Cultural Explorers: A Reading from Essays and Memoirs

Howard Axelrod’s work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Shambhala Sun, and the Boston Globe, among other publications. Blinded in one eye during a pick-up game of basketball, Axelrod retreated to a jerry-rigged house in the Vermont woods, where he lived without a computer or television, and largely without human contact, for two years. He recounts that experience in his debut book, The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude (Beacon Press), a gorgeous memoir of solitude in an age of superficial connection, which probes the profoundly human questions of perception, time, identity, and meaning. In its starred review, Kirkus writes, “[Axelrod’s] writing is a balm for world-weary souls. A vibrant, honest, and poetic account of how two years of solitude surrounded by nature changed a man forever.”

Essayist Meghan Daum is the author of the collection The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion. Her other books include the novel The Quality of Life Report, and Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House, a memoir. Since 2005, Daum has been an opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times, writing on political, cultural, and social affairs. She has contributed to public radio's Morning Edition, Marketplace, and This American Life, and has written for numerous publications, including the New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, GQ, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and the New York Times Magazine. In her latest collection of essays, My Misspent Youth (Picador), Daum implicates herself as readily as she does the targets that fascinate and horrify her.

Michael W. Clune is a professor of English at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author the memoir White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin and of two scholarly books, American Literature in the Free Market and Writing Against Time. His latest, Gamelife (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), is the memoir of a childhood transformed by technology. In telling the story of his youth through seven computer games, Clune captures the part of childhood we live alone. Kirkus Revies writes, “Clune never treats games as an escape but rather an entry into a heightened reality, an education, a creative stimulus, and a portal for self-discovery . . . [a] provocative book.”