Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety
Author: HALL DONALD
Format: HARDCOVER
Publication date: 01/09/2018
Imprint: HOUGHTON MIFFLIN
Price: $35.00
Publishing status: Active
New essays from the vantage point of very old age, once again “alternately lyrical and
laugh-out-loud funny,” – from the former poet laureate of the United States (New York Times)
Donald Hall has lived a remarkable life of letters, one capped most recently by the New York
Times bestseller Essays After Eighty, a “treasure” of a book in which he “balance(s) frankness
about losses with humor and gratitude” (Washington Post).
Now nearing ninety, Hall delivers a new collection of self-knowing, fierce, and funny essays on
aging, the pleasures of solitude, and the sometimes astonishing freedoms arising from both. He
intersperses memories of exuberant days – as in Paris, 1951, with a French girl memorably
inclined to say, “I couldn’t care less” – with writing, visceral and hilarious, on what he has called
the “unknown, unanticipated galaxy” of extreme old age.
“Why should a nonagenarian hold anything back?” Hall answers his own question by revealing
several vivid instances of “the worst thing I ever did,” and through equally uncensored tales of
literary friendships spanning decades, with James Wright, Richard Wilbur, Seamus Heaney, and
other luminaries.
Cementing his place alongside Roger Angell and Joan Didion as a generous and profound
chronicler of loss, Hall returns to the death of his beloved wife, Jane Kenyon, in an essay as
original and searing as anything he’s written in his extraordinary literary lifetime.
AUTHOR:
Donald Hall, who served as poet laureate of the United States from 2006 to 2007, is a member
of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts,
awarded by the president.
ISBN: 9781328826343
Dimension: 211mm X 140mm