Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. This new book from 2005 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize winner Stan Persky is a generous reader gathering selections from his long writing career, ranging from essays written in the early 1970s to to brand-new pieces about Robert Creeley, Oscar Wilde, and New York.

"A first clue to how this book is going to work lies in the book's title: TOPIC SENTENCE. In the title story, written in 1970, Persky took on the two questions that dog every artist in the post-modern: What is the subject matter, and how can it be articulated? Since both questions are unanswerable, Persky twists them: How am I supposed to isolate the subject matter from the myriad of things in which it is lodged, and how do I elude the distortions of conventional exposition and its self-serving selectivity? How do I make what I write as alive and dynamic as the things I write about?" from the Introduction"