{"product_id":"unpleasantries-9780295998404","title":"Unpleasantries","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEven from upside-down in his recently flipped truck, Frank Soos reveals himself to be ruminative, grappling with the limitations of language to express the human condition. Moving quicklyskiing in the dark or taking long summer bike rides on Alaska highwaysSoos combines an active physical life with a dark and difficult interior existence, wrestling the full span of thinking and doing onto the page with surprising lightness. His meditations move from fly-fishing in dangerously swift Alaska rivers to memories of the liars and dirty-joke tellers of his small-town Virginia childhood, revealing insights in new encounters and old preoccupations. Soos writes about pain and despair, aging, his divorce, his father's passing, regret, the loss of home, and the fear of death. But in the process of confronting these dark topics, he is full of wonder. As he writes at the end of an account of almost drowning, Bruised but whole, I was alive, alive, alive.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003ePreface\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAnother Kind of Loneliness \u003cbr\u003e Mont Sainte-Victoire, Approximately \u003cbr\u003e I Held Their Coats: A Study of Two Jokes\u003cbr\u003e A Little Iliad\u003cbr\u003e Obituary with Bamboo Fly Rod\u003cbr\u003e Upside-Down with Borges and Bob \u003cbr\u003e Meditation on My Cousin Lou, Dead at Thirty-Three \u003cbr\u003e Glamour and Romance \u003cbr\u003e Other People’s Pain and My Own \u003cbr\u003e The Man on the Bridge \u003cbr\u003e Naked to the World \u003cbr\u003e Dead Animals I Have Known \u003cbr\u003e Why Is It That We Do This? \u003cbr\u003e Driving Directions to the Homes of the Dead \u003cbr\u003e Some Fibbers \u003cbr\u003e No Place Like \u003cbr\u003e Falling In \u003cbr\u003e I Built a Little Boat; or, The Necessity of Failure \u003cbr\u003e Kinds of Ambition \u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAcknowledgments\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Washington Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49400936202583,"sku":"9780295998404","price":25.19,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9780295998404.jpg?v=1730471985","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/unpleasantries-9780295998404","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}