Overview

An ""UNEXPECTEDLY PROFOUND,"" ""DEEPLY STRANGE,"" and ""UTTERLY UNIQUE tour of the human body"" (Publishers Weekly) ""A must read for anyone who's ever been amazed or aghast at what just came out."" -- Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch To live, our bodies must continuously shed materials. Stop urinating, stop defecating, stop expelling breath, and death is near. While we often think of these materials as embarrassing waste products, they serve far more complex functions. The color of our mucus, the volume of our flatus, the rhythm of our breath: taken together, these materials tell a story of the human that produced them. Moreover, the exchange, elimination, and frequent disguise of our effluence has been elemental to the development of human civilization, and our lives today are still governed by a host of laws and superstitions and social mores about the materials our bodies leave behind. In each of twelve discrete chapters, Earthly Materials tells a story about one of the materials the human body sheds--from breath and urine to vomit and tears. Sometimes the questions examined are historical: What have we physically done with all the urine produced in our cities? Sometimes they approach the matter through a philosophical lens: Is it ever logical to cry? Sometimes they explore recent scientific discoveries: How is mucus forcing us to reconsider our understanding of natural selection? But they always offer a window into how we negotiate our place in the world and how we get along with one another. Cutter Wood's delightfully weird, richly informative, and unexpectedly poetic tour of our bodily excretions uncovers extraordinary truths about ourselves--and the human story.

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9780063048607

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Reviews

"""In Love and Death in the Sunshine State, this gripping exploration of an island murder and a heartland love, Cutter Wood subverts all our expectations for the true crime genre. He challenges what we mean by 'true, ' by presenting us with feats of imagination alongside traditional reportage, and challenges how we understand 'crime' by asking us to consider the relationship between acts of extraordinary violence and the rhythms of our ordinary lives. Wood's voice is smart, curious, playful, and wholly engaging."" -- Leslie Jamison ""Love and Death in the Sunshine State, the new debut by Cutter Wood, is an astonishing true-crime narrative that, in its lyricism and formal inventiveness, expands and defies our expectations of what literary nonfiction can be . . . In the spirit of William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, Wood pushes beyond the facts of the case itself to explore larger questions of intimacy, destruction, and regret. This is a brilliant first book by an enormously talented young writer."" -- LitHub ""Wood combines elements of true crime with the techniques of contemporary fiction in his bold debut . . . Readers of literary nonfiction will find a promising new writer."" -- Publishers Weekly on Love and Death in the Sunshine State ""Those who appreciate style and creativity, which Wood has in abundance, will enjoy this."" -- Booklist on Love and Death in the Sunshine State ""Written with psychological insight and literary flair."" -- Kirkus Reviews on Love and Death in the Sunshine State"

Author Information

Cutter Wood is the author of Love and Death in the Sunshine State. His work has appeared in Harper's, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Paris Review Daily, and other publications. He completed an MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of Iowa, is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and was the Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Residence at George Washington University. He lives in Baltimore with his partner and family.

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