Waveform

Reviews / Votes

An essay collection that-at long last!-doesn't say, 'Next time we'll include more . . . more women, writers of color, trans writers, more less well-known writers, too,' but instead announces, 'Here they are.' Including essays by best-selling authors, critical favorites, and newcomers alike, Marcia Aldrich has done more than sample the bounty of brilliant women's essays. Through Waveform, she stakes a claim for the significance of the essay in contemporary literature by focusing on women's fusion of a singular voice, personal experience, and formal innovation. Waveform should come with a warning label, though: these essays are so compelling you'll be tempted to read heedlessly and breathlessly through the collection. But beware. This work is potent. Each essay delivers the blow of the wave as it breaks, exposing the hungry wave rider to the churn and danger beneath the swells. A herald of a new field, fully realized, and a triumphant display of its power. -- Leigh Gilmore * author of Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives * Rich in unexpected detail, these essays refresh our sense of how women map the world. Readers join writers on journeys of self-discovery that disconcert as well as reward. -- Nancy K. Miller * author of Breathless: An American Girl in Paris * The works largely explore an evocative, corporeal landscape with occasional forays into academic territory. . . . [T]here is plenty that stands out as wise, beautiful, and unforgettable. * Publishers Weekly * This collection offers something for every reader, whether one seeks the calm of a contemplative voice or the catharsis of anger. Lengths of essays vary widely, too: one writer offers a terse yet poetic recollection of childhood, horror, and love in the space of a page and a half. Another writer unravels a lengthy and wide-ranging exploration of pain and women's relationship to it. It's all here, just as it should be: birth, death, sex, longing, regret, anger, love. -- Joan Curbow * Booklist * Aldrich's collection not only rides the 'new wave' in nonfiction essay writing with bravura, intelligence, and sensitivity, it also reveals the depth and vastness of the contemporary, female, literary ocean that produced it. Other contributors include Meghan Daum, Roxane Gay, Eula Biss, and Margo Jefferson. Eclectic and always engaging. * Kirkus Reviews * For hundreds of years only men had access to the printing press, education, and platform. So while women and people of color and gender non-conforming writers catch up, a space to thrive, flourish, and gain airtime is essential. Woolf demanded for women a room of our own. Now we have a book of our own. -- Gila Lyons * Bust Magazine * Back in 2013, in The New York Times, essayist Christy Wampole declared that we are in a moment of 'the essayification of everything.' . . . The essay invites complexity, contradiction, nuance-all of those qualities that mark the real experience of our public and private lives. Essays want to reckon with the rich immensity that is in us and is us. . . . I encourage you to check out a new collection of essays edited by Marcia Aldrich. Its entitled Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women and includes many of the best essayists in America. In essays by Cheryl Strayed, Roxanne Gay, Dana Tommasino, and Aldrich herself, the essay achieves its fullest potential as Wampole described it in 2013. -- Eric LeMay * New Books Network *