Overview

Fourth Genre: Twenty-Five Essays from Our First Twenty-Five Years is an anthology of outstanding creative nonfiction published since the journal’s first issue in 1999. Describing it as an anthology, though, feels too dry for this collection. Is it a mixtape, maybe? A literary festival or a potluck? A mosaic of voices, a tapestry, or an open mic? This volume includes essays on grief and guns, prayer and parenthood, fear and family, race and religion, hometowns and home cooking. It features stories from parents, teachers, scholars, activists, and artists, told in voices that represent white, Black, brown, gay, straight, transgender, and immigrant experiences. Ordinary people engaged in the extraordinary act of humble self-reflection, all wrestling with issues, big and small, trusting in the power of the personal to reveal essential truths about all of us. Each essay comes paired with writing prompts and a reflective note from the author that reveals their personal creative process, inviting readers to begin their own journeys of discovery. Whether you’re here to teach, learn, or just savor fine writing, this book will remind you that life, in all its strange, wonderful, heartbreaking, devastating beauty and trauma, is always worth writing about.

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9781611865547

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Reviews

“What a marvelous collection of intriguing, unforgettable essays. Fourth Genre: Twenty-Five Essays from Our First Twenty-Five Years illustrates the best of the nonfiction genre and marks an important milestone for a fantastic magazine.” —Dinty W. Moore, founding editor of Brevity “Between these covers, you’ll find a thoughtful and wide-ranging sampler of personal essays, as curated by one of the rare literary journals to seriously consider nonfiction for decades. As a bonus, the reflective essays written by each author and the writing prompt ideas that follow each piece make this anthology an excellent classroom tool in addition to a fine read.” —Elena Passarello, author of Animals Strike Curious Poses and Let Me Clear My Throat

Author Information

Joey Franklin, a professor at Brigham Young University, is the author of the The Writer's Hustle: A Professional Guide to the Creativity, Discipline, Humility, and Grit Every Writer Needs to Flourish, and two essay collections: Delusions of Grandeur: American Essays and My Wife Wants You to Know I'm Happily Married. His essays and articles have appeared in Poets & Writers, Gettysburg Review, Brevity, The Norton Reader, and elsewhere. In addition to his work as a coeditor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, he is a host of the NonfictionWOW! quiz show and teaches in the MFA program at Brigham Young University. Patrick Madden, a professor at Brigham Young University, is the author of three essay collections, Disparates, Sublime Physick, and Quotidiana, and coeditor of After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays. In addition to his work on Fourth Genre, he coedits with David Lazar the 21st Century Essays series at Ohio State University Press, serves as vice president of the NonfictioNOW Conference, and curates quotidiana.org, an online anthology of classical essays.

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