Feverland: A Memoir in Shards

(Paperback)

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Description

Brain surgery. Assault weapons in the bed of a pickup truck. Rilke, Rodin, and the craters of the moon. Recovery and disintegration. Monkeys stealing an egg outside a temple in Kathmandu. Brushing teeth bloody on long car rides. Pain, ours and what we bring to others. Wildfires in southern California. Rats in Texas. Childhood abuse. Dreams of tigers and blackout nights. The sweetness of mangoes. A son born into a shadowy hospital room. Love. Joy.
InFeverland, Alex Lemon has created a fragmented exploration of what it means to be a man in the tumult of twenty-first-century Americaand a harrowing, associative memoir about how we live with the beauties and horrors of our pasts. How to be here, nowLemon asks. How to be here, good Immersed in darkness but shot through with light,thisis a thrillingly experimental memoir from one of our most heartfelt and inventive writers.

Reviews

Praise for Feverland

What a marvel of a book. In its rigor, variance, and sonic playfulness,Feverlandmakes a winning argument for the case that a lifein all its trial, tenderness, and physical troublingis best presented in shards, as the subtitle indicates. Why Because these vivid and surprising shards that Alex Lemon gives us teem with heft and life, evocative diction and sticking image, narrative brilliance and lyric mystery.Elena Passarello, author of Animals Strike Curious Poses

Feverland is a life turned on its head and dissected so that each ugly thing, each shiny bobble, each meanness, each fury of need, each ache, each bloom of love is laid bare for us. Alex Lemon has offered us an essential long stare into the bleak yet textured truth of illness, abuse, and disability; at the same time he offers us the one thing we all cling to despite it all: beauty and survival. Lemon's intense and stratified essays lean in and tell us the hardest thing we've ever heard, then embrace us so tightly we think we might burst from the sheer joy of being alive.Ada Limn

Lemons bold decision to eschew narrative allows him to portray a sense of life as he lived it, with the blending of memory, sensory immediacy, and hopes and fears in a waking nightmare. In taut, vibrant prose, he pieces together the fragments of his life . . . His sparkling language and repeated motifs provide unity, and there is profound insighteven humorin this tale from the dark side.Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Alex Lemons Feverland uses an unconventional structure to tell the story of its authors life to powerful effect.. . . Lemons memoir is moving, unpredictable and sometimes digressivein that, too, its a lot like life itself.Minneapolis Star Tribune

I didnt read FeverlandI plunged into it. Alex Lemons mind comes at you in a hot, mad rush, and you experience him as you experience your own past, all at once. A good memoir leaves you feeling that you know another person. This one, somehow, leaves you feeling that you know yourself as well.J.C. Hallman, author of B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal

"[A] funhouse of memories . . . Feverland goes deeper into the experience of living in a body hellbent on self-destruction.City Pages

Praise for Happy: A Memoir

Lemon makes Happy harrowing and upbeat, writing with a poets touch about the illness that overtook his jock life. . . . Nonfiction writers and poets have a secret allianceworking toward defining a truth instead of making it up. So when we get a twofer of a poet writing memoir, the results trend toward glinting precision.Cleveland Plain Dealer

Lemon takes his reader inside the terror and strangeness of illnessand gives us, along the way, a loving portrait of a devoted, wonderfully nutty mother. Lemon is a brave, headlong writer, and he captures the life of the body with vivid and memorable intensity.Mark Doty

The pyrotechnic prose of Lemons memoir creates an electrifying portrait of a body in crisis, and the way the soul is inexorably, reluctantly, dragged along. . . . If ever a book was written in blood, it is this one.Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

Lemon packs the poignant wallop of a sprawling Dickensian novel with his taut, speedy memoir.Denver Post

This one is something special. . . . This is the story of a boy and his mother, but one whose tenderness sneaks up on you while youre distracted by all the blood and booze and hollering. The two of them can talk about nearly anything, but dont always have to. What Lemon and his mom have is that rarest of things in a trauma memoir, a parent-child relationship that is more than merely functional. Its funkily, goofily, supremely life-affirming. Make that lifesaving.Salon

One of our times most compelling memoirs . . . An electrifying portrait of a body in crisis.Esquire

A page-turner on par with the best thrillers . . . Lemons exquisite prose blasts us out of our own time, heart, brain, and body into his, making an acute empathy possible. Read this and weep, laugh, weep.Library Journal (Editors Pick)

Dazzling . . . An unnervingly intimate, relentlessly poetic recounting of debauchery, trauma and healing, Lemons memoir is cut from the same cloth as David Carrs The Night of the Gun or James Freys discredited A Million Little Pieces. But whereas those autobiographies reveled in the seamy details accompanying the wild life, Happy is far more concerned with the party's aftermath. . . . There are few modern works that so elegantly capture a mind and, by extension, a life on the verge of disintegration.Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Happy is graphically raw and in-your-face; Lemons dexterity with words forces the reader into gritty latitudes no one would visit voluntarily, and the level of detail will cause some readers to squirm. But Happy is an honest voyage into Lemons keen mind, remarkable spirit and loving heart, and it shouldnt be missed.Minneapolis Star Tribune

Author Bio

Alex Lemon is the author of Happy: A Memoir, and the poetry collections Mosquito, Hallelujah Blackout, Fancy Beasts, and The Wish Book. His writing has appeared in Esquire, Best American Poetry 2008, AGNI, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, and Tin House, among others. He was awarded a 2005 Literature Fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and he contributes and reviews frequently for a wide range of media outlets. He lives with his wife and two children in Fort Worth, and teaches at Texas Christian University.