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Book Title

The Art of Time in Memoir

Subtitle
Then, Again
Author 1
Sven Birkerts
Body
In The Art of Time in Memoir, critic, editor, and memoirist Sven Birkerts examines the human impulse to write about oneself. "Memoir is, for better and often for worse, the genre of our times," Birkerts admits. But what makes one memoir memorable and another self-serving? What makes the difference between graceful disclosure and sensational self-exposure? Birkerts passionately argues that the memoirist's strategies for navigating time itself reveal the power and resonance of a writer's life. By examining memoirs such as Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Virginia Woolf's unfinished A Sketch of the Past, and Mary Karr's The Liar's Club, Birkerts describes the memoirist's essential art of assembling patterns of meaning, stirring to life our own sense of past and present.

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List Price
$14.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-55597-489-3
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
120
Series
Series
Trim Size
Trim Size
5 x 7
Keynote
Critic and memoirist Sven Birkert's meditation on the allure and the dangers of chronology as a writer renders his own life

About the Author

Sven  Birkerts
Credit: Mara Birkerts
Sven Birkerts is the author of Changing the Subject and nine previous books, including The Other Walk,The Gutenberg Elegies, The Art of Time in Memoir, and My Sky Blue Trades. He is the director of the Bennington Writing Seminars, and he edits the journal AGNI, which is based at Boston University. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts
 
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Praise

  • “Among the most insightful books on the genre.”—Ron Slate
  • “Expansive and eclectic and laserous and lucid and impassioned and heartlessly smart. Birkerts is the most interesting and persuasive critic in the U.S. today.”—David Foster Wallace
  • “To read Birkerts is to hear (and enjoy hearing) the voice of literary conscience.”—Seamus Heaney
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