American Lives: Memoirs

Kent Russell’s essays have appeared in The New Republic, Harper's, GQ, n+1, the Believer, and Grantland. His collection of essays, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (Knopf) records Russell’s quest to understand, through his journalistic subjects, his own appetites and urges, his persistent alienation, and, above all, his knotty, volatile, vital relationship with his father. Locked in battle with both his adult appetites and his most private childhood demons, Russell hungers for immersive experience and revelation, and his essays take us to society’s ragged edges, the junctures between savagery and civilization.  In a narrative that can be read as both a magnificent act of literary mythmaking and a howl of filial despair, Russell gives us a haunting and unforgettable portrait of an America—and a paradigm of American malehood—we have never before seen.

In his moving and strikingly honest memoir, Lord Fear, Lucas Mann interrogates the loss of an older brother to a heroin overdose and grapples with the frustrating fragility of memory in attempting to understand a man he deeply adored, but hardly got the chance to know.

Shulem Deen is the former blogger known as "Hasidic Rebel," and the founding editor of Unpious, an online journal for voices on the Hasidic fringe. His work has appeared in Salon, the Brooklyn Rail, Tablet Magazine, The Jewish Daily Forward, and elsewhere. He serves as a board member at Footsteps, a New York City-based organization that offers assistance and support to those who have left the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. Deen is the author of All Who Go Do Not Return (Graywolf Press), a memoir about growing up in and then leaving one of the most insular Hasidic sects in the U.S.