Emily Nussbaum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic for The New Yorker, explores the fascinating and ever-evolving medium of television in I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution. This insightful, thought-provoking collection of essays includes both previously published and new work, with topics ranging from “difficult women” and exploring the legacy of “Sex and the City” to arts criticism in the age of Trump and how “Black-ish” rethinks the family sitcom.

In the author’s preface, she explains her selection process: The essays aren’t about her favorite shows or based on any sort of rating system. Instead, she writes, “These reviews are simply the ones I thought held up the best as criticism—and also the ones that most effectively made my argument about TV.” And hold up they do, as Nussbaum turns her gaze on Joan Rivers, “Jane the Virgin,” “True Detective” and product integration.

It seems fitting that Nussbaum begins her entertaining collection with a new essay entitled “The Big Picture: How Buffy the Vampire Slayer Turned Me into a TV Critic.” Here she contrasts that show with the cultural impact of “The Sopranos.” She goes on to explore the many ways in which television has changed—and revolutionized—since her own TV-watching childhood in the 1970s. And she reveals how this public square of our culture has continued to reshape and reinvent itself anew in often surprising ways.

It’s also here, in this first essay, that Nussbaum reveals her own model of criticism: “It’s about celebrating what never stops changing.” Whether you’ve long been a TV fan or you’ve recently found yourself returning to this fascinating medium for long binge-watching sessions, this is a book you won’t want to miss.

Paul Crenshaw grew up in Logan County, Arkansas. It was not an idyllic childhood, and it failed to evolve into either a comfortable adolescence or an easy adulthood. Punctuated by disasters, Crenshaw’s life is full of material. From a young age, Crenshaw witnessed violence and poverty. He endured ferocious tornadoes and iron-cold winters. His rural hometown has been poisoned by the meth crisis, and he has mourned the deaths of family and friends. Crenshaw has also seen boundless generosity, enduring love and fearsome beauty. In This One Will Hurt You, Crenshaw transforms these episodes into a collection of hard-hitting essays that leave the reader in no doubt that he is a writer of considerable talent.

Autobiographical essays are difficult to write successfully. It is painful to recount past hurts, and the temptation to avoid that pain by offering comforting platitudes can mar an otherwise admirable piece of writing. However, Crenshaw, a 2017 recipient of the prestigious Pushcart Prize, writes honestly, luminously and unsparingly. The opening essay, “After the Ice,” examines with almost superhuman objectivity the traumatic impact of the murder of Crenshaw’s baby nephew. “In Storm Country” reveals the vicious beauty of the countless tornadoes Crenshaw experienced as a child. The titular closing essay is about the death of yet another innocent, and as its title promises, it is a painful read. In between, there are tales of wonder, humor, sorrow and awe—all of them told by a clear-eyed writer who refuses to flinch from the truth.

These essays are written with poetic stoicism. Paradoxically, this is precisely this quality that makes Crenshaw’s essays powerfully redemptive. Like the tornadoes he describes, This One Will Hurt You reveals that it is the harshness of life that creates its beauty and gives it meaning.

If timing is indeed everything, what better time than now, here in deep winter, to seek—and find—solace in the delightful but often elusive moments of the everyday? In The Book of Delights, poet and avid gardener Ross Gay sets out, beginning on his 42nd birthday, to write “a daily essay about something delightful” for one year. The result: 102 essays with curiosity-provoking titles like “Tomato on Board” and “Hole in the Head.” Gay writes, “[M]y delight grows—much like love and joy—when I share it.”

Gay leads us on a merry walk through the mundane, illuminating moments of his day with intense, exquisitely detailed observations: a morning stop at a fragrant bakery; a glimpse of two strangers sharing their shopping bag handles; a grateful kiss planted on a blooming flower in his garden. He is mesmerized by the moment when the natural world meets the human eye, as when a praying mantis perches on an empty pint glass and transforms it into “a gorgeous transparent stage for this beast to perform on.”

Nor does he shy away from the reality of being black, that constant third rail embedded in our country’s history. The color of his skin shadows and illuminates his existence, causing both delight (when a “phenotypical” flight attendant calls him “Baby” and bestows him with extra pretzels) and angst (he has reason to note that “the darker your skin, the more likely you are to be ‘loitering’”).

Gay’s journey ambles back and forth in time. He feels his losses but imbues them with gratitude; people here and gone remain his delights. They are all here, stuffing this slim book with their abilities to delight the author. Yet humans are far from the only objects of Gay’s insights. Hummingbirds, cardinals, pigeons, skunks and bumblebees are all worthy of a moment’s glee, and he shares them all—delightfully, of course—with us.

BookPage starred review, February 2019

The world can be a chaotic, terrifying place. That has been evident to Pam Houston since childhood; she was born to reluctant parents whose abuse and neglect echo through her memories. But at age 31, Houston found a plot of land that became a place to heal. She purchased a 120-acre ranch in rural Colorado with money from a book advance—an amount which was far less than the typically recommended 20 percent down payment—and with the faith of the ranch’s previous owner. 

In the decades since that bold purchase, Houston has uncovered her identity through her relationship with the property. She shares that journey in Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, a collection of personal essays that reveals Houston’s process of self-discovery while surrounded by the Colorado mountains. Houston also writes of the challenges of rural living, including a detailed essay about a fire raging through the state toward her land. 

“How do we become who we are in the world? We ask the world to teach us. But we have to ask with an open heart, with no idea what the answer will be,” Houston writes in the book’s early pages. Although she examines the forces that uniquely shaped her in Deep Creek, the collection is as universal as it is personal. 

“I started writing toward an answer to the question I wake up with every morning and go to bed with every night. How do I find hope on a dying planet, and if there is no hope to be found, how do I live in its absence? In what state of being? Respect? Tenderness? Unmitigated love? The rich and sometimes deeply clarifying dreamscape of vast inconsolable grief?” Houston invites readers into these questions. Deep Creek is one woman’s reckoning of her past and the land where she’s found herself, but it is also a reflection on what it means to be a soft-hearted human in an ever-changing and sometimes frightening world. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Pam Houston for Deep Creek.

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Esmé Weijun Wang delivers stunning insights into the challenges of living with schizoaffective disorder in The Collected Schizophrenias. Wang provides glimpses of her journey toward understanding herself with deliberate, sparkling prose and exquisitely fine-tuned, honest descriptions filled with intimate details of her struggles.

Wang describes herself as an overachieving child; she wrote a 200-page novel in the fifth grade and assigned herself essays to write during school vacations. In high school, when she told her mother that she was considering suicide, her mother suggested they do it together. Later, after she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and accepted to Yale, Wang fled to the East Coast college, where her life began to fall apart at a rapid clip. 

Wang finally received her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder eight years after she experienced her first hallucination. She admits that she finds the diagnosis comforting, as it provides a “framework, a community, a lineage. . . . [A] diagnosis says that I am crazy, but in a particular way that has been experienced and recorded.” Once Wang receives her diagnosis, she probes every facet of her illness, sharing her insights with us along the way. Wang brilliantly explores the relationship between herself and her psychosis, writing, “[I]f I am psychotic 98 percent of the time, who am I?”

The Collected Schizophrenias easily takes its place among the best memoirs about illness and the transformative power of embracing it.

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Natalie Babbitt’s career in children’s literature began with a picture book, The Forty-Ninth Magician, which her husband, Samuel, wrote and she illustrated. After Samuel, a college president, became too busy to collaborate on books, Babbitt began writing and illustrating children’s books on her own, resulting in more than a dozen works. Her 1970 novel, Knee-Knock Rise, won a Newbery Honor, and her beloved children’s novel Tuck Everlasting (1975) was twice adapted for film and also became a musical.

It’s no surprise that Babbitt, who died in 2016 at age 84, wrote and spoke extensively about children’s literature during her life. Barking with the Big Dogs: On Writing and Reading Books for Children compiles Babbitt’s speeches and articles spanning 34 years, and in many cases the work addresses the “big dogs,” the writers and critics who focus on work meant for adults.

“There is no reason why children’s authors should have to serve up the sherbet of the literary feast and be forced to apologize to our colleagues in the adult world because our creations melt on touch,” Babbitt writes, bringing up a theme she revisits repeatedly in this collection. Some adults are prone to reducing children to a single, monolithic audience. They deserve better, Babbitt argues: “The children I remember had precious little in common.”

Children’s books often tackle big questions in a way that’s accessible to still-developing minds. Babbitt knew that; Tuck Everlasting, for example, examined the ever-present shadow of time and the appeal of immortality. Throughout the timeless essays in Barking with the Big Dogs, Babbitt dissects these concepts for her adult audiences. Regardless of the reader’s age, imaginative work can invite people to step out of themselves and their everyday lives to explore other possibilities.

As Babbitt wrote in 1986, “In these terrible days of uncertainty and fear not just for our own individual lives but of the life of our lovely, lonely planet, we need our fantasies more than ever, especially our fantasies of hope.”

This article was originally published in the December 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, June 2018

If you’re ever stuck in an elevator or airport, just pray for David Sedaris to appear. Time passes quickly with this national treasure of a storyteller.

Reading Calypso, Sedaris’ latest collection of essays, is like settling into a glorious beach vacation with the author, whose parents, siblings and longtime boyfriend, Hugh, feel like old friends to faithful readers. Family gatherings at Sedaris’ North Carolina beach house are featured frequently in this collection of 21 essays, and at the Sea Section (his chosen moniker for his beach house), games of Sorry! become delightfully vicious and the clan gets gleefully nosy when James Comey is said to be renting 12 doors down.

Another favorite topic, not surprisingly, is aging. Sedaris, 61, observes that sometimes life at the beach feels like a Centrum commercial, and soon enough, he and his siblings will join the seniors they see zooming by on golf carts. “How can that be,” he asks, “when only yesterday, on this very same beach, we were children?”

While Sedaris is laugh-out-loud funny in his brilliant, meandering way, it’s his personal reflections that will stay with you. He writes of his sister Tiffany, who killed herself in 2013, admitting that he asked his manager to close the door in her face the last time he saw her. He describes scattering the ashes of his late mother in the Atlantic Ocean, writing, “My mother died in 1991, yet reaching into the bag, touching her remains, essentially throwing her away, was devastating, even after all this time.” Sedaris laments how he and his family never confronted his mother about her drinking, and he worries over the health of his 94-year-old father, who can’t be talked into moving to a retirement home.

Sedaris freely shares all, explaining, “Memory aside, the negative just makes for a better story: the plane was delayed, an infection set in, outlaws arrived and reduced the schoolhouse to ashes. Happiness is harder to put into words.”

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Let’s be clear: Jim Holt is not afraid of tackling the big questions. His 2012 book, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story, made that fact certain. His latest book, When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought, is a collection of essays previously published in several distinguished periodicals, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and the London Review of Books. A noted American philosopher and TED talk speaker, Holt is at home whether he is discussing the history of science, the state of play in modern philosophy or the impact of quantum mechanics.

Consequently, it is no surprise that the essays in this book explore a complex array of subjects: string theory, the nature of the infinite and the infinitesimal and the impact of computers upon human intelligence, to name a few. But there are lighter moments as well, such as Holt’s essay on the overabundance of overconfidence, or the lowdown on Ava Lovelace’s self-proclaimed mathematical genius (Holt’s verdict on whether Lord Byron’s daughter was a mathematical prodigy: not so much). There are many poignant moments, too, and several of his biographical essays serve as cautionary tales—apparently, mathematical obsession can be dangerous to sanity and health.

This book does not dawdle. Holt is a complex and rigorous writer examining complex and rigorous subjects. Readers whose mathematical and analytical logic skills are a tad rusty might need to google Gödel’s incompleteness theorem or the Riemann zeta conjecture. Trust me, it’s worth the effort. As his subtitle suggests, Holt is pushing us to explore the ideas that have revolutionized how we see the world, the universe and truth itself. They are messy, complicated affairs, but Holt’s intellectual clarity and lucid writing illuminate them. These concepts are mind-boggling, literally. Like the fractals Holt writes about in “Geometrical Creatures,” these ideas are as wild and jagged as a rocky coastline, but therein lies their beauty—and their fun.

From The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) to The Tao of Travel (2011), Paul Theroux has taught us how to travel: intently, adventurously and lightly.

While the title may suggest a single painting, the 30 essays included here are alive with locales as varied as Theroux’s many journeys. He is a collector of experiences with the famous and infamous, the familiar and the exotic, the literati and the little guys. There’s a helicopter flight over Neverland Ranch with Elizabeth Taylor as she discusses her Peter Pan and Wendy-esque friendship with Michael Jackson. Walks with Robin Williams and Oliver Sacks reveal their inspiring humanity. A dominatrix explains everything. Hunter S. Thompson is remembered for his writing and demons, “familiar, because they are our demons, most of them anyway.”

Theroux gets around the globe as well, whether searching for a fabled drug high in Ecuador, residing in England for 18 years, rediscovering Vietnam or paddling around in Hawaii.

Having been everywhere and done almost everything, Theroux concludes Figures in a Landscape closer to home, examining his childhood and parents with the circumspection of a worldly-wise adult. Yet his insatiable curiosity continues, and he wonders what his own legacy should be. For Theroux, the idea of leaving no trace has never been an option.

This article was originally published in the May 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.