
Unpleasantries
Considerations of Difficult Questions
Frank Soos(Author)
University of Washington Press
Published on 1. February 2018
Book
Paperback/Softback
208 pages
978-0-295-74280-9 (ISBN)
Description
Even from upside-down in his recently flipped truck, Frank Soos reveals himself to be ruminative, grappling with the limitations of language to express the human condition. Moving quickly-skiing in the dark or taking long summer bike rides on Alaska highways-Soos combines an active physical life with a dark and difficult interior existence, wrestling the full span of "thinking and doing" onto the page with surprising lightness. His meditations move from fly-fishing in dangerously swift Alaska rivers to memories of the liars and dirty-joke tellers of his small-town Virginia childhood, revealing insights in new encounters and old preoccupations. Soos writes about pain and despair, aging, his divorce, his father's passing, regret, the loss of home, and the fear of death. But in the process of confronting these dark topics, he is full of wonder. As he writes at the end of an account of almost drowning, "Bruised but whole, I was alive, alive, alive."
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Seattle
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 208 mm
Width: 132 mm
Thickness: 13 mm
Weight
227 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-295-74280-9 (9780295742809)
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
Frank Soos is the Alaska State Writer Laureate, 2015-2016. He taught writing at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, from 1986 until 2004. His publications include Double Moon: Constructions and Conversations (with Margo Klass), Bamboo Fly Rod Suite (essays), and Unified Field Theory (stories).
Content
Preface
Another Kind of Loneliness
Mont Sainte-Victoire, Approximately
I Held Their Coats: A Study of Two Jokes
A Little Iliad
Obituary with Bamboo Fly Rod
Upside-Down with Borges and Bob
Meditation on My Cousin Lou, Dead at Thirty-Three
Glamour and Romance
Other People's Pain and My Own
The Man on the Bridge
Naked to the World
Dead Animals I Have Known
Why Is It That We Do This?
Driving Directions to the Homes of the Dead
Some Fibbers
No Place Like
Falling In
I Built a Little Boat; or, The Necessity of Failure
Kinds of Ambition
Acknowledgments
Another Kind of Loneliness
Mont Sainte-Victoire, Approximately
I Held Their Coats: A Study of Two Jokes
A Little Iliad
Obituary with Bamboo Fly Rod
Upside-Down with Borges and Bob
Meditation on My Cousin Lou, Dead at Thirty-Three
Glamour and Romance
Other People's Pain and My Own
The Man on the Bridge
Naked to the World
Dead Animals I Have Known
Why Is It That We Do This?
Driving Directions to the Homes of the Dead
Some Fibbers
No Place Like
Falling In
I Built a Little Boat; or, The Necessity of Failure
Kinds of Ambition
Acknowledgments