Some kids dream about writing poetry and fiction, about becoming writers. Not me. I didn’t know what I wanted out of life, but writing was never one of my dreams. But here I am. Guess I was just stupid. To be brutally honest, I wanted to be a pole-vaulter. My abiding secret. But I was such a lousy pole-vaulter in high school why brag about it. But the idea of jumping, vaulting upside down into blue sky, never left me. I wrote about this in my first book, Oppenheimer Is Watching Me, a cultural history of the Cold War. There’s a chapter dedicated to pole-vaulting, me soaring absurdly into thin air. That’s when it occurred to me there may be little difference between writing and jumping.
My most recent memoir, a book about loss. Eventually we all suffer catastrophic loss, and when that happens we are sent down a wormhole of grief that turns us inside out. A sad story, for sure. But that’s not all. The book is also playful, quirky, and self-ironic in a way that challenges the genre’s traditional solemnity. We’re all in need of stories of love, loss, and resilience—especially now—and it helps to know we’re all in this together.
A literary history of radio from Orson Welles to Ira Glass. Even though an academic thingy, a pretty cool book that puts together a literary tradition that was a vital part of broadcast radio during the mid-1930s through the 1940s and beyond. For a brief spell, a door opened in broadcast culture that allowed sophisticated forms of storytelling to mix with prevailing forms of popular radio. The book explores the way modernism was absorbed by radio and contributed to the boon in literary programming during radio’s heyday, elevating drama and introducing other genres, such as the literary essay and narrative poetry, to broadcast culture. The movement also encouraged experiments with narrative form and provoked interest in radiophonic techniques that pushed the boundaries of music and sound effects.
First memoir. The Cold War through a boy’s eyes. The true meaning of paranoia. Mutually assured destruction and all that dark stuff. The idea of death infiltrated our little psyches back then in weird ways, and that felt like an awful trespass. Duck and cover my ass—what that drill really meant was prepare to die.
A tribute to the essay as a complicated genre of literature. An anthology of nineteen critical pieces on how to approach the essay as a work of literary sophistication. Provides close-readings of canonical works by essayists ranging from Montaigne, Jonathan Swift, William Hazlitt, and Charles Lamb to Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, Anne Carson and David Foster Wallace, and they are written by well-known essayists themselves. The book argues that, given how the genre has made a remarkable literary comeback, the essay calls for the kind of attention provided other literary genres. That tradition is marked by a surprising degree of animation and expressive activity: Montaigne bemoaning his kidney stones, Robert Burton writing his way out of depression, William Hazlitt performing contempt, Virginia Woolf rambling through the streets of London, George Orwell managing the dirty work of the Empire, Annie Dillard caressing her blood-stained cat.