
Description
What should we do with the things we inherit? In ten intimate essays as vivid as fiction and as varied as music, Melora Wolff's Bequeath presents a flawed, funny, impressionable narrator who tries to solve the mysteries of bequeathed artifacts, family myths, and haunting mistakes--while also figuring out how to grow up in dangerous, glamorous 1970s New York City.
With a wide range of voices--comic, lyric, collective, personal, joyful, and deeply elegiac--Wolff pays homage to her musician father and family as she roams a past rich with cultural touchstones and indelible characters, from West Side Story and Lost in Space to Leonard Bernstein and Gloria Steinem. Bequeath explores the legacies we impose and bestow on one another.
Product Details
Publisher | LSU Press |
Publish Date | September 13, 2024 |
Pages | 180 |
Language | English |
Type | |
EAN/UPC | 9780807182772 |
Dimensions | 7.5 X 5.5 X 0.4 inches | 0.5 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
"Melora Wolff's memoir in essays brings thrillingly to life the vanished New York of her childhood and adolescence in the 1970s, along with her beloved parents and friends. In glorious prose, Wolff conjures textures, ideals, and emotions--from a girl's early experience of joy to a city's rampant paranoia and the eager futurism of Lost in Space. Bequeath is a beautiful, memorable book."--Claire Messud, author of Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write: An Autobiography in Essays
"These magical essays shimmer with tenderness and regret, with sensuous allusion, joy, self-deprecating humor, and wry intelligence. The memories are so successfully evoked that the question then becomes: Does the present stand a chance, now that the past has been recaptured?"--Phillip Lopate, author of A Year and a Day: An Experiment in Essays
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