrooms to genetic testing, people have a fascination with discovering their origins. Many children have a desire to know who their parents were before starting a family—yet some parents do not have the words to explain what happened in … Continue reading A Rescued Mother, a Refugee Father: New Holocaust Memoirs
The singular American life is a source of endless diversity, and the methods of telling the life are as important as the details themselves. The American Lives series, called “splendid” by Newsweek, features works of creative or literary memoir that, … Continue reading A Closer Look at the American Lives Series
The following is an excerpt from Courage and Grief: Women and Sweden’s Thirty Years’ War (January 2018) by Mary Elizabeth Ailes. Ailes is a professor of history at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. She is the author of Military Migration and State Formation: The British … Continue reading Excerpt: Courage and Grief
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