In this powerful collection of personal journal entries, a writer at the height of his powers responds to the fear and uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic in real time.In March of 2020, John Rember was scheduled to go on tour for his latest book. Covid-19 intervened. In the following years, 1.2 million people died of Covid in the United States. Global deaths exceeded 7 million. A world, one secure, predictable, and safe, had disappeared forever.Quarantinin...

In this compelling collection of personal journal entries, an award-winning writer responds to the grief and fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic and other civilization-threatening dangers.After a year of weekly entries, John Rember ended his Journal of the Plague Years: End Notes in March of 2021. But the pandemic wasn't over. This second volume, Ghost Dance, starts in September 2021. It expands the meaning of plague to include wars, population growt...

This astonishing collection of journal entries is a testament to resilience in a world made up of shards of the past.If a Roman citizen in 410 C.E. had kept a journal of everyday life and its fears, joys, and hopes, it would be a treasured historical document, especially when civilization has fallen apart.In April 2023, John Rember began writing his third and final volume of Journal of the Plague Years. Convinced that we are living among ruins cult...

As Rember notes in his introduction, "MFA in a Box is not a How to Write Book. It's a Why to Write Book." By exploring the relationships between the writer and love, grief, place, family, race and violence, Rember helps writers dive deep into their own writing. He tells them how they can breathe down there and how they can get back. "A big part of writing involves grappling with the terrors and discouragements that come when you have writing skills but can't project yours...

In 1987, John Rember returned home to Sawtooth Valley, where he had been brought up. He returned out of a homing instinct: the same forty acres that had sustained his family’s horses had sustained a vision of a place where he belonged in the world, a life where he could get up in the morning, step out the door, and catch dinner from the Salmon River. But to his surprise, he found that what was once familiar was now unfamiliar. Everything might have looked the same to the horses that spring...

Written with clarity, tenacity, humor, and warmth, A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World attempts to find tolerable ethical positions in the face of barely tolerable events—and the real possibility of an intolerable future. It is a compelling, surprising, disturbing, and highly literate work of reportage and contemplation. It is both a collection of gentle-spirited wisdom and a rumination on ruin, as if distilled in equal measure from the spirits of Norman Maclean’s ...

Written with clarity, tenacity, humor, and warmth, A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World attempts to find tolerable ethical positions in the face of barely tolerable events—and the real possibility of an intolerable future. It is a compelling, surprising, disturbing, and highly literate work of reportage and contemplation. It is both a collection of gentle-spirited wisdom and a rumination on ruin, as if distilled in equal measure from the spirits of Norman Maclean's ...

HOW WILL YOU REMEMBER THE PANDEMIC?40 authors from around the world set out to record their innermost feelings-- to offer inspiring, heartfelt, creative takes on the Covid-19 pandemic. Crime fiction, elegant and angry poetry, and gut-wrenching personal essays: all paint a picture of the year and help us make sense of the sacrifices we've made in 2020.Thank you for your generous support: all profits donated to charity.A brainchild of editor Lise McClendon, the anthol...

'An ideal summer read' SpectatorThis is the enchanting story of a beautiful, lifelong friendship and laughter centred around the Villa Marchio near Lucca where John Fleming and Hugh Honour, both art historians and the last great British eccentrics, created the perfect life for themselves by nestling in literary Tuscany. Novelist Susanna Johnston first met them when she was twenty one, penniless and at sea in Rome in the 1950s.