Keynote
From a “brilliant, one-of-a-kind maestro” (Booklist), a vibrant tapestry of memoir, research, and criticism
Book Title
An Image of My Name Enters America
Subtitle
Essays
Cover Image
- “Extraordinary . . . a dazzling display of knowledge, wit, ratiocination, and prose style.”—Kirkus Reviews
Body
Again, today, if I must choose between love and memory, I choose memory.
What would you risk to know yourself? Which stories are you willing to follow to the bitter end, revise, or, possibly, begin all over? In this collection of five interrelated essays, Lucy Ives explores identity, national fantasy, and history. She examines events and records from her own life—a childhood obsession with My Little Pony, papers and notebooks from college, an unwitting inculcation into the myth of romantic love, and the birth of her son—to excavate larger aspects of the past that have been suppressed or ignored. With bracing insight and extraordinary range, she weaves new stories about herself, her family, our country, and our culture. She connects postmodern irony to eighteenth-century cults, Cold War musicals to a great uncle’s suicide to the settlement of the American West, museum period rooms to the origins of her last name to the Assyrian genocide, and the sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem to the development of modern obstetrics. Here Ives retrieves shadowy sites of pain and fear and, with her boundless imagination, attentiveness, and wit, transforms them into narratives of repair and possibility.
What would you risk to know yourself? Which stories are you willing to follow to the bitter end, revise, or, possibly, begin all over? In this collection of five interrelated essays, Lucy Ives explores identity, national fantasy, and history. She examines events and records from her own life—a childhood obsession with My Little Pony, papers and notebooks from college, an unwitting inculcation into the myth of romantic love, and the birth of her son—to excavate larger aspects of the past that have been suppressed or ignored. With bracing insight and extraordinary range, she weaves new stories about herself, her family, our country, and our culture. She connects postmodern irony to eighteenth-century cults, Cold War musicals to a great uncle’s suicide to the settlement of the American West, museum period rooms to the origins of her last name to the Assyrian genocide, and the sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem to the development of modern obstetrics. Here Ives retrieves shadowy sites of pain and fear and, with her boundless imagination, attentiveness, and wit, transforms them into narratives of repair and possibility.
List Price
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About the Author
Credit: Will Matsuda
Praise
- “It is rare for a mind as mercurial and voracious as Lucy Ives’s to possess such obvious lexical facility in guiding readers from one thought to the next, but here we are: Ives is one of our brilliant weirdos and must be protected at all costs.”—Jonny Diamond, Literary Hub's “most anticipated books of 2024”
- “An enormously inviting, surprising, increasingly strange (in the best way), compelling and gripping book.”
—Maureen N. McLane - “Lucy Ives is a visionary writer/citizen/woman/image/mother/lover/person/body who charts the mind-boggling wobble of these unstable categories. Learned and harrowing, urgent and companionable, cruelly optimistic, her essay-quests bristle with accuracy as they take us to the edge and beyond.”
—Robert Glück - “This is the kind of book you want to read aloud to people you love, to assign, to give as a present—but don’t loan this one; you might not get it back.”—Alexander Chee
