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FESTIVAL DAYS

Jo Ann Beard

Searing and exhilarating new work from the beloved, award-winning author of The Boys of My Youth and In Zanesville.
Since the publication of her groundbreaking collection, The Boys of My Youth, Jo Ann Beard has been heralded as a master of the autobiographical essay, a form that has recently gained popularity with the works of Leslie Jamison, Eula Biss, Esmé Weijun Wang, and Roxane Gay, among others.

Now, Beard returns with nine pieces in which she investigates love and betrayal, grief and survival in the precise, searingly personal language for which she is beloved.

In these genre-defying works, Beard captures both the quietly luminous moments of daily existence and those of life-and-death decision: a man jumps from a burning building to save his own life; a woman fights off a home invader with only a shovel; and in the title, novella-length story, the narrator examines issues of love and death, friendship and betrayal.

With exquisite language and unflinching observation, Festival Days captures the pain and exhilaration of our human experience, and shows a pioneering author at the pinnacle of her talent.

Jo Ann Beard is the author of the groundbreaking collection of autobiographical essays, The Boys of My Youth, and the novel, In Zanesville. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays, and other magazines and anthologies. She has received a Whiting Foundation Award and nonfiction fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.
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Book

Published 2021-03-16 by Little Brown

Book

Published 2021-03-16 by Little Brown

Comments

eard's curiosity and amazement are contagious.

[P]rofoundly observed and impeccably phrased. No surprises there, then, given Jo Ann Beard's formidable talents. But it's actually full of audacious narrative surprises, is darkly moving and, at times, unexpectedly - almost unbearably - suspenseful.

[A] taut and troubling novella [.] The concluding pages, in which we experience the process of assisted dying in real time along with Cheri, are as powerful as the close of The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

I love how you love things,' someone who loves her tells Jo Ann Beard. That love is one reason Festival Days is such a great book. Another is her flair for describing those things in vibrant and felicitous prose. Beard honors the beautiful, the sacred, and the comic in life, and for life's inescapable cruelties and woes she offers the wisdom of a sage.

Jo Ann Beard was one of the winners of the very prestigious 2022 Literature Award in the Arts and Letters Awards in Literature for FESTIVAL DAYS.

Festival Days is an artistic triumph - vividly peopled, elegantly written, and full of surprises. Each essay and story is an electrically-charged tale of loss and partial redemption. Reading Jo Ann Beard is like setting out on a walk with a curious and intelligent friend who is determined to show you how seemingly unrelated things share a secret kinship.

Violence and death are balanced by hard-won, transcendent joy in Beard's remarkable stories that merge fiction and memoir... Beard has barely been published in the UK, but her fans include Jonathan Franzen, Sigrid Nunez and Jeffrey Eugenides. Mary Gaitskill has called her 'a kind of literary celebrity that very few people have heard of.

Easily the most exciting new book I've read in the past year is Jo Ann Beard's Festival Days. It is a knockout a collection of nonfiction narratives that read like short stories, plus one short story that makes you wonder if it, too, is nonfiction. Masterly sentence by sentence, entirely original in method, the pieces are full of death and the threat of it, but their effect is the opposite of funereal. Beard's wry voice and her clear-eyed compassion make her the best sort of company. Read more...

There are aging dogs, fire survivors, straying husbands and lots of cancer in this terrific new collection...[Beard's] writing works like compound interest, each experience building on the last, which built on the one before, till 'nothing new' - all the dying dogs and aging friends, abandoned houses and abandoned women (and cancer, which pervades this collection) - is something new, something more, and 'every moment of your life brings you to the moment you're experiencing now. And now. And now.'

A book so good you have to put it down, then pick it back up... I can't think of a writer who puts words to our most difficult moments as adroitly as Beard - who so steadfastly refuses to cut away when things get tough. It never makes Festival Days an ordeal to read, though I found myself needing to take a walk when I reached the final page of each piece. During those walks, I found myself revisiting the stories, feeling invigorated to be in the company of someone who seems so much braver than me, and to soak up just some of that bravery.

Ann Enright calls Beard "a rare talent[.] Beard... combines the lapidary chill of Joan Didion with the sense of a proper, lived humanity that you get from a writer like Grace Paley or Sigrid Nunez. She is good company. She connects. You should read her and not look away." Read more...

Here is a recent piece in the San Francisco Chronicle about mixing literary genres, in fine company with Truman Capote, Ayad Aktar, and others Read more...

UK: Serpent's Tail ; Spain: Muneca Infinita ; Italy: Orville Press (Garzanti)

Beautiful... Beard's power comes from phrasings and insights that aren't just screaming for likes. Few writers are so wise and self-effacing and emotionally honest all in one breath... Over the course of nine beguiling pieces - which seamlessly meld observation and imagination - she effects an intimacy that makes us want to sit on the rug and listen. Read more...

[A] ferocious new collection.We can rely on Jo Ann Beard to miss nothing. She will gather the essential elements and arrange them before us with such precision that, without instructing us how to see, she grants us sight. Read more...

Vital and diverse, Jo Ann Beard's nine pieces in this second collection are an intriguing blend of fact and fiction.

Jo Ann Beard was profiled in the New York Times Book Review's By The Book Read more...