
Estranger
Erik Anderson(Author)
Rescue Press
Published on 1. May 2016
Book
Paperback/Softback
142 pages
978-0-9860869-3-9 (ISBN)
Description
Literary Nonfiction. Fiction. Hybrid Genre. ESTRANGER begins with a memoirist's problem--the suppressed story of a grandfather's death on the south side of Chicago in 1984--but ESTRANGER is no memoir. ESTRANGER reexamines and reinvents genre, as one family's story enters an intricate constellation of subjects: animal intelligence, museum architecture, films by Werner Herzog and Michael Haneke and Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Camus's The Stranger, Thoreau's journals, the work of artists Kara Walker and Cy Twombly. In the tradition of writers such as W.G. Sebald, Michael Ondaatje, and Rebecca Solnit, Erik Anderson's second book blends essay and invention into an exploration of vulnerability and detachment, a book that pushes against the limits of both everyday thought and literary form. The result is a work of restless, precise intelligence and disquieting originality.
So what does this have to do with strangeness, she asked. What does this have to do with your family? The obvious answer, I said, is that I'm here to figure it out, but on some level I don't really want to know.
"Though a hallmark of Erik Anderson's virtuosity is his allergy to category, we might describe ESTRANGER as itself a catalog of everyday alienations, one organized by bottomless intellect and searing honesty. Anderson is a direct descendant of Thoreau and Herzog, while also extending their inquiry into the realm they didn't dare: fatherhood and family. A stunning, moving, essential book."--Claire Vaye Watkins
"'Rumination,' the memoirist- narrator of ESTRANGER once told his wife, 'is the only thing I'm good at.' The 'only' is far too modest, I'm sure, but we feel no doubt as we read that we are in the hands of a world-class ruminator. This inward saga delights and surprises as its meanders become connections and as its themes--estrange
So what does this have to do with strangeness, she asked. What does this have to do with your family? The obvious answer, I said, is that I'm here to figure it out, but on some level I don't really want to know.
"Though a hallmark of Erik Anderson's virtuosity is his allergy to category, we might describe ESTRANGER as itself a catalog of everyday alienations, one organized by bottomless intellect and searing honesty. Anderson is a direct descendant of Thoreau and Herzog, while also extending their inquiry into the realm they didn't dare: fatherhood and family. A stunning, moving, essential book."--Claire Vaye Watkins
"'Rumination,' the memoirist- narrator of ESTRANGER once told his wife, 'is the only thing I'm good at.' The 'only' is far too modest, I'm sure, but we feel no doubt as we read that we are in the hands of a world-class ruminator. This inward saga delights and surprises as its meanders become connections and as its themes--estrange
More details
Language
English
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 208 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 13 mm
Weight
181 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-9860869-3-9 (9780986086939)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Erik Anderson is the author of a book of lyric essays, THE POETICS OF TRESPASS (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2010). He teaches creative writing at Franklin & Marshall College, where he also directs the annual Emerging Writers Festival. ESTRANGER (2016) is Anderson's second book of nonfiction and the fourth selection in Rescue Press's Open Prose Series.