Graywolf Press

“Like a modern-day Proust, though at blessedly shorter length, Birkerts’s keen eye and sinuous prose are triggered time and again by the humblest of objects. . . . [The Other Walk] should be picked up, reread and savored for its expressive beauty and its gentle reminder that we can find life’s fullness amid its most inconsequential moments.”—Shelf Awareness

T hroughout his life, Sven Birkerts, one of the country’s foremost literary critics, has carved out time for himself—to walk, to swim, to read, to contemplate. Now in his late fifties, he has clocked up many thousands of hours of reflection. It shows in his prose, which proceeds at a refreshingly deliberative pace as it draws the reader into his patterns and rhythms.

In this deeply appealing collection of essays, Birkerts looks back through his life, as well as at the generations before him, and ahead at the lives of his children. He shares his son’s frightening sailing accident, how he feels when he encounters his own prose from years ago, how finding a lost ring releases a cascade of memories. The objects he sees around him are excavated, their layers exposed.

But most winning of all is the emerging character of Birkerts himself. We come to have great respect for this competitive but loyal friend, the caring father who respects his children’s independence even as he tries to connect with them, the traveler, the onetime bookseller, the writer at all stages of his writing life, and throughout it all, the attentive, passionate reader.

“One of America’s finest literary critics brings us 45 short autobiographical pieces meditating on the necessity and delight of quiet contemplation in a busy existence. . . . Sven Birkerts’s thoughtful and elegant pensées reveal the enchantment awaiting anyone who slows down long enough to look.”

—The Barnes & Noble Review

“Birkerts’ essays, many of them about fatherhood, some about his Latvian heritage, are full of the passage of time—nostalgia, regret, melancholy. . . . In each essay, he looks for ‘the prompt, the sliver, the bit of grit that grows the pearl.’ He looks for the ‘smallest detail in the heart of the day.’” —Newsday

“[Birkerts] is one of the foremost essayists working today. He doesn’t care about seeming cool or sounding smart; he writes what he thinks. In this new gathering, he combines his typically astute literary criticism with personal essays about his first post-college job at Borders Books in Ann Arbor, Michigan; the night he learned to play chess; and his reflections on Saul Bellow.” —Chicago Tribune

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The Other Walk

Essays