Book of Days: Personal Essays - Softcover

Book of Days "A Spiegel & Grau Trade Paperback Original"--T.p. verso. Full description

"The best of these ten essays combine the details of memory with reflective insight and a command of tone that resists cliché, while refusing to settle into simplistic understanding. ... Whether she's explaining her affinity for Kafka or exploring the tribal rituals of faculty wives--her husband is a professor, as her father was--Gordon writes with flinty humor, unsentimental precision and a refusal to let herself or anyone else off too easily."
--Kirkus

"Emily Fox Gordon's essays make me want to curl up inside them and keep on reading for as long as I can. She writes with candor, wit, and insight about common and uncommon occurrences, whether it be her husband's colonoscopy or her decades-long therapy experience. Her ability to sound out the truth about the coded world of academe or the pleasure to be found in long-running marriages makes her a bracing and welcome guide through the thickets of contemporary life."
--Daphne Merkin

"In one of this book's fine essays, Emily Fox Gordon observes drily that calling oneself a born personal essayist is like calling oneself a born éminence grise. Maybe so--but if there were ever a writer born to this genre, it's Gordon, who can simultaneously strip herself bare and turn an unforgettable phrase."
--Anne Fadiman

"Good writing is itself a moral virtue. Wit, complexity, and detail are its outward signs, and [Gordon's work] shines with them."
--The New Yorker

"Emily Fox Gordon's writing combines remarkable intelligence--a critical eye, a complex wit--with extraordinary candor and vulnerability."
--Rosellen Brown