NewPages Blog

Guest Post by Andrea Roach

I am reading Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House, a memoir about generations of family and place (New Orleans, pre & post-Katrina, and their family homes). One of the things that I like about this book is the artful way the author brings the reader into what could be an extremely confusing story, with so many characters and the landscape of New Orleans, by initially laying it out like a map: this is where my neighborhood and my house fit into the history of NOLA, and here’s a blueprint of my relatives leading to me. She refers to Katrina as The Water and so, like the Yellow House, makes it its own complicated character. It’s a multilayered achievement that connects history, politics, race, culture, disaster, and identity, while also telling the ways in which we become our homes and our homes become us. I’d recommend!

The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom. Grove Press, August 2019.

Reviewer bio: Andrea Roach is a writer of memoir, essays, and creative nonfiction. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and was a finalist for The Writer’s Room of Boston Fellowship Award.

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Guest Post by Kelsey Owen

Lately, I’ve been finding solace in rereading A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. Written to be read like a novel, Eggers’s genre-splicing memoir follows him through becoming a parent by proxy to his eight-year-old brother after the sudden losses of both parents.

What’s so enduring about this book is how, on the surface, Eggers embodies the pessimism and acid-reflux-irony of postmodernism, but he swiftly and frequently undercuts his own nihilism by exalting the constructive power of familial bonds and solidarity between characters—or, real people. Character-ish people. The narrative style itself draws on the ironic, self-aggrandizing voices of writers like David Foster Wallace, sharing the same undercurrent of desire to locate and create meaning in the seemingly vapid and obscene.

Eggers’s competing aspirations to distinguish himself from others and assimilate into something greater than himself makes his journey both intense and darkly humorous, but Eggers’s often last-minute refusals to abandon the silver-lining, his enduring sentimentality amid existential and physical destitution, never fail to lead you back out into the sun.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. Vintage, February 2001.

Reviewer bio: Kelsey Owen is an editorial assistant at Under the Gum Tree.

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Guest Post by Evan White

I’ve been reading the memoir How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones. What I like about the book is this: the story of a young, gay black man growing up in the south could go any number of expectedly tragic ways. And in the hands of a lesser writer, a story like Jones’s might have fallen prey to the unrelenting misery that is so often a substitute for poignancy. As it stands, however, How We Fight for Our Lives clips along without stopping to cry, and it’s this clear-eyed observation—this cataloguing of experience, and, by implication, the self—that makes Jones’s story by turns shocking, elegiac, and revelatory. Plus, he’s funny.

How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones. Simon & Schuster, October 2019.

Reviewer bio: Evan White is a graduate of the University of California, Davis. White co-founded Absurd Publications and published the anthology, All the Vegetarians in Texas Have Been Shot, in addition to the creative journal The Oddity.

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Guest Post by Katie Anderson

The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary is a beautifully written series of letters about the evolution of humankind published in 1793. Karl von Eckartshausen describes the “mystery of the New Man” as the synthesis of an alchemical union between man and spirit, or man and God. This transformative art he explains must occur as the mystery teachings from ancient Greece, through a series of stages. This formula espouses an evolution of knowing thyself outwardly, then inwardly.

Eckartshausen illustrates the formula for the transformative art as one that confers wisdom at successive levels, but not as an undertaking belonging to an elite group. He had envisioned it as a spiritual pursuit that the whole of humankind would enter, not a secret practice known only to men in the lodges and salons of the eighteenth century. Eckartshausen uses biblical symbolism and allegory to express the philosophy of an esoteric spiritual counsel 55 years before the advent of Spiritualism and 102 years before Theosophy. This “interior community of light” in union with humankind, produces the illuminated community. Two archetypes embody the exoteric and the esoteric, the Priest and the Prophet, whose union produces the archetype of the illuminated man.

People are looking towards traditional and alternative forms of spirituality to find inner peace of mind. This is in response to the constraints of shelter orders and social distancing measures in place to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic. Quarantine has stripped away human social interaction, but it also has dissolved our illusions. We’re no longer comfortably numb. When there isn’t anyone to talk to, we listen to the silence and talk to ourselves. What might we learn in the interim?

The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary by Karl von Eckartshausen, edited by Isabel de Steiger. William Rider & Son, Ltd, 1909.

Reviewer bio: Katie Anderson is a historian and writer living in Troy, Missouri.  Her work has appeared in Eternal Haunted Summer and The Far Shining One.

Guest Post by Leland Davidson

As COVID-19 has ravaged this world effecting many emotionally and physically, the emotions of how governments are handling are telling as well. Two books show a serendipitous attitude we are dealing with today as a society, while also showing history repeating itself.

One of these is The Hot Zone by Richard Preston, which gives a in depth story and research on Ebola. The book is based around different stories detailing where it came from, how it spread, and close call to a pandemic that almost ravaged the United States. What makes this book so chilling are the stories that took place in the 1980s and 90s in the continent of Africa and United States, but are detailed examples of what we are seeing today. These stories range from the beginning of the disease’s origins showing how messing with nature can cause a pandemic, or how nonuse of safety measures will help spread the disease. This book is a chilling narrative of how history, disease, and panic is not new, which should be a lesson for all.

Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution by Holly Tucker details the history of blood transfusion in England and France in the 1600s, going into detail of its history and the people involved in its transformation. Showing medical science experiments of the time may seem crazy today, but it is still relevant in modern thinking. With current news stories of people selling snake oils or ways to cure COVID-19, we see similarities in the core belief of the time that blood from a cow transfused with a sheep will make a monster. The book shows how scientific, political, and religious clashes of the 1600s mimic today’s clashes. Tucker details the narrative that stopping science and medical experiments will not only stop breakthroughs but keep humans in the dark instead of forward thinking to a better life.

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. Penguin Random House, June 1999.
Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution by Holly Tucker. W. W. Norton & Company, May 2012.

Reviewer bio: Leland Davidson, a native of East Tennessee, holds an M.A. in Conflict Resolution and Coexistence from Heller School at Brandeis University, 2020.

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