Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!

Create Free Account

The Most of It

4.2/5 ( ratings)

“[Mary] Ruefle . . . brings us an often unnerving, but always fresh and exhilarating view of our common experience of the world.”—Charles Simic

Fans of Lydia Davis and Miranda July will delight in this short prose from a beloved and cutting-edge poet. Here are thirty stories that deliver the soft touch and the sucker punch with stunning aplomb. Ducks, physicists, detectives, and The New York Times all make appearances.

From “The Dart and the Drill”:

I do not believe that when my brother pierced my skull with a succession of darts thrown from across our paneled rec room on the night of November 18th in my sixth year on earth, he was trying to transcend the notions of time and space as contained and protected by the human skull. But who can fathom the complexities of the human brain? Ten years later—this would have been in 1967—the New York Times reported a twenty-four year old man, who held an honor degree in law, died in the process of using a dentist’s drill on his own skull, positioned an inch above his right ear, in an attempt to prove that time and space could be conquered . . .

Mary Ruefle’s poems and prose have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Best American Poetry, and The Next American Essay. Her many awards include NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. She is a frequent visiting professor at the University of Iowa, and she lives and teaches in Vermont.

Language: English

Pages: 96

Format: Paperback

Publisher: Wave Books

Release: June 01, 2008

ISBN: 1933517298

ISBN 13: 9781933517292

The Most of It

4.2/5 ( ratings)

“[Mary] Ruefle . . . brings us an often unnerving, but always fresh and exhilarating view of our common experience of the world.”—Charles Simic

Fans of Lydia Davis and Miranda July will delight in this short prose from a beloved and cutting-edge poet. Here are thirty stories that deliver the soft touch and the sucker punch with stunning aplomb. Ducks, physicists, detectives, and The New York Times all make appearances.

From “The Dart and the Drill”:

I do not believe that when my brother pierced my skull with a succession of darts thrown from across our paneled rec room on the night of November 18th in my sixth year on earth, he was trying to transcend the notions of time and space as contained and protected by the human skull. But who can fathom the complexities of the human brain? Ten years later—this would have been in 1967—the New York Times reported a twenty-four year old man, who held an honor degree in law, died in the process of using a dentist’s drill on his own skull, positioned an inch above his right ear, in an attempt to prove that time and space could be conquered . . .

Mary Ruefle’s poems and prose have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Best American Poetry, and The Next American Essay. Her many awards include NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. She is a frequent visiting professor at the University of Iowa, and she lives and teaches in Vermont.

Language: English

Pages: 96

Format: Paperback

Publisher: Wave Books

Release: June 01, 2008

ISBN: 1933517298

ISBN 13: 9781933517292

More books from Mary Ruefle

Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

4.4/5 ( ratings)

My Private Property

4.3/5 ( ratings)

Trances of the Blast

4.2/5 ( ratings)

A Little White Shadow

4.1/5 ( ratings)

Dunce

3.9/5 ( ratings)

On Imagination

4.2/5 ( ratings)

Indeed I Was Pleased With the World

4.3/5 ( ratings)

Cold Pluto

4.5/5 ( ratings)

State of the Union: Fifty Political Poems

4.1/5 ( ratings)

Antiquity

The Hoot and Hare Review (No. 2)

Kenyon Review, Jan/Feb 2019

Kenyon Review, Sept/Oct 2018

Mein Privatbesitz

El Gran Libro de los Pájaros: Los mejores relatos, ensayos y poemas de la literatura alada universal

Por qué no beso bien

Sobre la imaginación

Selected Poems

Post Meridian

Ploughshares Winter 1994-95 Guest-Edited by Don Lee and David Daniel

Rate this book!

Write a review?