Following the acclaimed Dunce, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, comes Mary Ruefle's latest prose publication The Book.
True to its bold title, The Book affirms Mary Ruefle's legacy as (dubbed by Publishers Weekly) 'the patron saint of childhood and the everyday.' With the same curiosity found in Madness, Rack, and Honey and My Private Property, Ruefle's prose here feels both omniscient and especially intimate. 'It seems I believe in a bygone world though I no longer live there,' she writes. 'Will I continue to read about all that is dusty?'
In the spirit of friendship, Ruefle generously invites us to query ourselves as readers and thinkers in a world that will eventually endure without us.
'Straightforward in form, comic and companionable in tone, blessed with the Martian gift of seeing the strange in the ordinary and vice-versa...' - Joel Brouwer, Poetry
'Ruefle's speakers muse in a very deliberate, declarative syntax in a lot of universalities, generalities, and absolutes, speaking often for all of us.'- Adrien Blevins, Ploughshares
Table of Contents:
Untitled
The Photograph
Pixie
The Wrapped Book
Nettles
The Bark
Nope
We Need To Talk About Ice Cream
The Candy
House Hunting
A Lesson In History
My Life As A Scholar
The Cashew
My Memory of A Story by Lydia Davis
I Read Years Ago And Never Forgot
The Stagehand
The Trees
What Happens When You Die
The Cloud Beaters
The Translator
Golden Crumbs
Love Story
The Wind
The Color
The Perk
The Heart, What Is It?
I Dream Of Jung
Lucky Dragon
My Dying Friend
Dear Friends
Letter To Elizabeth Bishop
The Gables
Affordable Vacation
An American Haiku
Teeth Of Noon
The Effusive
The Novel
The Book
Chilly Observation
The Plum And The Devil
