Nonfiction Memoir

Endpapers excavates the extraordinary histories of the author's grandfather and father: the renowned publisher Kurt Wolff, dubbed "perhaps the 20th century's most discriminating publisher" by the New York Times Book Review, and his son Niko, who fought in the Wehrmacht during World War II before coming to America.

The plan was as idealistic as it was audacious - and utterly unprecedented. Take thousands of broke writers and put them to work charting a country on the brink of social and economic collapse, with the aim of producing a rich and beguiling series of guidebooks to the 48 states. All this fell within the singular purview of the Federal Writers' Project - a division of the Works Progress Administration founded to employ jobless writers, from best-selling novelists and acclaimed poets to the more dubiously qualified.

In this collection of more than 30 essays, published in the New York Times, Esquire, and the New Republic, the vast range of Saul Bellow’s nonfiction is made abundantly clear. In Bellow’s capable hands, a single essay can range fluidly across topics as various as the talents of President Roosevelt, the economic narrative of Jay Gatsby, and childhood adventures in Chicago.

A surreal, high-wire act of narrative nonfiction that redefines the genre, Avoid the Day is part detective story, part memoir, and part meditation on the meaning of life - all told with a dark pulse of existential horror. What emerges is an unforgettable study of mortality and the artist’s journey.

The stories I have chosen to share include some of the special people who have touched my heart and helped to mold me. Each of the stories uncovers the direct impact that a simple day or moment has when a person shares their interests, experiences, and life's passions with another person. I have been lucky enough to have encountered some very special people in my life who have shown me how important one person can be in the life of another person.