Biography

Roxane Gay's Audacious Book Club Pick - An acclaimed writer goes searching for the truth about her wildly unconventional Southern family--and finds that our obsession with ancestors opens up new ways of seeing ourselves--in this "brilliant mix of personal memoir and cultural observation" (The Boston Globe).

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR, Time, Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Esquire, Garden & Gun

Maud Newton's ancestors have vexed and fascinated her since she was a girl. Her mother's father, who came of age in Texas during the Great Depression, was said to have married thirteen times and been shot by one of his wives. Her mother's grandfather killed a man with a hay hook and died in an institution. Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated through Maud's maternal lines back to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts. Maud's father, an aerospace engineer turned lawyer, was an educated man who extolled the virtues of slavery and obsessed over the "purity" of his family bloodline, which he traced back to the Revolutionary War. He tried in vain to control Maud's mother, a whirlwind of charisma and passion given to feverish projects: thirty rescue cats, and a church in the family's living room where she performed exorcisms.

Her parents' divorce, when it came, was a relief. Still, her position at the intersection of her family bloodlines inspired in Newton inspired an anxiety that she could not shake, a fear that she would replicate their damage. She saw similar anxieties in the lives of friends, in the works of writers and artists she admired. As obsessive in her own way as her parents, Newton researched her genealogy--her grandfather's marriages, the accused witch, her ancestors' roles in slavery and genocide--and sought family secrets through her DNA. But immersed in census archives and cousin matches, she yearned for deeper truths. Her journey took her into the realms of genetics, epigenetics, and the debates over intergenerational trauma. She mulled over modernity's dismissal of ancestors along with psychoanalytic and spiritual traditions that center them.

Searching, moving, and inspiring, Ancestor Trouble is one writer's attempt to use genealogy--a once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry--to expose the secrets and contradictions of her own ancestors, and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors offers all of us.

Jesse Ball has produced fourteen acclaimed works of deeply empathetic absurdism in poetry and fiction. Now, he offers readers his first memoir, one that showcases his "humane curiosity" (James Wood) and invites the reader into a raw and personal account of love, grief, and memory. Inspired by the memoir Édouard Levé put to paper shortly before his death, Autoportrait is an extraordinarily frank and intimate work from one of America's most brilliant young authors.

The subtle power of Ball's voice conjures the richness of everyday life. On each page, half-remembered moments are woven together with the joys and triumphs--and the mistakes and humiliations, too--that somehow tell us who we are, why we are here. Held at the same height as tragic accounts of illness or death are moments of startling beauty, banality, or humor: I wake in the morning, I sit, I walk long distances. If there is somewhere to swim, I may swim. If I have a bicycle, I will ride it, especially to meet someone. There is no more preparing for me to do, other than preparing for death, and I do that by laughing. Not laughing at death, of course. Laughing at myself.

An extraordinary memoir that reminds us what is possible and builds to the kind of power one might feel reading Anne Carson's Glass Essay, or Joe Brainard's I Remember. Autoportrait will leave you feeling utterly invigorated, inspired, and a little afraid.

Many are asking, what is wrong with teaching, learning, schooling, and education, and what can be done? You will get the answers (panacea) from the letters of a mad public school teacher: intrepid, irascible, cantankerous, provocative, passionate, thought-provoking, iconoclastic, and enhanced with vitriolic demagoguery.

As a grad student / colleague said, Thanks for an enjoyable class on education issues in society. I also enjoyed your letters to the editor. I've been told that I say what other people think. Well, you write and publish what we're all thinking.