Make It Scream, Make It Burn

Leslie Jamison pushes and perfects the expansive, digressive, investigative and autobiographical essay style she emerged so spectacularly onto the literary stage with in The Empathy Exams. From a lonely whale roaming the world's oceans singing a singularly high-pitched song, to lonely people living perfect lives in online artificial realities, Jamison maps and charts the ways in which we are now haunted, have always been haunted, by our personal mythologies, by our choices, by the choices seemingly given to us by our social or political contexts. The collection is a feat of inter-linked philosophical analysis and painstaking reflection. Ranging from the journalistic to the experimental, from deeply considered ethical reflection to sumptuous descriptive prose, Jamison proves herself able to turn and test the essay in countless directions. The result is a deeply impressive and exciting tour-de-force of American literary non-fiction.