Description: Is it truth or fiction? Memoir or essay? Narrative or associative? To a writer like Michael Martone, questions like these are high praise. Martone's studied disregard of form and his unruffled embrace of the prospect that nothing--no story, no life--is ever quite finished have yielded some of today's most splendidly unconventional writing.
Brief description: MICHAEL MARTONE is a professor of English at the University of Alabama. He is the author of several books, including The Flatness and Other Landscapes, Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art, and Racing in Place (all Georgia). His stories and essays have appeared in Harper's, Esquire, Story, Antaeus, North American Review, Benzene, Epoch, Denver Quarterly, Iowa Review, Third Coast, Shenandoah, BOMB, and other magazines.
Review Quotes:
Martone's gentle, thoughtful, and wry tone informs these pitch-perfect segmented essays on growing up and moving on, on the mythic Midwest, the subtropical South, and the gloomy sunless Northeast. His concerns in this collection are about the act of creative 'transformation' whether the creative act is personal or aimed at an audience. The ordinary always transforms into the extraordinary in these wonderful, complex, and circling essays.
--Robin Hemley "author of Turning Life into Fiction"