- 304 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Within the recent explosion of creative nonfiction, a new type of form is quietly emerging, what Brenda Miller calls “hermit crab essays.” The Shell Game is an anthology of these intriguing essays that borrow their structures from ordinary, everyday sources: a recipe, a crossword puzzle, a Craig’s List ad. Like their zoological namesake, these essays do not simply wear their borrowed “shells” but inhabit them so perfectly that the borrowed structures are wholly integral rather than contrived, both shaping the work and illuminating and exemplifying its subject.
The Shell Game contains a carefully chosen selection of beautifully written, thought-provoking hybrid essays tackling a broad range of subjects, including the secrets of the human genome, the intractable pain of growing up black in America, and the gorgeous glow residing at the edges of the autism spectrum. Surprising, delightful, and lyric, these essays are destined to become classics of this new and increasingly popular hybrid form.
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Information
Table of contents
- Front Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Foreword: Discovering the Hermit Crab Essay
- Introduction: A Natural History of the North American Hermit Crab Essay
- Grand Theft Auto
- Ok, Cupid
- Rubik’s Cube, Six Twisted Paragraphs
- Solving My Way to Grandma
- Genome Tome
- As Is
- Falling in Love with a Glass House: Twenty-Four Views of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House
- Son of Mr. Green Jeans: An Essay on Fatherhood, Alphabetically Arranged
- Snakes & Ladders
- Math 1619
- Stagecraft
- We Regret to Inform You
- The Six Answers on the Back of a Trivia Card
- Piecing the Quilt of Valor
- Self-Portrait as a 1970s Cineplex Movie Theatre (an Abecedarian)
- The Forgetting Test
- #miscarriage.exe
- SECTION 404
- The Body (an Excerpt)
- Questionnaire for My Grandfather
- The Petoskey Catechism, 1958
- What Signifies (Three Parables)
- The Marriage License
- The Heart as a Torn Muscle
- The Spectrum (of Miracles and Mysteries)
- “Easy as Pie,” That’s a Lie
- Outline toward a Theory of the Mine versus the Mind and the Harvard Outline
- The Clockwise Detorsion of Snails: A Love Essay in Sectors
- Postscript: Forms on the Page
- Source Acknowledgments
- Contributors