PAUL LISICKY / The Burning House and RYAN VAN METER / If You Knew Then What I Know Now
“Paul Lisicky’s The Burning House smolders with muscular, beautiful language,and shines with love for two sisters as each blossoms darkly into her own future.Lisicky’s odd man out finds his way deeply inside the reader’s desires and hopes. The answer to the question, ‘what do (good) men want?’ may well be answered in this elliptical, pitch-perfect gem of a novel.” — Jayne Anne Phillips
When Isidore Mirsky’s sister-in-law Joan loses her apartment, she moves in. Mirsky’s world is already in flux—his job lost, his bayside town under siege by developers—and now he must struggle with his bewildering attraction to Joan, who evokes for him all the qualities that once drew him to his wife. How can a warm, unpredictable man remain true to himself and to the woman he loves? Desire, and the renewal it brings, might just be the thing that causes damage. Outrageous, tender, and alive with the sound of Isidore’s voice, The Burning House captures a man at his most vulnerable moment, on the brink ofsomething new.
"The Burning House is an achingly lovely novel about the things that bind us together in this life and the things that pull us apart. Paul Lisicky has an extraordinary gift for exploring emotional nuance and the rhythms of desire. With this book he yet again asserts himself as one of the select writers who continues to teach me about the complexities of the human heart.” -- Robert Olen Butler
Paul Lisicky is also the author of the novel Lawnboy and the memoir Famous Builder. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, StoryQuarterly, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, Hotel Amerika, Prairie Schooner, and has been widely anthologized. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He has taught in the graduate writing programs at Cornell University, Rutgers-Newark, Sarah Lawrence College, and Antioch University Los Angeles. He currently teaches at NYU.
The middle-American coming-of-age has found new life in Ryan Van Meter’s coming-out, made as strange as it is familiar by acknowledging the role played by gender and sexuality. In fourteen linked essays, If You Knew Then What I Know Now reinvents the memoir with all-encompassing empathy -- for bully and bullied alike. A father pitches baseballs at his hapless son, and a grandmother watches with silent forbearance as the same slim, quiet boy sets the table dressed in a blue satin dress. Another essay explores origins of the word “faggot,” and its etymological connection to “flaming queen.” This deft collection maps the unremarkable landscapes of childhood with compassion and precision, allowing awkwardness its own beauty. This is essay as an argument for the intimate -- not the sensational -- and an embrace of all the skinned knees in our stumble toward adulthood.
“Ryan Van Meter’s is both a charming and wounding intelligence. To reada book this observant, this fiercely honest, and this effortlessly beautiful isto feel the very pulse of contemporary American essays.” -- John D’Agata
Ryan Van Meter’s essays have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, Arts & Letters, and Fourth Genre, among others, and selected for anthologies including Best American Essays 2009. In the summer of 2009, he was awarded a residency at the MacDowell Colony. He currently is an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at The University of San Francisco.
- Street:
- 1644 Haight St.
- City:
- San Francisco ,
- Province:
- California
- Postal Code:
- 94117-2816
- Country:
- United States
