Overview

A genre-bending work similar to Edgar Lee Masters' A Spoon River Anthology, this ""miscellany"" is a portrait of a fictional New England small town over the past several hundred years, celebratory and insightful, its stories recounted by more than a hundred voices, those of the living-white, Black, Native American, male, female, gay-and of the dead, and also of inanimate objects-a neglected upright piano, a bench along a nature trail-in poems, dialogues, roadside markers, tombstones, business brochures, newspaper articles, a playlet, diary entries, oral history transcripts, a stitched sampler, and even a nursery rhyme. Some tales are of quiet happiness, others of roiling passions, moral quandaries, tragedy and comedy; above all they speak to the centrality of community and continuity in our lives.

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9781963695571

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Reviews

I loved it. Rich in detail, every turned page a surprise, the different voices animate and inanimate (I got a special kick out of ""Lament for an Upright""), the vivid imagination, and much more.-John G. Ryden, Director Emeritus, The Yale University Press I really love it ... The orchestra of voices, alive and dead, works very well in evoking the feeling of place, the history of it, the complexity. It is powerfully nostalgic for me but also feels true to how layered a place it is. I especially love the use of signs, epitaphs, markers, newspapers, transcripts, to evoke the whole community, and the richness of each part of the town. The form is experimental, and I can sense the complexity in that. But it hangs together well, and I feel curious and connected all the way through. It is the very movement between forms that keeps me reading. Each of the voices feels fully realized and fleshed out, even when brief. And the cumulative effect is that of a chorus, each holding a part of the story.-Eiren Caffall, 2023 Whiting Prize winner and author, The Mourner's Bestiary, and All the Water In The World. Praise for Tom Shachtman's The Memoir of the Minotaur A romping confessional riff on the classic tale, a portrait of the artist as a young bull. Shachtman's rollicking prose weaves mythology into a gripping yarn and gives antiquity's voiceless celebrity monster a soaring human heart.-Charles Graeber, NYT bestselling author of The Good Nurse and The Breakthrough Seldom have I written a review in which I can quiet the voice of the critic while losing myself in the story. As I read The Memoir of the Minotaur, that critical voice was very quiet; I am not exaggerating when I say the prose is so nearly flawless that we may as well call it perfect. There is not one phrase that has not been carefully selected and evaluated. Shachtman is a word-master.-Five-star Reedsy review

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