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Wolff
Melora Wolff
Melora Wolff is a prose writer whose book Bequeath: Essays is available from Louisiana State University Press on September 13, 2024. Melora’s work has been published in many journals and anthologies including: the New York Times, Brick, Speculative Nonfiction, The Normal School, the Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, Salmagundi, and Best American Fantasy, Best New Writing, and Every Father’s Daughter: 24 Women Writers Remember Their Fathers (edited by Phillip Lopate and Margaret McMullan). She has received multiple Notable Essay of the Year citations from Best American Essays and Special Mentions in Nonfiction from the Pushcart Prizes; the Thomas A. Wilhelmus Award in Nonfiction Prose from Southern Indiana Review; and Nonfiction fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She holds her MFA from Columbia University, and a BA from Brown University. She directs Creative Writing at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs.
Photo credit: Elizabeth Haynes
Session Info:
A Literary Book Chat with Authors Steve Stern and Melora Wolff
SSPL Dutcher Room | Friday, Oct 3 | 1:00 PM–2:00 PM
Books
About Bequeath
What should we do with the things we inherit? In ten intimate essays as vivid as fiction and as varied as music, Melora Wolff’s Bequeath presents a flawed, funny, impressionable narrator who tries to solve the mysteries of bequeathed artifacts, family myths, and haunting mistakes—while also figuring out how to grow up in dangerous, glamorous 1970s New York City.
With a wide range of voices—comic, lyric, collective, personal, joyful, and deeply elegiac—Wolff pays homage to her musician father and family as she roams a past rich with cultural touchstones and indelible characters, from West Side Story and Lost in Space to Leonard Bernstein and Gloria Steinem. Bequeath explores the legacies we impose and bestow on one another.
Praise
“Melora Wolff’s memoir in essays brings thrillingly to life the vanished New York of her childhood and adolescence in the 1970s, along with her beloved parents and friends. In glorious prose, Wolff conjures textures, ideals, and emotions—from a girl’s early experience of joy to a city’s rampant paranoia and the eager futurism of Lost in Space. Bequeath is a beautiful, memorable book.”—Claire Messud, author of Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write: An Autobiography in Essays
“These magical essays shimmer with tenderness and regret, with sensuous allusion, joy, self-deprecating humor, and wry intelligence. The memories are so successfully evoked that the question then becomes: Does the present stand a chance, now that the past has been recaptured?” —Phillip Lopate, author of A Year and a Day: An Experiment in Essays
“Bequeath is a collection that reads like a memoir, or even more: a succession of memoirs. Each essay here is as layered and fully rendered as a book. The voice is assured, the narrative movements as inevitable as they are unpredictable. Tracing the arc of a life and a family—her own—Wolff reminds us of all we know and all we never know, the insufficiency of memory and also its necessity.”—David L. Ulin, author of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles
Product Details
Bequeath
by Melora Wolff
Essays/Paperback
ISBN: 9780807182772
Published by LSU Press – September 2024