Books
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. That was my abiding secret. I was such a lousy pole-vaulter in high school, though, 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 these two things, writing and jumping. I don’t know about you but whenever I write I feel wrong side up, blood rushing to my head. It’s an exquisite sensation.
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. Click for excerpt.
A literary history of radio from Orson Welles to Ira Glass. Even though an academic thingy, a pretty cool book that 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. “Captivating,” say the critics. Click for excerpt.
My first memoir looks at the Cold War through a boy’s eyes. 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. The true meaning of paranoia. Plus a cultural history of an America on the brink of madness. Click for excerpt.
A tribute to the essay as a complicated genre of literature with 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. 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. Click for excerpt.