I could go on. Every page of Narrow Rooms has at least one sentence that stops me cold. As the reviewer of the biography noted, everyone who writes about Purdy winds up urging readers to do themselves the favor of discovering him. I now do the same.
MoreOVER TWO DECADES AGO, Kathleen Norris published Dakota, a wonderfully poetic and ruminative memoir about life on the Great Plains from a spiritual point of view. Now comes Taylor Brorby’s Boys and Oil, an equally contemplative book, this time attempting to capture the experience of growing up gay in that beautiful but bleak environment.
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Writing a Chrysanthemum teems with intense, mysterious feeling. There’s something unhinged about the work (one of Barton’s benefactors called him “crazy as a bedbug and impossible to cope with”) that is both bizarre and intriguing. It defies the norms we know, as does Barton, who considered himself not an artist but a writer
MoreAUTHOR LARS HORN writes in Voice of the Fish: “Past a certain age, my own reflection became increasingly difficult to look at. So, I didn’t. I looked out. Around. At others. Animals. Trees. Anything not myself.” Looking outside themself—the author uses they/them pronouns—is one of the primary ways in which Horn makes this lyric essay, as the book is aptly subtitled, a superb achievement.
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Simon Doonan’s Transformer is a light-hearted, deeply personal, thoroughly researched examination of the social and artistic revolution in fashion and music ushered in during the 1960s and ’70s, and the role of Transformer in that revolution.
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Sorrow’s Drive consists of four novella-length stories about, yes, sorrow. Michael Alenyikov’s soft, deft hand wields an ethos as harsh as Greek tragedy. His humor attains surpassing cruelty. He knows how real sin is. Sins of omission concern him.
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[Keeping Family Secrets] ]is itself based on memoirs by people who lived through this era, people whose often jaw-dropping personal stories came to light once it was safe to reveal them in memoirs. The “secrets” are organized into categories: absent siblings, i.e., children who were institutionalized all their lives because of physical or mental disabilities; same-sex desire among boys; “unwed mothers”; parents who were members of the Communist Party; unorthodox conceptions (hidden adoptions); and hidden Jewish ancestry.
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IN ERNESTO MESTRE-REED’S novel Sacrificio, Rafa is a penniless Afro-Cuban teenager from the rural eastern part of the country who travels to the fishing village of Cojímar, famous as the setting for Hemingway’s novel The Old Man and the Sea. Rafa is cruised and picked up by Nicolás, then taken to Havana to become a waiter in the semi-legal restaurant run by Nicolás’ family. Welcomed as another son by Nicolás’ strong-willed mother Cecilia, the family struggles to make do while catering to the dwindling number of “Yuma,” foreign tourists.
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EDAFE OKPORO’S Asylum: A Memoir & Manifesto opens at a market in Warri, a rural town in southern Nigeria, where he experiences his earliest years. As he and his mother wait in line for hired street youths to help them carry their purchases, two of the young men come to blows over who will get the job.
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Taken as a whole, Brown Neon shines a light on identities, experiences, and artworks not often explored in the realm of creative nonfiction. In this way, the collection feels wholly original even though it’s firmly rooted in the social and historical context that the author is seeking to explore. The result is an impressive group of essays that display a mixture of aching vulnerability, hard-earned expertise, and exquisite prose.
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