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Jo Ann Beard, one of the most influential writers in America, illuminates the complexities of the human condition in this career-spanning collection

About the Author

Jo Ann Beard is the author the collections Festival Days and The Boys of My Youth, published jointly in the United Kingdom as The Collected Works. She is also the author of the novel In Zanesville, and the novella Cheri. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays, and other magazines and anthologies. She has received a Whiting Foundation Award and nonfiction fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2022, she received an American Academy of Arts and Letters 2022 Award in Literature. She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

Reviews

'Jo Ann Beard is a remarkably modest writer, a kind of literary celebrity ... readers who become fans of her work view it with the kind of amazement associated with human and literal stars' - Mary Gaitskill

'A towering talent... Perhaps instead of an essayist we should think of her as a poet-naturalist, wedding intuition and observation, and forming from this union something unaccountably yet undeniably real' - New York Times Book Review

'Darkly moving, and, at times, unexpectedly - almost unbearably - suspenseful' - Geoff Dyer

'Reading Jo Ann Beard is like setting out on a walk with a curious and intelligent friend who is determined to show you how seemingly unrelated things share a secret kinship' - Adrienne Brodeur

'Generous, beautifully observed, compassionate and, at times, genuinely funny' - A L Kennedy