num_pages: 177
description: “Albert Goldbarth writes very well indeed. These are lively, brilliant, vivid, witty and informed pieces about the real world.” — Annie Dillard “ A Sympathy of Souls could be hazardous to any preconceived ideas you may have about personal essays. These are a whole new breed. Albert Goldbarth has spliced strands of the old genre with a powerful new gene— and the results are miraculous. But what I ﬁnd most astonishing about Goldbarth’s writing is that for all its coils and curlicues it never loses touch with actual life and genuine emotion. He is easily one of the best new essayists writing today.” — Robert Atwan, Series Editor, The Best American Essay; ln ‘A Sympathy of Souls’, celebrated essayist and poet Albert Goldbarth brilliantly orchestrates an exciting discourse over barriers of time, place, and genre. Goldbarth splices together Jewish history, the history of physics and art, mythology, and layman’s anthropology, using a writing style that combines elements of the literary memoir, the short story, the research essay, and the prose poem. The result is a heady, expansive mix which fuses formative ideas and major contemporary and historical figures, with one man’s life. In these essays, images of the shtetl, Marie Curie’s laboratory, 1950s toy stores, and Leonardo da Vinci’s studio seamlessly merge, demonstrating that the lives and ideas of “souls in sympathy” continue to resonate one off of the other.
language: English
title: Sympathy Of Souls
titlecomplete: Sympathy Of Souls
genres: Essays, Memoir, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 17
publisher: Coffee House Press