Brief interviews with the romantic past / Kathryn Nuernberger.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nuernberger, Kathryn, author.

Standardized Title:

Essays. Selections

Language:

English

Physical Description:

viii, 95 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Columbus : Mad Creek Books, an imprint of The Ohio State University Press, [2017]

Summary:

Could Marie Antoinette's wigs get any higher? Could the anonymous women riding in hot air balloons alone with gentlemen be any more scandalous? Does an Ozark holler hold the mouth to a lost cave with the longest, thickest vein of gold in North America? Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past is a collection of rumors, secrets, tall tales, and lies that begins at the court of Louis XV and ends in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. With all the astonishments of history and the intimacy of memoir, Kathryn Nuernberger's collection juxtaposes peripheral figures from the French Revolution-the assassin, the executioner, the mistress, the spy, the son of a slave, the transgender swordfighter-with the oral histories of poachers, prophets, well witches, and ghosts of the Ozarks a century later. In essays that are equal parts historical and personal, Nuernberger brings the marvelous strangeness of the past into our present moment with wry wit and insight. Nuernberger has an eye for salvaging overlooked snapshots of human decency and moments of moral courage-the memories of which we might just want to save for later. Book jacket.

Contents:

The air loom

Float, cleave

"And now brightness falls from the air . . ."

The gazelle

The blue sky, the gray woods

A thin blue line

Heed not the milk hare

Introduction to the symbols of the revolution

On horseback

Plutarch's Parallel lives of virtue and failing

Pantoum for Tilly Matthews

Hearts in jars

Trinkets

Why the dauphin won't consummate the marriage

The inner life of Charles-Henri Sanson

A right cross

Brief interviews with the romantic past

Lost creek cave

The ghost cave

Gary Turnbough, hill prophet

The known world

"If I make my bed in hell, you cannot help it, and I will have to lay on it"

The sameness of days

Abiding

In a time of drought

Short treatise on those animals which wear clothes and those which do not

Beset upon all sides

Fred Sandback makes me miss that teenage feeling

DMV & fledgling

Christmas night

With or without you.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 91-95).

Winner of the 2016 The Ohio State University Press/"The Journal" Non/Fiction Prize

ISBN:

9780814254097

0814254098

OCLC:

974567358