Reviews
"Court jester, philosopher, provocateur, smarty pants: Michael Martone, is this allowed? You have a glorious and weird brain, and you don’t seem to care who knows it. Brooding on your Brooding makes me glorious and weird too, makes me glad that this world has all the books in the world, and just when we think we have what we need, you go and pull a stunt like this. Thank God."
—Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs
Description
This collection of more than twenty-five essays, both meditative and formally inventive, considers all kinds of subjects: everyday objects such as keys and hats, plus concepts of time and place; the memoir; writing; the essay itself; and Michael Martone’s friendship with the writers David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Kurt Vonnegut. Throughout the essays, Martone’s style expands with the incorporation of new technological platforms. Several of the pieces were written specifically for online venues, while the essays on the death of Martone’s mother and father were written on Facebook while the events happened. One essay about using new technologies in the classroom was written solely in tweets.
Brooding—the book’s title and the title of an essay—draws a parallel between the disappearance of early browsers and the emergence, after seventeen years, of a brood of cicadas. Throughout these essays Martone’s words inhabit spaces where the reconnection to people in the past and the metaphors of electronic memory converge.
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Paper List price: $24.95 978-0-8203-5307-4 03/01/18 ![]() View Shopping Cart |
Ebook List price: $24.95 978-0-8203-5306-7 03/01/18 Check ebook availability |