Foxtrue463

Tin House Books

February 04, 2020

5.9 X 9.0 X 1.1 inches | 1.05 pounds

English

Hardcover

9781947793286

Jenn Shapland's work won a 2017 Pushcart Prize and fellowships/residencies at Ucross, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Yaddo, the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, and Vermont Studio Center. Her essays have been published in Tin House, THE Magazine, Pastelegram, The Lifted Brow, Electric Literature, NANOfiction, and The Millions. She teaches in the Creative Writing department at the Institute of American Indian Arts and has a PhD in English from UT Austin. She designs and makes clothing for Agnes. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sleek, elegant. .. both a memoir of her own coming-out and a nuanced exploration of her magnificent obsession with the Georgia author known for her sensitive portrayals of misfits.
I felt so seen and moved and completed by this book that I haven't been able to shut up about it for weeks.
This is a work of lesbian recovery, of literary biography and of breathtaking queer autobiography by an exceptional debut author.
Shapland's account is part memoir and part history, but it's also a pointed critique of the rampant LGBTQ+ erasure in so much of history, and a powerful attempt to reclaim McCullers' true identity.
In lucid, distilled, honest prose, Jenn Shapland teaches us about McCullers, the desire for recognition, loneliness, the complexities of queer history, the seductions and resistances of the archive, and, all throughout, love.--Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts
You don't have to be a Carson McCullers fan to admire this remarkable book. It's a biography that's also a memoir, a story of obsession and longing. Captivating and trenchant and moving, Shapland's genre-mixing debut will stay with me a long time.--R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries
Following along with Shapland-as-detective is a delight, and the mystery she sets out to solve is one of those wicked unsolvables: how do we account for the apertures in language, history, and identity?
Shapland interweaves candid self-questioning and revealing personal stories with a nuanced portrait of a writer who confessed her loves were 'untouchable' and her feelings 'inarticulable.' A sensitive chronicle of a biographer's search for truth.
This book will change the way you think about the truth. .. Shapland possesses the perfect storm of talents to push McCullers's love life, and beautiful writing, into the light of this century during a moment when we need all the queer heroes we can get.--Kate Gorton
This is a gorgeous, brilliant book that is all but guaranteed to resonate with queer folks, word nerds, and readers everywhere.
A fine narrative of how the best writers express the deepest secrets of the heart.
A hard-won inquiry into how we seek out the truth of ourselves and others in ways that often, by necessity, aren't straightforward, that arrive in our lives in glimmering bits and shards. . . . Shapland's book is the kind of state-of-the-form reckoning that makes one wish there were more like it.
This book uncovers ways women's queer history has been ignored. It's a personal, powerful, genre-bending account of literary discovery.

Conversation Starters from ReadingGroupChoices.com

Read More