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Book Title

An Image of My Name Enters America

Subtitle
Essays
Author 1
Lucy Ives
Body
Again, today, if I must choose between love and memory, I choose memory.

What would you risk to know yourself? Which stories are you willing to follow to the bitter end, revise, or, possibly, begin all over? In this collection of five interrelated essays, Lucy Ives explores identity, national fantasy, and history. She examines events and records from her own life—a childhood obsession with My Little Pony, papers and notebooks from college, an unwitting inculcation into the myth of romantic love, and the birth of her son—to excavate larger aspects of the past that have been suppressed or ignored. With bracing insight and extraordinary range, she weaves new stories about herself, her family, our country, and our culture. She connects postmodern irony to eighteenth-century cults, Cold War musicals to a great uncle’s suicide to the settlement of the American West, museum period rooms to the origins of her last name to the Assyrian genocide, and the sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem to the development of modern obstetrics. Here Ives retrieves shadowy sites of pain and fear and, with her boundless imagination, attentiveness, and wit, transforms them into narratives of repair and possibility.

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List Price
$20.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-64445-311-7
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Pages
Pages
336
Trim Size
Trim Size
5.5 x 8.25
Keynote
From a “brilliant, one-of-a-kind maestro” (Booklist), a vibrant tapestry of memoir, research, and criticism

About the Author

Lucy  Ives
Credit: Photographer Credit / Will Matsuda
Lucy Ives is the author of three novels: Impossible Views of the WorldLoudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World; and Life Is Everywhere. She is the 2023–2025 Bonderman Assistant Professor of the Practice in Literary Arts at Brown University.
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