Something That May Shock and Discredit You
Daniel M Lavery
(Author)
Description
"One of our smartest, most inventive humor writers, Ortberg combines bathos and the devotional into a revelation." --Jordy Rosenberg, The New York Times Book Review From the New York Times bestselling author of Texts From Jane Eyre and Merry Spinster, writer of Slate's "Dear Prudence" column, and cofounder of The Toast comes a hilarious and stirring collection of essays and cultural observations spanning pop culture--from the endearingly popular to the staggeringly obscure. Daniel M. Lavery is known for blending genres, forms, and sources to develop fascinating new hybrids--from lyric rants to horror recipes to pornographic scripture. In his most personal work to date, he turns his attention to the essay, offering vigorous and laugh-out-loud funny accounts of both popular and highbrow culture while mixing in meditations on gender transition, family dynamics, and the many meanings of faith. From a thoughtful analysis of the beauty of William Shatner to a sinister reimagining of HGTV's House Hunters, and featuring figures as varied as Anne of Green Gables, Columbo, Nora Ephron, Apollo, and the cast of Mean Girls, Something That May Shock and Discredit You is a hilarious and emotionally exhilarating compendium that combines personal history with cultural history to make you see yourself and those around you entirely anew. It further establishes Lavery as one of the most innovative and engaging voices of his generation--and it may just change the way you think about Lord Byron forever.
Product Details
Price
$17.99
$16.73
Publisher
Washington Square Press
Publish Date
October 13, 2020
Pages
256
Dimensions
5.4 X 8.3 X 0.7 inches | 0.45 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781982105228
BISAC Categories:
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About the Author
Daniel M. Lavery is the author of Something That May Shock and Discredit You and the current Dear Prudence at Slate.
Reviews
"This book is clever and strange and lovely and sad and hysterical and poignant. These are the qualities that make up most of my favorite people and all of my favorite books. You really need to read this now." --Jenny Lawson, New York Times bestselling author of Let's Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy
"At last, we have the work of transgender bathos we didn't know we needed, but very much do. . . . Rejecting the suffering bildung often demanded of transgender writers, Ortberg's narrative is anything but linear: It skips back in time to mythic Greece, traipses across the landscape of contemporary pop culture and, in one wonderfully fabulist entry that would make Carmen Maria Machado proud, slips outside of time altogether. Such temporal vertigo makes Something That May Shock and Discredit You addictively strange and delightful. . . . One of our smartest, most inventive humor writers, Ortberg combines bathos and the devotional into a revelation." --Jordy Rosenberg, The New York Times Book Review
"A delightful hybrid of a book...blends genres with expert facility....Throughout, Ortberg's writing is vulnerable but confident, specific but never narrow, literal and lyrical. The author is refreshingly unafraid of his own uncertainty, but he's always definitive where it counts....You'll laugh, you'll cry, often both at once. Everyone should read this extraordinary book." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Ortberg brings the full force of his wit and literary depth to this genre-bending essay collection, [which] intersperses searingly honest passages about his journey as a transgender man with laugh-out-loud funny literary pastiche....an often hilarious, sometimes discomfiting, but invariably honest account of one man's becoming." --Publishers Weekly
"Like all of his work, Something That May Shock and Discredit You is a stand-alone pillar in Ortberg's remarkable canon, one in which the lines typically drawn around topic and genre are obliterated, resulting in a wide-open field of possibility." --Electric Literature
"Deeply honest and often sidesplittingly funny" --Michelle Hart, O: The Oprah Magazine
"Ortberg gracefully slips between the memoirist's lucid personal narrative and the essayist's more topical ruminations. Passage after passage sees him refining a riveting intertextual portrait of his life and transness fit for the pages of an illuminated manuscript....Discarding any distinction between high and low cultures, Ortberg's Something that May Shock and Discredit You most certainly astonishes and amazes--it may even be transformative." --Dave Wheeler, Shelf Awareness
"Ortberg does not simply narrate his experience of transition; he also grapples with the challenge of doing so, toggling skillfully between criticism, personal essay, and literary pastiche....Animated by Ortberg's Christian faith and eclectic cultural enthusiasms, the book is a syllabus of sorts--a road map for navigating one remarkable writer's mind." --The New Yorker
"At last, we have the work of transgender bathos we didn't know we needed, but very much do. . . . Rejecting the suffering bildung often demanded of transgender writers, Ortberg's narrative is anything but linear: It skips back in time to mythic Greece, traipses across the landscape of contemporary pop culture and, in one wonderfully fabulist entry that would make Carmen Maria Machado proud, slips outside of time altogether. Such temporal vertigo makes Something That May Shock and Discredit You addictively strange and delightful. . . . One of our smartest, most inventive humor writers, Ortberg combines bathos and the devotional into a revelation." --Jordy Rosenberg, The New York Times Book Review
"A delightful hybrid of a book...blends genres with expert facility....Throughout, Ortberg's writing is vulnerable but confident, specific but never narrow, literal and lyrical. The author is refreshingly unafraid of his own uncertainty, but he's always definitive where it counts....You'll laugh, you'll cry, often both at once. Everyone should read this extraordinary book." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Ortberg brings the full force of his wit and literary depth to this genre-bending essay collection, [which] intersperses searingly honest passages about his journey as a transgender man with laugh-out-loud funny literary pastiche....an often hilarious, sometimes discomfiting, but invariably honest account of one man's becoming." --Publishers Weekly
"Like all of his work, Something That May Shock and Discredit You is a stand-alone pillar in Ortberg's remarkable canon, one in which the lines typically drawn around topic and genre are obliterated, resulting in a wide-open field of possibility." --Electric Literature
"Deeply honest and often sidesplittingly funny" --Michelle Hart, O: The Oprah Magazine
"Ortberg gracefully slips between the memoirist's lucid personal narrative and the essayist's more topical ruminations. Passage after passage sees him refining a riveting intertextual portrait of his life and transness fit for the pages of an illuminated manuscript....Discarding any distinction between high and low cultures, Ortberg's Something that May Shock and Discredit You most certainly astonishes and amazes--it may even be transformative." --Dave Wheeler, Shelf Awareness
"Ortberg does not simply narrate his experience of transition; he also grapples with the challenge of doing so, toggling skillfully between criticism, personal essay, and literary pastiche....Animated by Ortberg's Christian faith and eclectic cultural enthusiasms, the book is a syllabus of sorts--a road map for navigating one remarkable writer's mind." --The New Yorker
