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Engine Running: Essays: 21st Century Essays

Autor Cade Mason
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 4 dec 2022
Runner Up, 2021 Gournay Prize

Engine Running explores debut author Cade Mason’s gradual distancing from home and old selves alongside an increasingly fractured family doing the same. Starting at the beginning of his parents’ love and working past its end, he combs through memory to piece together a portrait of a family then and now: of a father, reeling after a blindsiding divorce; of a mother, anxious to move on; of a sister, caught in the crossfire; and of a son, learning to embrace his sexuality even as he fears that his own loves may have deepened the rift between his parents. 
 
Lush and innovative, these essays contemplate childhood memories and family secrets, religion and queerness in the rural South, and the ways rituals and contours of manhood are passed through generations. Most of all, we feel with Mason what it is to grapple with and love a place even as you yearn to leave.
 
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780814258507
ISBN-10: 0814258506
Pagini: 192
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 25 mm
Greutate: 0.25 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Mad Creek Books
Seria 21st Century Essays


Recenzii

“These essays travel the roads of memory and imagination in sentences as sharp as their setting’s horizon, poignantly navigating the distance between what we once knew and who we’ve become. Joan Didion wrote, ‘A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest.’ West Texas belongs to Cade Mason.” —Jill Talbot, author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir 
“One of the most potent incantations of a particular time and place I can remember reading in a long time. Mason conjures his landscape and family with intense clarity, generosity of spirit, humility, and affection. A beautiful book.” —Ryan Van Meter, author of If You Knew Then What I Know Now
“Mason never fails to evoke the infinitude of West Texas's landscape, a place where beauty hovers on the horizon like a storm. In Engine Running, he pulls off the impossible: profiling his escape while honoring his longing for this windswept, cloud-haloed home.” —Clinton Crockett Peters, author of Mountain Madness: Found and Lost in the Peaks of America and Japan
“… An innovative archive of stories and selves frozen in time … Mason teaches readers what it means to love a place that you must also leave in order to live.” —Sarah Fawn Montgomery, Electric Literature

Notă biografică

Cade Mason holds an MA in English and Creative Writing from the University of North Texas, where he has also taught. His work has appeared in Hotel AmerikaDIAGRAMNinth Letter, and Literary HubEngine Running is his first book.

Extras

Generations (Like Surrender)

We're several miles from town, Post, Texas, where there's nothing much but cotton and the sky, and all around us it's the bare-slate land I'd once called home. I'm visiting from what feels far away-the Metroplex. I've ridden out with my father, and his, to load a couple of cattle into a trailer.

(And it takes no time to realize that I feel like less a man out here.)

I don't belong, I think. Not here, not anymore, at least. Anyway, I sure don't look the part: black jeans hug skinny to my legs, undirtied and near brand-new; my white Converse, the most worn part of me, appear stain-spotted gray along their sides; and my blue t-shirt, a hug against my belly, is just a shade or two darker than the bright sky that holds solid above us. It's the one constant, I think, the thing about this place that hasn't changed, that won't ever: that sky.

(And the country-here-now, I think, it makes me feel so small.)

I'm 26, and like a child, I'm stepping back to watch the work. My father's found an old plow part. It's sizable, near rusted. Half buried in the dirt. It's settled near the base of the leaning yellow house where we've stopped to get the trailer. Where several generations of my father's family learned to work, and hard. There's a picture of them here, what's tucked, yellow-faded, into one of my grandmother's many picture albums. It's the first generation lined and coupled up together, standing by the porch. My grandmother has made it her aim to document her family and her husband's family's history-our history-and she taps the corner when she pulls the photo out and shows me: 1925, it says in chicken scratch, above the sepia earth. The men wear suits with vests or else something close: a dark pant with a dress shirt and a tie, and they look, I think, like men. Two women of the three wear white dresses where the matriarch wears black, and every dress meets skin or dark hose at just below mid-calf. All eight of those standing in the photo arch their shoulders forward as if some great weight has settled at
the very moment they've been captured. Their row of faces stare toward the camera's lens, and the biggest smile is hardly one at all; their eyes must face the sun as they squint, tight, and their mouths appear as solid lines to match them. Even the youngest of this group-or the one who I imagine must be: the girl on the left of the porch's steps who can't be much older than 16, maybe 17-her body appears to struggle against itself, as if she's working to hold herself up from something unseen-some force that's pulling down and tying her to the earth. The man who stands up highest, on the first step of the porch beside his wife, he has my father's hands, and his father's hands. It's a small fist curled at the edge of a dress shirt's cuff-a tint darker than his face-cracked and lined with dirt.

Now, all these years later, my father's father-the man that I, my sister, my cousins and our parents all call Grandaddy-nearing 80-he helps my father raise the piece of plow. The movement shakes off dust, or well enough, so that it powders down and back into its place like snow. I step forward from my lean against my father's truck-what's bright, bright red, and, still, what's somewhat new to me-longing to do something, anything, with my hands. But Grandaddy waves me off with a nod of his head. And my father waves me off with a nod of his head. And the motion makes me wonder how they see me. If they think I might get hurt.

(They're gentle signs, I think. But there they are.)

Cuprins

PART I
Exodus
Knowing Me, Knowing You
The Howling-Out
On Roadside Crosses
Generations (Like Surrender)

PART I I
What We Are

PART I I I
Baptism
Axis
Blurs
Child of the Clouded Brow
In Case You Find Us Unresponsive

PART I V
Coda

Descriere

A queer coming-of-age memoir-in-essays that investigates a family’s fracturing in the aftermath of divorce in rural West Texas.