Award-winning essayist Ander Monson to read at Austin Peay on September 15th

September 12, 2009 |

Ander Monson will read from and discuss his essay collection Neck Deep and Other Predicaments at 7 p.m., Tuesday, September 15th, in room 303 of the Morgan University Center. The reading is free and open to the public.

He is the author of the novel-in-stories Other Electricities (Sarabande Books, 2005), a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and winner of the John C. Zacharis First Book Award in Fiction. He is also the author of the poetry collection Vacationland, which won the fourth Annual Tupelo Press First Book Editors’ Prize in 2005.

An essayist, poet, and fiction writer, Monson earned an MFA from the University of Alabama. He teaches creative writing at the University of Arizona and is the editor of the magazine DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press.He lives in Michigan His forthcoming collection of essays Vanishing Point (Graywolf Press) and his poetry collection The Available World (Sarabande Books) will both be released in 2010.Visit his web site at www.otherelectricities.com/neckdeep.

The Graywolf Press had this to say about Ander Monson’s Neck Deep:

“In this sparkling nonfiction debut, Monson uses unexpectedly nonliterary forms—the index, the Harvard Outline, the mathematical proof—to delve into an equally surprising mix of obsessions: disc golf, the history of mining in northern Michigan, car washes, topology, and more. He remembers the telegram, a disappearing form, and reflects on his outsider experience at an exclusive Detroit-area boarding school in the form of a criminal history.”

The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize is funded in part by endowed gifts from the Arsham Ohanessian Charitable Remainder Unitrust and the Ruth Easton Fund of the Edelstein Family Foundation.

More praise for Neck Deep and Other Predicaments

• “Puts most memoirs to shame.” — Time Out Chicago
• “Monson’s subjects are engaging and engaged.” — Water-Stone Review
• “A surprising alloy of caper and elegy.” — Frieze
• “Strange and delightful…cutting edge.” — Star Tribune
• “Neck Deep should be read by anyone who cares about new developments in nonfiction…” — The American Book Review
• “In this often amusing, inventive, and unconventional approach to autobiography, Monson comes at us sideways with personal revelations and observations that are alternately filled with infectious enthusiasm and shamefaced contrition.”­ — Rain Taxi Review of Books
• “A delightful read…the genius in Monson’s writing is in synchronistic balance of word crafting and visual form.” — Grand Rapids Press
• “The interrelated stories, set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in the bleakest midwinter, represent a sort of inventory that drifts again and again into stretches of purely poetic language.” — The Rake
• “Wonderfully recondite and cunningly executed, Monson’s work will make a brilliant discovery for open-minded fans of narrative nonfiction.” — Publishers Weekly
• “Elizabeth Bishop often remarked that she wanted poems and prose that register the mind in motion rather than at rest. Bishop would have loved the work of Ander Monson, as much for his yearning mind as his quick, restless, precise motion…For Monson the essay is something like a schematics for our fiercest longings and most ecstatic inventions. Every time I turn to it I’m astonished all over again by the majesty of this book.” — Robert Polito, Judge

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