The Shell Game

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The Shell Game

Writers Play with Borrowed Forms

Edited and with an introduction by Kim Adrian
Foreword by Brenda Miller
Postscript by Cheyenne Nimes

276 pages
3 illustrations

Paperback

April 2018

978-0-8032-9676-3

$24.95 Add to Cart
eBook (PDF)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

April 2018

978-1-4962-0629-9

$24.95 Add to Cart
eBook (EPUB)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

April 2018

978-1-4962-0627-5

$24.95 Add to Cart

About the Book

Within the recent explosion of creative nonfiction, a new type of form is quietly emerging, what Brenda Miller calls “hermit crab essays.” The Shell Game is an anthology of these intriguing essays that borrow their structures from ordinary, everyday sources: a recipe, a crossword puzzle, a Craig’s List ad. Like their zoological namesake, these essays do not simply wear their borrowed “shells” but inhabit them so perfectly that the borrowed structures are wholly integral rather than contrived, both shaping the work and illuminating and exemplifying its subject.

The Shell Game contains a carefully chosen selection of beautifully written, thought-provoking hybrid essays tackling a broad range of subjects, including the secrets of the human genome, the intractable pain of growing up black in America, and the gorgeous glow residing at the edges of the autism spectrum. Surprising, delightful, and lyric, these essays are destined to become classics of this new and increasingly popular hybrid form.  
 

Author Bio

Kim Adrian is a Boston-based creative writer and a visiting lecturer of nonfiction writing at Brown University. She is the author of Sock, part of the Object Lesson series, and the forthcoming memoir The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet (Nebraska, 2018). Adrian is the recipient of a Bread Loaf scholarship, a PEN/New England Discovery Award, and an artist’s grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Brenda Miller directs the MFA in Creative Writing and the MA in English Studies at Western Washington University. Cheyenne Nimes is a cross-genre writer currently working on poetry/nonfiction hybrids on the nature of evil and Jonestown. She won the Edwin Ford Piper Scholar Award and was a University of Iowa Art Museum resident writer.
 

Praise

"The Shell Game may serve to expand what readers may think of when they think of the essay. Among the grocery lists and Post-It notes, comic sketches and sermons, and the other ephemera of our everyday lives, essayistic elements exist—searching for their shells."—Sadaf Ferdowsi, Punctuate

"Of course you’ll want to let essay fans know they’ll enjoy this book. But also be sure to let people know that, if they’re also a writer or if they teach writing, this collection can serve as a model. You've always been somewhat of a rebel, so you'll want writers, especially those who stick to more rigid forms, to read this book to encourage them to have fun with their work. To take risks and chances."—Hippocampus Magazine

"The essays in this collection bring with them a sense of hope about literature and its capacity for evolution and change. . . . Ultimately, maybe it’s this promise of transformation and adaptation that makes hermit crab essays so appealing. They encourage us to move forward, and they show us how many different paths we might take."—Vivian Wagner, Millions

"If you are looking for a book that fits into the genre of "Creative Nonfiction," especially as an introduction, your best bet is to pick up The Shell Game immediately. . . . This book is the science fiction of creative nonfiction, or better yet, the Ulysses of the modern essay. It's a shell for itself, in that, without claiming these essays as "essays," one wouldn’t know what to call them, what to do with them. The Shell Game is far from the five paragraphs that grammar schools teach, and it makes readers feel as if they are learning what an essay is (or could be) all over again."—Cody Lee, New Pages

"If good creative writing sparks the instinct to write, The Shell Game provides ample embers to inspire a wide range of writers. . . . If any writer stumbles into The Shell Game, even for a few essays, they are bound to come away with some fresh ideas and new perspectives, a renewed hankering to examine the quotidian and evaluate the details and textures around them to render them in new, yet recognizable ways."—Rachel Kathryn Rueckert, Columbia Journal

"Hermit crab essays, without proper care, are at risk of devolving into cute pets . . . but The Shell Game makes a unique and significant contribution to helping avoid this fate."—Rebecca Fish Ewan, Split Rock Review

“Daring, innovative, and mind-bending, this anthology showcases the best of what is arguably the most exciting new thing on the literary landscape today: the borrowed form essay.”—Kathy Fish, coauthor of Rift and author of Wild Life
 

“Virginia Woolf asked of the essay ‘simply that it should give pleasure.’ The Shell Game fulfills this request, even exceeds it, bringing startling diversity of subject, voice, and form. Each essay is a new surprise, a prettier shell than ordinary, demonstrating astonishing originality in mimicry and providing, for this reader at least, pure joy.”—Patrick Madden, author of Sublime Physick and Quotidiana
 

Table of Contents

Contents
Foreword: Discovering the Hermit Crab Essay
Brenda Miller
Introduction: A Natural History of the North American Hermit Crab Essay
Kim Adrian
Grand Theft Auto
Joey Franklin
Ok, Cupid
Sarah McColl
Rubik’s Cube, Six Twisted Paragraphs
Kathryn A. Kopple
Solving My Way to Grandma
Laurie Easter
Genome Tome
Priscilla Long
As Is
Brian Oliu
Falling in Love with a Glass House: Twenty-Four Views of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House
Jennifer Metsker
Son of Mr. Green Jeans: An Essay on Fatherhood, Alphabetically Arranged
Dinty W. Moore
Snakes & Ladders
Anushka Jasraj
Math 1619
Gwendolyn Wallace
Stagecraft
Mary Peelen
We Regret to Inform You
Brenda Miller
The Six Answers on the Back of a Trivia Card
Caitlin Horrocks
Piecing the Quilt of Valor
Judith Sornberger
Self-Portrait as a 1970s Cineplex Movie Theatre (an Abecedarian)
Steve Fellner
The Forgetting Test
Lee Upton
#MISCARRIAGE.EXE
Ingrid Jendrzejewski
SECTION 404
Cheyenne Nimes
The Body (an Excerpt)
Jenny Boully
Questionnaire for My Grandfather
Kim Adrian
The Petoskey Catechism, 1958
Elizabeth Kerlikowske
What Signifies (Three Parables)
David Shields
The Marriage License
Judy Bolton-Fasman
The Heart as a Torn Muscle
Randon Billings Noble
The Spectrum (of Miracles and Mysteries)
Steve Edwards
“Easy as Pie,” That’s a Lie
Amy Wallen
Outline toward a Theory of the Mine versus the Mind and the Harvard Outline
Ander Monson
The Clockwise Detorsion of Snails: A Love Essay in Sectors
Karen Hays
Postscript: Forms on the Page
Cheyenne Nimes
Source Acknowledgments
Contributors
Contributor’s Note
Michael Martone 

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