Overview

Brain surgery. Assault weapons in the bed of a pickup truck. Rilke, Rodin, and the craters of the moon. Recovery and disintegration. Monkeys stealing an egg outside a temple in Kathmandu. Brushing teeth bloody on long car rides. Pain, ours and what we bring to others. Wildfires in southern California. Rats in Texas. Childhood abuse. Dreams of tigers and blackout nights. The sweetness of mangoes. A son born into a shadowy hospital room. Love. Joy. InFeverland, Alex Lemon has created a fragmented exploration of what it means to be a man in the tumult of twenty-first-century America-and a harrowing, associative memoir about how we live with the beauties and horrors of our pasts. How to be here, now?Lemon asks. How to be here, good? Immersed in darkness but shot through with light,thisis a thrillingly experimental memoir from one of our most heartfelt and inventive writers.

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9781571313362

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Reviews

<b>Praise for <i>Feverland</i></b> I didn't read <i>Feverland</i>--I plunged into it. Alex Lemon's mind comes at you in a hot, mad rush, and you experience him as you experience your own past, all at once. A good memoir leaves you feeling that you know another person. This one, somehow, leaves you feeling that you know yourself as well. <b>--J.C. Hallman, author of <i>B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal</i></b> Praise for <i>Happy: A Memoir</i> Lemon makes <i>Happy</i> harrowing and upbeat, writing with a poet's touch about the illness that overtook his jock life. . . . Nonfiction writers and poets have a secret alliance--working toward defining a truth instead of making it up. So when we get a twofer of a poet writing memoir, the results trend toward glinting precision. <b>--<i>Cleveland Plain Dealer</i></b> Lemon takes his reader inside the terror and strangeness of illness--and gives us, along the way, a loving portrait of a devoted, wonderfully nutty mother. Lemon is a brave, headlong writer, and he captures the life of the body with vivid and memorable intensity. <b>--Mark Doty</b> The pyrotechnic prose of Lemon's memoir creates an electrifying portrait of a body in crisis, and the way the soul is inexorably, reluctantly, dragged along. . . . If ever a book was written in blood, it is this one. <b>--Nick Flynn, author of <i>Another Bullshit Night in Suck City</i></b> Lemon packs the poignant wallop of a sprawling Dickensian novel with his taut, speedy memoir. <b>--<i>Denver Post</i></b> This one is something special. . . . This is the story of a boy and his mother, but one whose tenderness sneaks up on you while you're distracted by all the blood and booze and hollering. The two of them can talk about nearly anything, but don't always have to. What Lemon and his mom have is that rarest of things in a trauma memoir, a parent-child relationship that is more than merely 'functional.' It's funkily, goofily, supremely life-affirming. Make that lifesaving. <b>--<i>Salon</i></b> One of our time's most compelling memoirs . . . An electrifying portrait of a body in crisis. <b>--<i>Esquire</i></b> A page-turner on par with the best thrillers . . . Lemon's exquisite prose blasts us out of our own time, heart, brain, and body into his, making an acute empathy possible. Read this and weep, laugh, weep. <b>--<i>Library Journal</i> (Editors' Pick)</b> Dazzling . . . An unnervingly intimate, relentlessly poetic recounting of debauchery, trauma and healing, Lemon's memoir is cut from the same cloth as David Carr's <i>The Night of the Gun</i> or James Frey's discredited <i>A Million Little Pieces</i>. But whereas those autobiographies reveled in the seamy details accompanying the wild life, <i>Happy</i> is far more concerned with the party's aftermath. . . . There are few modern works that so elegantly capture a mind and, by extension, a life on the verge of disintegration. <b>--<i>Fort Worth Star-Telegram</i></b> <i>Happy</i> is graphically raw and in-your-face; Lemon's dexterity with words forces the reader into gritty latitudes no one would visit voluntarily, and the level of detail will cause some readers to squirm. But <i>Happy</i> is an honest voyage into Lemon's keen mind, remarkable spirit and loving heart, and it shouldn't be missed. <b>--<i>Minneapolis Star Tribune</i></b>

Author Information

Alex Lemon is the author of Happy: A Memoir, and the poetry collections Mosquito, Hallelujah Blackout, Fancy Beasts, and The Wish Book. His writing has appeared in Esquire, Best American Poetry 2008, AGNI, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, and Tin House, among others. He was awarded a 2005 Literature Fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and he contributes and reviews frequently for a wide range of media outlets. He lives with his wife and two children in Fort Worth, and teaches at Texas Christian University.

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