Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction

10 best books like Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction (Judith Kitchen): Playing House: Notes of a Reluctant Mother, Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories, The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers Of/On Creative Nonfiction, The Best American Essays 2003, Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction, The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, The Best American Essays 2011, Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present, Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love, Quench Your Thirst with Salt

AuthorLauren Slater
ISBN0807001732
Acclaimed author Lauren Slater ruminates on what it means to be family.

Lauren Slater’s rocky childhood left her cold to the idea of ever creating a family of her own, but a husband, two dogs, two children, and three houses later, she came around to the challenges, trials, and unexpected rewards...
Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories
AuthorKatha Pollitt
ISBN1400063329
Celebrated for her award-winning political columns, criticism, and poetry, Katha Pollitt now shows us another side of her talent. Learning to Drive is a surprising, revealing, and entertaining collection of stories drawn from the author's own life.
With deep feeling and sharp insight, Pollitt...
AuthorRobert L. Root Jr.
ISBN0321434846
This best-selling anthology is a comprehensive and indispensable introduction to the way creative nonfiction is written today. The Fourth Genre offers the most comprehensive, teachable, and current introduction available today to the cutting-edge, evolving genre of creative nonfiction. While...
AuthorAnne Fadiman
ISBN0618341617
Since 1986, The Best American Essays has gathered the most interesting and provocative writing of the year, establishing a firm place as the leading annual of its kind. The volume is edited each year by an esteemed writer who brings a fresh eye to the selections. Previous editors have included Elizabeth...
AuthorBrenda Miller
ISBN0072512784
This is a great book, and if you look for it, try for the earlier edition with the anthology in the back. The most recent edition took the essays out and that makes no sense. Why read about how to write creative nonfiction and not immediately have an example?

At this point I have read most of the book...
AuthorPhillip Lopate
For more than four hundred years, the personal essay has been one of the richest and most vibrant of all literary forms. Distinguished from the  detached formal essay by its friendly, conversational tone, its loose structure, and its drive toward candor and self-disclosure, the personal essay...
AuthorEdwidge Danticat
ISBN0547479778
The Best American Series®
First, Best, and Best-Selling

The Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites . A special...
AuthorLex Williford
ISBN1416531742
From memoir to journalism, personal essays to cultural criticism - this unique, indispensable anthology brings together fifty unforgettable works from all genres of creative nonfiction. Selected by five hundred writers, English professors, and creative writing teachers from across the country,...
AuthorDebra Gwartney
ISBN0547054475
An intensely emotional and redemptive memoir about a mother's mission to rescue her runaway daughters

 

After a miserably failed marriage, Debra Gwartney moves with her four young daughters to Eugene, Oregon, for a new job and what she hopes will be a new life for herself and her family....
AuthorNicole Walker
ISBN0978612779
Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. "Part affecting memoir, part lyric meditation on water, part cultural critique, but finally about all that is unquenchable in the human experience, Nicole Walker has created a book that is truly sui generis. By turns wry, elegiac, and always elegant in its precision...
AuthorEmily Fox Gordon
ISBN0385525893
The sexual politics of a faculty wives dinner. The psychological gamesmanship of an inappropriate therapist. The emotional minefield of an extended family wedding . . .
 
Whatever the subject, Emily Fox Gordon’s disarmingly personal essays are an art form unto themselves—reflecting...
AuthorPhilip Stevick
Contents:

Life story by John Barth
The seventh trunk by Heinrich Böll
How I contemplated the world from the Detroit House of Correction and began my life over again by Joyce Carol Oates
The coal shoveller by Keith Fort
Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote by Jorge Luis Borges
Gogol's...
AuthorMary Oliver
ISBN0618982728
Addendum to original review, explaining why I have downgraded this to two stars - (italicized material below):

My second criticism is probably more a reflection of my personal taste, and may not be shared by other readers. But I felt that Mary Oliver's background as a poet shone through, with...
I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives from the Other Side of Silence
AuthorKim Dana Kupperman
ISBN1555975607
I Just Lately Started Buying Wings is a finely crafted debut, winner of the 2009 Bakeless Nonfiction Prize

Kim Dana Kupperman's essays plumb the emotional and spiritual depths of a transitory life. Her episodic "missives" cover territory from the chaos of a frenetic childhood to love affairs,...
AuthorWilliam Stafford
ISBN0472063715
If you want to better understand how William Stafford approaches writing, this book may help with that. Through a combination of essays, poetry and interviews, Stafford presents what I can only describe as a kind of philosophy of writing, including his approach to helping others find their own voice....
A Private History of Awe
AuthorScott Russell Sanders
ISBN0865477345
An original and searching memoir from "one of America's finest essayists" (Phillip Lopate)

When Scott Russell Sanders was four, his father held him in his arms during a thunderstorm, and he felt awe--"the tingle of a power that surges through bone and rain and everything." He says, "The search...
AuthorDinty W. Moore
ISBN0984616667
Unmatched in its focus on a concise and popular emerging genre, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction features 26 eminent writers, editors, and teachers offering expert analysis, focused exercises, and helpful examples of what make the brief essay form such a perfect medium...
AuthorLia Purpura
ISBN1932511393
“Purpura is the real deal, and so is every successive sentence in this collection. A cornucopiac vocabulary is married to a strict economy of expression; an offbeat curiosity is married to the courage of difficult witnessing. . . .”—Albert Goldbarth “Purpura's prose is a system of delicate...
AuthorJohn D'Agata
ISBN1555973752
In this singular collection, John D'Agata takes a literary tour of lyric essays written by the masters of the craft. Beginning with 1975 and John McPhee's ingenious piece, "The Search for Marvin Gardens," D'Agata selects an example of creative nonfiction for each subsequent year. These essays are...
AuthorJohn Jeremiah Sullivan
ISBN0544309901
“A creature from an alternative universe . . . wanting to understand what is on the American mind should rush to the nearest bookstore and buy a copy of this distinguished anthology . . . Exhilarating.” — Publishers Weekly

The Best American Essays 2014 is selected and introduced by...
AuthorJohn Donahue
ISBN1565129857
Look who’s making dinner! Twenty-one of our favorite writers and chefs expound upon the joys—and perils—of feeding their families.

Mario Batali’s kids gobble up monkfish liver and foie gras. Peter Kaminsky’s youngest daughter won’t eat anything at all. Mark Bittman reveals...
AuthorMegan Stielstra
In these insightful, compassionate, gutsy, and heartbreaking personal essays, Stielstra, whose essay “Channel B” was recently featured in Best American Essays 2013 edited by Cheryl Strayed, explores the messy, maddening beauty of adulthood with wit, intelligence, and biting humor.

The...
AuthorMarjorie Williams
ISBN1586484575
Marjorie Williams knew Washington from top to bottom. Beloved for her sharp analysis, elegant prose and exceptional ability to intuit character, Williams wrote political profiles for the Washington Post and Vanity Fair that came to be considered the final word on the capital's most powerful figures....
Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor
AuthorTara Herivel
ISBN0415935385
Paul Wright has been reporting on the way we treat our poverty-stricken and incarcerated criminal outcasts(the majority of whom are mentally ill)for over twenty years and every one of his books is essential reading for anyone who cares about human rights here in america, where we now have more people...
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