Hannah Horvath—Lena Dunham’s character on HBO’s “Girls”—famously declared, “I think I might be the voice of my generation. Or at least, a voice of a generation.”

But while the erstwhile Hannah never lived up to that sweeping statement, Sloane Crosley is getting close, consistently delivering since her bestselling 2008 debut essay collection, I Was Told There’d Be Cake. With her hilarious and astute observations, Crosley’s writing has garnered comparisons to heavyweights like Nora Ephron and David Sedaris. Her latest collection covers everything from fertility to vertigo, and it carries a newfound heft that can only be gained with age and experience.

Like Sedaris, Crosley allows her essays to unfurl slowly and deliciously. Judging by the opening sentence of “If You Take the Canoe Out” (“The strongest impulse I’ve ever had to ride a baggage carousel was at the airport in Santa Rosa, California.”), I assumed that the essay would be about traveling. It sort of is, but it’s also about writing, marijuana and swingers.

The most personal essay in the collection may be “The Doctor Is a Woman,” in which Crosley recounts having her eggs harvested and frozen. “[O]ne day I was walking up my apartment stairs, flipping through my mail, when I came across a thin envelope with the cryobank’s logo,” she writes. “My eggs had never sent me actual mail before. Camp is fun. We are cold.” Once she’s endured the frankly horrifying process of attaining the eggs, Crosley is uncertain of her next move. “They are just floating fractions of an idea,” she writes. “I know that. But I had never seen a part of my body exist outside my body before. I felt such gratitude.”

Crosley’s writing crackles with wit and humanity. Look Alive Out There reaffirms her place as one of the most generous essayists writing today.

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

Though she’s best known for novels like her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, in recent years Marilynne Robinson has quietly been building an impressive body of nonfiction work. In What Are We Doing Here?, her third collection of essays since 2012, she again discourses with depth and sensitivity on an impressive range of topics in theology, philosophy and contemporary American life.

Save for two undated essays that conclude the volume, all of the pieces comprising the book were written between 2015 and 2017. Many were delivered in the form of lectures at churches or institutions of higher education around the world. As in her last book, The Givenness of Things, Robinson doesn’t flinch from engagement with deep aspects of Christian theology, something that may be a difficulty for more casual readers. An enlightening theme of several pieces is Puritan belief and culture, as she seeks to rescue thinkers like Jonathan Edwards from the stigma of narrow-mindedness traditionally attached to the label of Puritanism.

Robinson is at her most accessible and eloquent when, as a “self-professed liberal,” she focuses her critical eye on prominent aspects of our current political climate. As she explains in “A Proof, a Test, an Instruction,” written a few weeks after the 2016 election, she’s an unabashed admirer of Barack Obama, describing her respect for him as “vast and unshadowed.” The two engaged in a deep and impressively wide-ranging conversation in Des Moines, Iowa, in September 2015, which was later published in The New York Review of Books. She concludes this book with the essay “Slander,” lamenting how her mother, who died at age 92, “lived out the end of her fortunate life in a state of bitterness and panic,” as a result of her obsessive devotion to Fox News. Readers who share Robinson’s strong political views will appreciate how forcefully she defends them in this challenging but worthwhile collection.

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

For many, Cuba seems like a distant exotic cousin you've grown up hearing about but never been able to meet. Whether you're planning a visit or merely intrigued, Cuba on the Verge is a collection of 12 essays that offer an engrossing glimpse into this island nation and its endless dichotomies.

Carlos Manuel Álvarez writes beautifully about a 2015 visit with his father, a former doctor who had recently emigrated to Miami, and how they worked together shaking coconuts from the trees of wealthy homeowners, collecting 70 cents for each nut.

Wendy Guerra chronicles decades of change in Cuba, from the elegance of the early 1960s to her teenage years in the 1980s, when a ration book allowed her to buy one set of underwear a year and getting an abortion "is much more common than going to the dentist." She maintains that Cuban women have been empowered in various ways over the years, but laments that "today, female political leadership is still unthinkable."

Jon Lee Anderson remembers being an American writer in Cuba in the early 1990s, living in a house with no running water, dropping his daughters off at school to sing the Cuban revolutionary national anthem pronouncing "Yanquis [Yankees], the enemies of humanity" as he researched a biography of Che Guevara. Anderson describes returning to their house decades later with one of his daughters, gazing at the nearby spot where they once watched Cuban "rafters"―including their neighbor―plunge into the ocean in an attempt to escape.

Baseball, movies, music, Fidel and Raúl Castro, visits by Obama, the Rolling Stones and Pope Francis―all and more of these subjects are addressed. As author Patricia Engel's friend Manuel concludes, "Popes and presidents. They come and they see Cuba, then they leave and forget us. But for us, nothing changes. Here we are. Here we will always be . . . the same Cuba, the same ruta, the same struggle always."

When Oliver Sacks died in 2015, the world lost a writer whose insatiable curiosity about the connections between every facet of life permeated his elegant, joyous and illuminating essays and books. His memoirs, such as Uncle Tungsten, reveal a man peering into the corners of life and discovering sparkling rays connecting family life, human nature and the life of the mind. His books, from The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat to Musicophilia, lead us gently and warmly into the labyrinths of psychology and the quirkiness of science without losing us along the way.

Two weeks before he died, Sacks outlined the contents of The River of Consciousness and directed the book’s three editors to arrange its publication. Although a number of the essays in this collection appeared previously in The New York Review of Books (the book is dedicated to the late Robert Silvers, its longtime editor), they read as if they’ve been written just for us. In the essays, Sacks moves over and through topics ranging from speed and time, creativity, memory and its failings, disorder, consciousness, evolution and botany. In a fascinating essay on Charles Darwin, Sacks reminds us that Darwin was deeply interested in botany and spent much of his time following the publication of The Origin of Species exploring the evolution of plants. Sacks points out that Darwin illuminated for the first time the coevolution of plants and insects. Creativity, according to Sacks, is “physiologically distinctive. . . . If we had the ability to make fine enough brain images, these would show an unusual and widespread activity with innumerable connections and synchronizations occurring.”

Sacks’ golden voice and his brilliant insights live on in the essays collected in The River of Consciousness, and for that we’re fortunate.

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Mandy Len Catron’s essay, “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This,” went viral after being published in the New York Times Modern Love column in 2014. In it, she details a study in which couples sit face to face, asking and answering progressively more personal questions. Six months after the study, two participants were married.

Catron tried the questions out with an attractive acquaintance named Mark, and lo and behold, they are now a couple. (She is the first to admit, in the last paragraph of the essay, that love didn’t happen to them because of the questions—they chose to be together.)

Now Catron is tackling the many facets of love in a book that builds upon her famous essay.

In truth, the book’s name is a bit of a misnomer. Catron, a professor in British Columbia, is not making the case, as the title suggests, that love is either random or formulaic. Rather, she examines what science tells us about the elements of lasting love, and explores why her Appalachian grandparents stayed married for life while her parents divorced after so many seemingly happy years and her own long-term relationship (pre-Mark) slowly crumbled.

She writes, “Deciding to break up, I thought, was like learning a star had burned out in a distant galaxy, even though you can still see it in the sky: You know something has irrevocably changed, but your senses suggest otherwise.”

Catron melds science and emotion beautifully into a thoughtful and thought-provoking meditation on the most universal topic.

This article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Welcome to a lively, provocative gathering of women talking about the force that inspires, compels, thwarts and confounds them: ambition. Bring along your own life experiences and compare notes as these essayists give the word its due. Double Bind, edited by author and memoirist Robin Romm, is a collection of 24 essays, authored by novelists, playwrights, psychiatrists, poets, critics, scientists, actors, producers, editors, professors, a tech industry executive, a butcher and a dogsled runner. They are also stay-at-home moms, wives, mothers and daughters. Some are immigrants or daughters of first-generation immigrants. All make the reader think.

In her essay “Doubly Denied,” Cristina Henríquez ponders the unique difficulties of being an ambitious woman of color. If she should “achieve something,” she may be told—overtly or otherwise—that she doesn’t deserve her success, that her gender or color got her there.

Camas Davis grew tired of her successful career as a food writer and became a teacher—and butcher—at the school she created in Oregon, the Portland Meat Collective. Actor Molly Ringwald could not follow her grandmother’s advice—“It’s bad manners to talk about yourself.”

Is it nature or nurture that imparts the desire to achieve something greater? Can a stay-at-home mom sustain ambition? Can the daughter in a patriarchal culture use ambition as her lifeline to escape a destiny she cannot accept?

These remarkable women may thrive or struggle on their various life paths, but what holds them together in Double Bind’s diverse assembly is that complex, culture-fraught word: ambition.

As the Obamas leave the White House, their departure saddens many, as evidenced by the essays in The Meaning of Michelle, a diverse collection united by admiration in a “praise song” anthology. Whether discussing Michelle Obama’s shapely arms, her fashion sense or her “Evolution of Mom Dancing” with Jimmy Fallon, these 16 writers would all agree with chef Marcus Samuelsson’s observation: “It’s nothing short of stunning the way she manages a 24/7 news cycle.”

Samuelsson got to know the first lady in 2009 while planning and cooking the Obamas’ first state dinner, for the prime minister of India and 400 guests. He concludes, “I think she embodies the ability to shape the conversation around her better than any person that I know.”

Here and there, we learn interesting tidbits of Michelle’s past, such as the horrifying fact that when she attended Princeton as an undergraduate in the 1980s, the family of her first roommate protested to the administration that their daughter had been assigned to room with a black person. (It would certainly be interesting to check in on this family now.) We’re also reminded of smile-worthy moments, such as the self-proclaimed mom-in-chief’s response that if she could be anyone other than herself, it would be Beyoncé.

Those who feel despondent about FLOTUS leaving the White House are likely to rally behind novelist and essayist Cathi Hanauer’s closing plea: “She has said she’ll never run for president herself. To that I say: Never say never, Michelle. Let’s just see where we all are a decade from now.”

This article was originally published in the January 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Most of the 18 brief, beautiful essays in Upstream have appeared individually in other collections by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver. Gathered together here, these prose works provide an interior roadmap to her development as one of America’s most accomplished—and most popular—poets of nature and transcendence. 

The title essay, for example, is an impressionistic remembrance of straying away from her family as a young child, wandering upstream and becoming lost. Within a few short pages, it becomes an exhilarating celebration of being lost in nature. The essay concludes: “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

Attention and devotion are what readers have come to expect from Oliver’s poems. The same traits are evident in her prose. In the astonishing “Swoon,” she watches with great curiosity and sympathy as a female spider produces eggs, nurtures her newborns and painstakingly traps a cricket—“with a humped, shrimplike body and whiplike antennae and jumper’s legs”—in her web. Questions arise in her mind about what she is witnessing, and she writes: “I know I can find [answers] in some book of knowledge, of which there are many. But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus. The world is not what I thought, but different, and more! I have seen it with my own eyes!”

Other essays contemplate her poetic and intellectual forebears—the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and poets Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe and William Wordsworth. Still others relate her soulful encounters with nature during her walks in the woods and along the shore near her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts. These places have often been sources of inspiration for her poems and will be familiar to many of her readers. So the final essay about leaving Provincetown, nuanced as it is, comes as a shock. 

Oliver, now in her 80s, has moved to Florida. And she remains a joyful advocate for the palace of discovery.

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“Salinger’s Holden Caulfield made a distinction between writers you would like to call on the phone and those you wouldn’t care to talk to at all. Teju Cole belongs to the former group.”

Those words were written by the author Aleksandar Hemon, and they’re proven true by Known and Strange Things, Teju Cole’s companionable new essay collection. Again and again in this gathering of more than 40 pieces, Cole demonstrates an appealing blend of erudition and affability—a quality that makes him unique as an essayist.

The author of the award-winning novel Open City, Cole was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, but grew up in Lagos, Nigeria. He returned to the states for college, focusing on art history and photography. Both subjects figure prominently in these essays, which are organized into three categories: “Reading Things,” “Seeing Things” and “Being There.”

In the wistful “Far Away from Here,” Cole considers themes of home and dislocation during a visit to Switzerland, where he photographs the landscape in a process he describes as “thinking with my eyes about the country around me.” In unflinching essays like “Black Body” and “The White Savior Industrial Complex,” he examines contemporary perceptions of race, invoking the work of James Baldwin along the way.

An understated and lyrical stylist, Cole combines the rigor of a critic with the curiosity of Everyman. “We are creatures of private conventions,” he writes. “But we are also looking for ways to enlarge our coasts.” This collection provides a way.

This article was originally published in the August 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s hard to write about Shame and Wonder, albeit for good reason. David Searcy’s collection of 21 essays are unlike anything I’ve read before, though they feel achingly familiar. The subject matter is the stuff of everyday life, or an era just passed: comic strips, the prizes in cereal boxes, the craft of folding a perfect paper airplane. But woven through each essay is a haunting quality, humor and loss uncomfortably conjoined on the page.

The book opens with “The Hudson River School,” in which Searcy’s dental hygienist tells him the story of her father, a Texas rancher who uses a tape recording of his infant daughter’s crying to lure a sheep-thieving coyote to its doom. Searcy is unseated by the tale and ventures out to meet the man and ask him about the story. It’s a genial exchange, but on the page it assumes the spaciousness of a haiku, eerie, wide-open and wild. The story of a trip to Turkey sponsored by a tourist organization is filled with the rush of scheduled activity punctuated by bottles of Orange Fanta, but on a coastal ride in a hired car, “[A]ll of a sudden there’s the water. There’s the blue you get in children’s paintings. Blue as that primordial blue you’ve had in mind since childhood.”

The accessible tone of Shame and Wonder belies the depths these essays plumb. They come in peace, then sock you in the solar plexus. Read them; you’ll see. 

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Roger Angell, now 95, has had an extraordinary life. A longtime fiction editor of The New Yorker and one of the best-ever writers on baseball, he is the only writer elected to both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Baseball Hall of Fame. His wonderful new collection, This Old Man: All in Pieces, is, he says, a grab bag, a portrait of his brain at this point in his life. The title piece, a moving and personal account of aging, received the 2014 prize for best essay from the American Society of Magazine Editors.

“Getting old is the second biggest surprise of my life, but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love,” Angell writes. “We oldies yearn daily and hourly for conversation and a renewed domesticity, for company at the movies or while visiting a museum, for someone close by in the car when coming home at night.”

Some of my favorite selections are about writers. Angell reflects on the 20,000 or so manuscripts he has rejected over the years and addresses many misunderstandings about fiction, pointing out that there is no one way to write a story or to edit one for publication. He notes that his fellow fiction editors were very much alike in their passion for their work, but each went about the job differently. His own approach is to constantly ask tough questions about such things as clarity and tone, and, at the end, to ponder “Is it good enough? And is it any good at all?” In a postlude he writes, “[E]diting, I think remains a mystery to the world. Sometimes it even mystified me.” 

“Writing is hard,” he says, “even for authors who do it all the time.” He remembers his stepfather, E.B. White, rarely being satisfied with what he had written, sometimes commenting after sending his copy to The New Yorker: “It isn’t good enough. I wish it were better.” Angell need not worry about his own writing in this eloquent collection. It shares and illuminates and entertains in a variety of ways and is a reader’s delight.

This article was originally published in the December 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“Gorgeous hair is the best revenge,” said Ivana Trump, she of the platinum blonde, sky-high hair. Hair as tool of revenge, as obsession, as embarrassment, as source of pride: Why does a long string of protein absorb so much of our attention? 

In Me, My Hair, and I, authors including Anne Lamott, Adriana Trigiani, Jane Smiley and Hallie Ephron explore women’s unique relationships with their hair. As Elizabeth Benedict, who edits this glowing collection of essays, writes in the introduction, “Hair matters because it’s always around, framing our faces, growing in, falling out, getting frizzy, changing colors—in short, demanding our attention: Comb me! Wash me! Relax me! Color me! It’s always there, conveying messages about who we are and what we want. Invite me to the prom! Love me! Hire me! Sleep with me! Don’t even think about sleeping with me! Take me seriously! Marry me! Mistake me—please!—for a much younger woman.”

The essays range from poignant—Suleika Jaouad writes about losing her hair to chemo at age 22—to hilarious—Alex Kuczynski explores trends in pubic hairstyling. All of them are illuminating, revealing that for women, hair is inextricably linked to identity, a visual cue to who they are and what matters to them. 

“I wanted so badly to be someone I wasn’t, wanted so badly to find a way to be comfortable in my skin,” writes novelist Jane Green in an essay that chronicles how her hair has changed to mirror her life circumstances over the years. “Hair was simply the easiest thing to change, the most obvious aspect of my appearance to alter.”

Thought-provoking and insightful, Me, My Hair, and I is a must-read for anyone who has ever dealt with frizz, gray hair, mothers insisting we get a haircut, fathers insisting we not, hair envy or hair disasters. In short, all of us.

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.