Elizabeth Alexander’s memoir The Light of the World is a story told in pieces—a written collage, or whatever the literary equivalent might be of Russian nesting dolls.
Review: The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander
Category: Reviews
An archive of our reviews of memoirs, essay collections, and other works of creative nonfiction.
Review: The Unspeakable by Meghan Daum
Writer Meghan Daum … suspects her own book will be equally loved and hated. The Unspeakable contains 10 personal essays on a variety of topics from dogs to Joni Mitchell.
Review: Starve the Vulture by Jason Carney
Jason Carney’s debut memoir, Starve the Vulture is a book even the most avid haters of memoir could love.
Review: Writing Beat and Other Occasions of Literary Mayhem by John Tytell
The book reads as a collage of Tytell’s impressive stories of interviewing and writing about the Beats and writers such as Ezra Pound, Norman Mailer, and Henry Miller…
Review: Same Time Next Week — True Stories of Working Through Mental Illness, edited by Lee Gutkind
OCD constitutes more than a tendency to organize meticulously your email folders, or always put the remote in the same place on the table.
Review: What I Know For Sure (audio) by Oprah Winfrey
While promoting the movie Beloved in 1998, Oprah was interviewed by Gene Siskel. And the (now-late) film critic stumped her.
Review: My First Novel — Tales of Woe and Glory edited by Alan Watt
… the anthology features more than 20 writers of varying genres and backgrounds and their stories, as the title suggests, of woe and glory.
Review: Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham
Dunham’s new memoir, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned” (Random House, 2014), is equal parts horrifying and hilarious.
Review: Never Can Say Goodbye – Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York, edited by Sari Botton
If you’ve ever been pick-pocketed by a junkie, or roomed with an artist who painted with his own blood and semen, or watched two rats fight over human feces, then I have a must-read for you.
Review: True Stories, Well Told – from the first 20 years of Creative Nonfiction Magazine, edited by Lee Gutkind and Hattie Fletcher
“Creative nonfiction is tremendously flexible…. There aren’t many rules around here.” The collection that followed held true to those words…
