A Little Fling and Other Essays

“These essays are saturated in Pickering’s quirky, warm, amusing, and bemused sense of the world.”

Jay Parini Author of Robert Frost: A Life and Benjamin’s Crossing

No matter where he finds himself, Sam Pickering’s thoughts invariably return to his roots. Whether traipsing through a New England field near his home, overhearing a conversation at the local coffee shop, or enjoying idle time in Nova Scotia, he finds connections in life that always seem to lead him back to Tennessee.

Pickering’s “little flings” with language-his fleeting, well turned phrases that sparkle for a moment and make one forget weighty significance-fill the essays. With a style renowned for humor and craft, Pickering writes essays that he likens to three-legged stools, equally supported by observations of nature, commentaries on family activities, and anecdotes drawn from memory. A Little Fling and Other Essays brings readers more of this delightful prose.

Pickering captures the rich wonder of daily life: a son’s playing high school football, the friendly scorn of a wife long-married to the same conversation, the sound of sparrows flicking tails and cries through brambles. In the course of his verbal strolls, he transports readers to places and states of mind that are both real and mythic. Describing humorous and human characters like Googoo Hooberry and minister Slubey Garts, and events like a “Homegoing” parade, he finds lessons for modern life in the eccentricities of small-town Tennessee. Through his close observations, Pickering reminds us how varied the world is and how it can restore the spirit, examining things we often overlook, like moss or beetles or the quality of November light.

Here, then, are what Pickering describes as “miscellanies green and blue with family doings, ramblings over hill and field, old country tales dressed up and gone to prose.” Through essays grounded in his rich sense of the world and a poet’s feel for language, he invites readers to recognize bits of their own hours on these pages, to laugh without feeling guilty, and to appreciate the simple glories blooming in their lives.

The Author: Sam Pickering is professor of English at he University of Connecticut and was the inspiration for the character of Professor John Keating in the movie Dead Poets Society. He is the author of more than a dozen other books, the most recent of which are Deprived of Unhappiness and Living to Prowl.

Pickering's "little flings" with language - his fleeting, well-turned phrases that sparkle for a moment and make one forget weighty significance - fill the essays. With a style renowned for humor and craft, Pickering writes essays that he likens to three-legged stools, equally supported by observations of nature, commentaries on family activities, and anecdotes drawn from memory.. "Through his close observations, Pickering reminds us how varied the world is and how it can restore the spirit, examining things we often overlook, like moss or beetles or the quality of November light.

Kirkus Reviews

Essayist Pickering's (Deprived of Happiness, 1998, etc.) world is willfully circumscribed, mostly his family and friends (real and unreal) and the immediate landscape and what came in that day's mail, but he knows just how to coax from the ordinary the kind of sustained nourishment that imbues life with significance. Pickering tenders here not so much 15 essays, but 15 thought processes, 15 chances to join a nimble, unbridled, and ever-suspicious mind at work. A piece may start with him mulling over the personality of the months—November, say, lending itself to contemplation and fear—which may spark a story about religious bookstores, which bows to an encounter with an old college yearbook, which is abandoned when an inchworm eating a lichen catches his attention. These oddments, notions, fancies, and observations trip on and on in graceful, tenuous association, seeming trifles that circle and then dance as Pickering celebrates the mundane, gives it credit, and reaps its abiding rewards: the nighthawk quartering a field, a slow drive with his daughter and her friends to a soccer match, a droughty season in Nova Scotia yielding a bog dry enough to explore. He'll pursue a solemnity, pull at a gray thread until it unravels, as when he reads the gravestones of children and wonders what could have happened. But mostly he looks for the bright side, which is often provided by the good (fictional) citizens of Carthage Tenn., busy idlers all, who drop little pearls like "A dead cat will do a respectable job of keeping the rodents down." Then there are the priceless comments of his vinegary pal Josh, who turns his flame thrower on any hint of piety and pomposity and who either isfictional or else ought to be receiving a cut of Pickering's scant royalties: "In 1997 royalties from ten books brought me , or .000401 of what my friends assume I make." Like good sipping whiskey, each administration of Pickering triggers a small, worthy revelation.

The Author: Sam Pickering is professor of English at he University of Connecticut and was the inspiration for the character of Professor John Keating in the movie Dead Poets Society. He is the author of more than a dozen other books, the most recent of which are Deprived of Unhappiness and Living to Prowl.