Description:
In Trying to Be, John Haskell braids essay, fiction, memoir, and cultural history into a haunting meditation on loss, artistic legacy, and the unfinished project of the self. From dance studios to prison cells, from dying friends to dying fathers, Haskell maps the ways we inhabit--and resist--the roles we've been given.
Review Quotes:
"For what I most admire about Trying to Be is that the stories aren't just thinking about visual art, film, and dance; they are coming together with them. It feels as though this book is as close to artmaking as it is to writing, that Haskell's gaze is cast in different directions at the same time, into different planes of existence, that what happened when he wrote these stories is somehow still happening. This is obviously more than story, or it is story to remind us all over again of what is possible in this ever-shifting form." --Amina Cain, judge, Catherine L. Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize and author of A Horse at Night
"[Trying to Be] is an unconventional and quietly eloquent rumination on what it means to live well." --Publisher's Weekly