Many Circles

Many Circles collects the best of Goldbarth's three earlier essay collections, along with several new pieces. Goldbarth, whom Joyce Carol Oates has called "a dazzling virtuoso who can break your heart," weaves through an array of fascinating topics (including alien life, Jewish history, pop culture, ancient and recent events, and quantum physics) to explore the greater questions of our existence and our universe. Each essay, in language and topic, is a rich and extraordinary adventure, full of surprise and epiphany. As Robert Atwan, editor of The Best American Essays series, has noted: "Theses essays are a whole new breed . . . Goldbarth has spliced strands of the old genre with a powerful new gene—and the results are miraculous."

Publishers Weekly

Goldbarth's virtuosic essays bob and weave throughout this delightful, even brilliant, collection. Well worth reading and rereading, some of these pieces from the past 21 years were published in journals such as the Georgia Review and Parnassus and in previous books. Goldbarth (Dark Waves and Light Matter), also a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet, synthesizes isolated facts and sweeping concepts, locating himself within the general "we" even as he writes in first person and discusses exceptional individuals. In the title essay, the author circles around several topicsincluding Mayan archaeologist John Lloyd Stephens's troubles at an excavation and the dissolution of Goldbarth's friends' marriage in the face of repressed memory treatmentexploring accidental, analytic and associative connections. Goldbarth's playful and dissonant style ranges in one essay from witty ("But if the subject is shaky footing, let's make it literal for a while") to abrupt ("He caught her with her tongue up her therapist's ass, he said") to florid ("So tell me: who is this man here, doing a whoop-whoop whirl of dervish dance steps in that tumble of fretwork stone?") to critical ("A lesson: the authority of two-bit village big shots is as fervent to keep itself whole and unchallenged as is, for example, that of reigning academic theorists"). No subject falls outside Goldbarth's interest, from the planet Mars to Marie Curie to his own grandfather. While many of these essays aren't autobiographical, they are nonetheless deeply felt. Goldbarth's fresh prose and expansive content are helping reconfigure the essay as a form. (May) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Albert Goldbarth is the author of several books of poetry, and of three essay collections: Dark Waves and Light Matter, Great Topics of the World, and A Sympathy of Souls. He has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for his poetry, among many other honors. He lives and teaches in Kansas.