Crux: The Georgia in Literary Nonfiction

The Decade of Letting Things Go is a book of linked essays containing still-relevant experiences that take place after the age of becoming socially and/or professionally invisible, as Cris Mazza searches for the elusive serenity of self-acceptance among a growing list of losses. Mazza's story contains many of life's expected losses: pets, parents, old mentors, and symbols of enduring natural places, as well as the loss of identities-child, student, partner, "successful" author. Some of her late-life experiences aren't so easily categorized: having a mentally ill neighbor try to get her to come outside and fight; unpacking the complicity in thirty-year-old #MeToo incidents; "hooking up" with a "boy" from her teenaged past; struggling to accept that lifelong sexual dysfunction will never wane; realizing a deeply trusted mentor from forty-five years ago might be declining into dementia; plus a lifelong attachment to a childhood wound of having a "preferred child" as a sibling. Ultimately there is also the apparent loss of hope in ever finding contentment in the mark one makes in the world or in ever forming an identity that brings this abstract contentment-except that these have no expiration dates, and the exhausted author, at the end, is ready to keep looking.

In Happier Far, Diane Mehta takes us on a funny and engrossing tour of the absurdities and dilemmas of becoming a writer, and how family can sometimes help us and sometimes get in the way. From a vibrant childhood in India to her youth in an unwelcoming New Jersey suburb, from the confusions of marriage and divorce to life as a single parent, she chronicles her search for a family history that can help explain who she is and what matters most to her now. In concert halls, art galleries, parks, cemeteries, and hospitals, Mehta follows her curiosity to imaginatively expand her immediate world. With a voice that's propulsive and ironic, sly and profound, she takes stock: She wrestles with a personal tragedy in a letter to a turtle and reveals the hallucinatory mania of migraines in her interactions with a dog-walking service. She meditates on memory with ghosts of the dead, teaches herself to swim despite chronic pain, connects with her mother by listening to Beethoven's late sonatas, and examines family documents in an effort to pin down the story of her Indian-Jain and Jewish-American parents. Mehta tries to meet the demands of love, marriage, divorce, and parenting, all while figuring out what it takes to express herself clearly. An original and feisty storyteller, Mehta shows us that if you are kicked out of the life you thought you were going to lead, you can still rebuild it and become, as Milton said in Paradise Lost, "happier far."

Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays traces a life, not by recounting its major events but by going deep into its representative moments: the moments of wonder, hope, fear, uncertainty, humor, love, and epiphany that make up human experience. Along the way, as a son of a widowed mother, as a young man in the big city, as a husband and father, as an aging empty nester, and as an artist, the author discovers, with each new role, more of who he is. A lover of the arts, he offers creative reflections on literature, music, and film; a Black American whose life is informed but not defined by race, he embraces Black culture while remaining defiantly himself.

A provocative and meticulously structured exploration of identity, language, and the body, My Corpse Inside exposes the thin and increasingly blurry line between the physical and the digital, between the living and the dead. Wes Jamison contends with the complex and disturbing relationship of sexuality and violence through a torrent of virtual horrors-shock sites, hookup apps, beheading videos, and creepshots-as well as through Jamison's own experiences of being surveilled and exploited online. Inspired by Kiyoshi Kurosawa's master horror film Kairo, which portrays ghosts overflowing into our reality through the internet, this fragmented book-length essay clarifies Julia Kristeva's infamously esoteric theory of abjection and subjectivity and updates it for today's constant virtuality. My Corpse Inside is a disquieting work that asks readers to confront the violence, fetish, horror, and loneliness inherent in our eternal connectivity.

Lydia Paar joined the American workforce at age fourteen, holding a wide variety of jobs (twenty-seven, at last count) between then and now, across twenty-five different homes in eight states. The essays in this collection explore her attempts to evade or transform the lower-middle class American experience across various cityscapes, towns, deserts, and in-between places. As she moves through these spaces, she seeks peace, connection, and freedom: from the hip streets of Portland to desolate deserts, Army basic training to cross-country bus trips, to eerie St. Louis funeral homes, and more. Each essay interrogates the interior emotional work that accompanies such grappling: labors of love and friendship, of learning, of motion, of maintenance, and of finding faith in potential for positive change. Across a range of interior and exterior landscapes, Paar meditates on subcultures, agendas, violences, alliances, and the intersection of the natural world with our human endeavors. Ultimately, she considers how what we try to transform so often transforms us.

Sifting the Feminine: Essays on a Woman's Body examines how we define and understand femininity in relation to how we consider and treat women's bodies. Through a collection of personal, lyric, and flash essays, Ashley Anderson explores how illness, particularly polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), manifests and affects the relationships between women, their bodies, and the world. In retaliation against a history of scrutiny, Sifting the Feminine upends the idea that our bodies are always within our own control. Meditating on illness, health care, social media, storytelling, clothing, various forms of violence, and popular culture, Sifting the Feminine seeks to understand why women's bodies that challenge societal and cultural expectations of femininity are routinely disregarded in a world where no two bodies, regardless of gender, exist in the same way.

More than at any time in human history, our daily lives are scored and imprinted by music. We listen while bicycling, while taking walks, on the train to and from work, and at home on stereos or streaming. We're immersed in music and music making virtually 24/7. Why is music such an essential part of the way we live, and how does it enrich and fasten itself to our very beings? Play This Book Loud tunes in to many voices, from mainstream bands to obscure artists, from Lydia Loveless singing her heart out and DJ Shadow/Cut Chemist endlessly crate digging, from the Detroit Cobras playing for a few dozen to Green Day filling stadiums, from Riot Grrrl punk to the traditional styles of Connie Francis, from the Stooges' messiness and psychedelic rock to the careful orchestration of anonymous session players and 1960s commercial jingles. In this compelling and exuberant book, song by song, Joe Bonomo moves between zones of listening, turned on while wearing headphones or watching a band in a club. With the heart of a fan and a generous ear, he enthusiastically explores the reasons music, and those who devote themselves to it, matters so deeply. Play This Book Loud explores our urge for sonic existence.

The essays that make up The Season of Birds and Stones grapple with questions of what wilderness means and how we can interact with and learn from other species. Set in some of our most stunning public lands, including Denali National Park and Preserve, Great Basin National Park, Isle Royale National Park, and Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park, Renfro's essays examine her encounters with bears, arctic ground squirrels, loons, red-winged blackbirds, moose, and wolves, as she wrestles with a range of subjects including motherhood, mental illness, grief, and darkness. Whether focusing on bears in Alaska or the darkness of the Upper Peninsula, searching for moose bones on Isle Royale, or seeking out her past self in the landscape of Great Basin, her essays are rooted in the natural world but also in storytelling-the stories we tell about ourselves, the stories we tell about others, and the stories we tell about other species. Both deeply personal and meticulously researched, Renfro's essays seek to illuminate the natural world and show its deep relevance and resonance in all of our lives.