Overview

A child keeps a pet cloud in a dresser drawer. A man has coffee with his doppelganger. A 20-something stunt double performs pirate swordplay at birthday parties. A schoolkid ponders the absurdity of Hell. A woman sings a Diana Ross song to a stranger across a subway platform. In this genre-defying collection of short prose pieces, Aaron Angello explores the subtleties of recollection, imagination, and the connections, both momentary and long-lasting, between oneself and others. Each piece riffs on a word from Shakespeare's Sonnet 29; over the course of 114 days, Angello woke early, meditated upon a single word from the sonnet, and wrote. The results are sometimes funny, sometimes profound, and sometimes heartbreaking, accumulating into a map of a mind at work, a Gen X coming-of-age of sorts, seamlessly invoking the likes of The Golden Girls, Spinoza, Rick Springfield, and Rimbaud. The Fact of Memory uses its innovative structure to pause and consider how language--and people--can both enthrall and abandon us, how the invincibility of youthful ambition gives way to the nuanced disappointments of aging, how unanswerable philosophical questions can share the page with glimpses of our former selves navigating a fragmented past.

Full Product Details

9781941628256

Table of Contents

Reviews

""One striking aspect to The Fact of Memory is how these 114 pieces together reflect in an impressionistic, fractured way the person who wrote them. Angello writes, 'Yet here I am, examining every inch of myself in the pages of this book. Wisps of clouds congregate, then disperse.'Taken together, these 114 pieces don't comprise a Wikipedia entry on Aaron Angello or a curriculum vitae or an autobiographical essay. Instead, they fit together poetically in a portrait that is unique and original--a portrait of his experiences, his thoughts, his imaginations, and much more. The reader gets to know the writer in a direct and almost visceral way.""-- ""Third Coast Review""

Author Information

Aaron Angello is a poet, playwright, and essayist from the Rocky Mountains who lives and feels remarkably out of place in the charming, but very Eastern, town of Frederick, Maryland. He received his MFA and PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder, and he currently teaches writing and theater at Hood College.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available