- New Arrivals
Fiction- Historical FictionCrime & ThrillersMysteryScience-FictionFantasyPoetryRomanceChildren’s BooksYoung Adult
- Biographies & MemoirsHistoryCurrent AffairsTech & ScienceBusinessSelf-DevelopmentTravelThe ArtsFood & WineReligion & SpiritualitySportsHumor
Children’s BooksListsGift CardsWhat To ReadMy ListsGames- About & Help
- About Tertulia
- Membership & Co-Ownership
- Shipping & Delivery
- Orders & Payments
- Contact Support
- Send App Feedback
- Follow us
- Download the app
The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Driving with Dvorak: Essays on Memory and Identity
All our lives are made of moments, both simple and sublime, all of which in some way partake of the cultural moment. Fleda Brown is that rare writer who, in narrating the incidents and observations of her life, turns her story, by wit and insight and a poet's gift, into something more. This is an unconventional memoir. A series of lyrical essays about life in a maddeningly complex family during the even more maddeningly complex fifties and sixties, it adds up to one woman's story while simultaneously reflecting the story of her times. A strange and erratic father, a resigned and helpless mother, a mentally disabled brother, a sister with a brain tumor: folded into Brown's reflections are the intimacies and ambivalences of family and marriage, girlhood and adolescence, identity and self-knowledge. Whether reflecting on the automobile industry or a wrenching parting from beloved pets or the process of aging, Brown's telling rings with great humor, profound perception, and a lyricism that makes even the most commonplace moment uncommonly good reading.
Book Details
- Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
- Publish Date: Mar 1st, 2010
- Pages: 284
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.64in - 5.78in - 0.99in - 1.10lb
- EAN: 9780803224766
- Categories: • Personal Memoirs• Essays
About the Author
Fleda Brown, professor emerita at the University of Delaware and a faculty member of the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, served as Delaware's poet laureate from 2001 to 2007. Her many books include, most recently, On the Mason-Dixon Line: An Anthology of Contemporary Delaware Writers, coedited with Billie Travalini, and the award-winning poetry collection Reunion.
More books by Fleda Brown
Praise for this book
"Throughout this stunning book of essays, we journey into memory through a 'music made of accumulation.' Fleda Brown's voice is edgy, direct, yet surprisingly tender. A decrepit summer cottage, a brain-damaged brother, even an exhaustingly difficult father are all part of the symphony she offers her lucky readers."--Rebecca McClanahan, author of The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings -- (6/29/2009 12:00:00 AM)
"In these elegant, associative essays, Fleda Brown writes movingly of her metamorphosis in spirit, body, and mind from her hoop-skirted childhood to the present. Her essays are often elegiac, always tender and compassionate, her language a poet's, her memory a composer's."--Robin Hemley, director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa-- (6/29/2009 12:00:00 AM)
"Fleda Brown's memoir, Driving with Dvorak . . . invokes the elegiac tradition while Brown drives us across spaces as wide as America itself: the architecture of family, marriage, divorce and re-marriage, and the essential defining of self."--Scott Whitaker, Broadkill Review