Awkward: A Detour

(Paperback)

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Los Angeles Times Bestseller

Mary Cappello[s] inventive, associative taxonomy of discomfort . . . [is] revelatory indeed. MARK DOTY, author of Dog Years: A Memoir and Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems

A wonderful, multi-layered piece of writing, with all the insight of great cultural criticism and all the emotional pull of memoir. A fascinating book. SARAH WATERS, author of The Night Watch and The Little Stranger

Without awkwardness we would not know grace, stability, or balance. Yet no one before Mary Cappello has turned such a penetrating gaze on this misunderstood condition. Fearlessly exploring the ambiguous borders of identity, she mines her own life journeysfrom Russia, to Italy, to the far corners of her heart and the depths of a literary or cinematic textto decipher the powerful messages that awkwardness can transmit.

Mary Cappello is the author of four books of literary nonfiction, including Awkward: A Detour, which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life, which won a ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award and an Independent Publishers Prize, and Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them. Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, she lives in Providence, Rhode Island and Lucerne-in-Maine, Maine.

Reviews

Los Angeles Times Bestseller For any memoirist writing today, but particularly for one whose class, ethnicity, and sexuality may have left her with the feeling that shes still arriving, theres strong motivation to stick to the interstate, hoping it will lead to a stunning epiphany, a twelve-city book tour, and a fat movie deal. I find something bracingly feminist, daringly queer, and poignantly democratic in Mary Cappellos choice to take the nearest exit. Her rare articulation of lifes off-kilter moments makes me feel less alone in my own awkward interior. Womens Review of Books Mary Cappello[s] inventive, associative taxonomy of discomfort . . . [is] revelatory indeed. MARK DOTY, author of Dog Years: A Memoir and Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems An original, psychologically and culturally insightful book, a great pleasure to read. JOSIP NOVAKOVICH, author of Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust and April Fools Day At once comforting and startling . . . Cappellos adventurous meditation . . . makes memory seem like something worth re-making, and not the casual currency it has become. It is a remarkable achievement. ADAM PHILLIPS, author of Going Sane and Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life Daring in both content and form, Awkward is a wonderfully unpredictable riff on the human predicament. DAWN RAFFEL, author of Carrying the Body and The Secret Life of Objects With Awkward: A Detour, Mary Cappello becomes to my mind now the Kepler of human flesh and bone and of the soul of the worlds in which they move . . . Hers is a wonderful, suddenly essential book. DONALD REVELL, author of The Art of Attention: A Poet's Eye and Tantivy A wonderful, multi-layered piece of writing, with all the insight of great cultural criticism and all the emotional pull of memoir. A fascinating book. SARAH WATERS, author of The Night Watch and The Little Stranger

Author Bio

Mary Cappello is the author of four books of literary nonfiction, including Awkward: A Detour, which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life, which won a ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award and an Independent Publishers Prize, and Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Salon, Huffington Post, NPR, in guest author blogs for Powells Books, and on five separate occasions as Notable Essay of the Year in Best American Essays. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, The Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination from Teachers and Writers Collaborative, and the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from Duke Universitys Center for Documentary Studies. Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, she lives in Providence, Rhode Island and Lucerne-in-Maine, Maine.