Category: Nonfiction

In The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border, Francisco Cantú writes about his experiences working as a US Border Patrol agent, and also about his life before and after that job. He writes about his mom’s Mexican-American family, and her former job as a park ranger, and how he studied international relations in…

I like Italo Calvino’s fiction a lot, and I’m glad I read this book of essays, but I’m definitely not this book’s ideal reader: it’s a mix of big-picture literary/philosophical/political thought and close literary analysis of works/authors I’m (mostly) not that familiar with (e.g. Orlando Furioso or The Betrothed or anything by Charles Fourier). That…

The Lonely City (whose subtitle is “Adventures in the Art of Being Alone”) is a blend of the personal and the art-historical, though a bit heavier on the latter. Laing writes about how she had been planning to move to New York City from England to be with a man who then changed his mind;…

I haven’t watched The Office or The Mindy Project, and I don’t read many celebrity memoirs in general, but I found a copy of this book somewhere at some point (a Little Free Library? a giveaway pile at work? I don’t even remember) and thought it might be a good fun/light read. Which it was,…

The ten essays in this book range in subject/tone from funny to serious, which I didn’t realize when I picked it up: I had read one of the funny ones and somehow thought the whole book would be like that, which it isn’t. Not that that’s a bad thing: I like Koul’s style, whether she’s…

After I dislocated my elbow in January, when I read the message from my doctor’s office that said the MRI showed a torn ligament, a torn tendon, and a fracture, my first reaction was a giant mental “ugh,” except with more swear words. My second reaction was to put on the song “Dig Me Out”…

This short book (it’s only sixty pages) consists of three biographical essays about writers: there’s one about Thomas De Quincey, one about John Keats, and one about Marcel Schwob. I was somewhat familiar with Keats before reading this, a bit less familiar with De Quincey (or TDQ, as he’s referred to in the book), and…

I’d read some of the twenty-one pieces in Calypso before, since some of them appeared in The New Yorker, but that didn’t diminish my enjoyment of this book at all: I feel like a David Sedaris essay generally stands up to a re-read. A back cover blurb from Marion Winik at Newsday captures the appeal…

I found some of the fourteen essays in this collection more compelling than others, but, overall, I like Chew-Bose’s voice and the way she writes about memory/family/personal history and larger issues like race and the experience of being a first-generation North American. I liked “Summer Pictures,” about going to the movies in the summertime, a…