★ 01/04/2021
This imaginative and precise collection shows Beard (The Boys of My Youth) at her best. The nine entries vary in scope and subject, but loss and melancholy bridge the collection. “Last Night” captures her final moments with her beloved, terminally ill dog, and “Maybe It Happened” reflects on the unreliability of human memory. The title essay interweaves Beard being left by her partner and her grief after the death of a friend: “In less than five minutes, we don’t have her anymore. She’s gone.” Beard can evoke many emotions in a single stroke: “The Lab lived to be fifteen too. The marriage, fourteen,” she writes of losing both a dog and a relationship. She’s also cunning with surprising metaphors and details, as in “Close,” where she compares writing to sitting on a sled: writing a book is like “the snow has melted and there’s just grass and gravel. It takes a lot to get the sled moving, and then it goes only a few inches.” These sharp essays cement Beard’s reputation as a master of the form. Agent: Flip Brophy, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Mar.)
Ferocious… Beard [is] a towering talent… Perhaps instead of an essayist we should think of her as a poet-naturalist, wedding intuition and observation, and forming from this union something unaccountably yet undeniably real… a book as forceful as it is fine, leaving us both awed and unsettled.”—Leah Hager Cohen, New York Times Book Review
“Beautiful… Beard’s power comes from phrasings and insights that aren’t just screaming for likes. Few writers are so wise and self-effacing and emotionally honest all in one breath… Over the course of nine beguiling pieces—which seamlessly meld observation and imagination—she effects an intimacy that makes us want to sit on the rug and listen.”—Sara Lippmann, Washington Post
“[Beard’s] books are worth the wait. A master of sensory details, she also writes with humor, melancholy and a love of animals that never borders on saccharine… In her work, even everyday moments gleam with significance.”—Michele Filgate, Los Angeles Times
“A master of creative nonfiction, Beard explores life’s most salient moments through facts that she sometimes fractures.”—Amy Sutherland, Boston Globe
“Intimate, intelligent, intense—and ultimately comforting… Like a hot water bottle for grief, these honest, beautiful essays and stories take on the death of a beloved animal, a friend’s illness, getting dumped by a partner and other tragedies few escape.”—People (Book of the Week)
“Charged with fine detail… Beard is so good at what she does… In Beard's book, writing works like compound interest, each experience building on the last, which built on the one before.”—Ellen Akins, Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“A book so good you have to put it down, then pick it back up… The most indelible stories in Festival Days observe just as unflinchingly as Beard’s characters face the extremities of life and death. I can’t think of a writer who puts words to our most difficult moments as adroitly as Beard—who so steadfastly refuses to cut away when things get tough.”—Dan Kois, Slate
“Beard’s syntax is immortalizing… An acute quality in Beard’s work makes the stories feel lived, even alive, as if they are still happening. Sometimes, as writers, we see things for real only once we are writing them, and Beard’s title essay distills this fact beautifully.”—Rachel DeWoskin, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Beard shows her dazzling skill at finding universal truths in singular situations. Beard is not just a master of the short form—she’s a master of phrase and sentence, too.”—Bethanne Patrick, Washington Post
“A new collection from the masterful storyteller Jo Ann Beard is always reason to celebrate, and Festival Days marks her long-anticipated return to the essay. Written with clear-eyed empathy, these nine pieces have the luminous glow of fireflies caught in a child’s hand.”—Chicago Review of Books
“Beard renders her own life and the lives of others with characteristic precision… With each piece, she presses the essay form into new, more intimate territory.”
—Poets & Writers
“An absolute marvel… as Beard demonstrates in her writing, life as we know it is full of bizarre, sad, beautiful, unbelievable, indescribable things—events that transform our real lives into surreal experiences.”—Chelsea Hodson, Bomb Magazine
"An impressive return... [Beard's] topics range from the quotidian to the fantastic, but all are anchored by observant, beautifully written prose that's sure to rank among the year's best."—Town & Country (Must-Read Books of Winter 2021)
“Imaginative and precise… These sharp essays cement Beard’s reputation as a master of the form… [she] can evoke many emotions in a single stroke.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Festival Days shimmers with emotional intensity… evoking the flashes of memory that come to those pausing on the threshold between life and death… Allowing her work to exist beyond the labels of fiction or nonfiction, Beard’s metaphorical patterns evince the imaginative truths that underlie her writing”—Catherine Hollis, Bookpage (starred review)
“Beard's keen eye for novelistic detail subtly transforms pure fact into art… Vital and diverse, Jo Ann Beard's second collection is an intriguing blend of fact and fiction.”—Harvey Freedenberg, Shelf Awareness
“Beard is known as a nonfiction essayist, but her work often reads like suspenseful fiction… this collection of nine essays… continues that formidable track record.”—Bookpage
"Festival Days is profoundly observed and impeccably phrased. No surprises there, then, given Jo Ann Beard’s formidable talents. But it’s actually full of audacious narrative surprises, is darkly moving and, at times, unexpectedly—almost unbearably—suspenseful.”—Geoff Dyer, author of Otherwise Known as the Human Condition and White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World
“‘I love how you love things,’ someone who loves her tells Jo Ann Beard. That love is one reason Festival Days is such a great book. Another is her flair for describing those things in vibrant and felicitous prose. Beard honors the beautiful, the sacred, and the comic in life, and for life’s inescapable cruelties and woes she offers the wisdom of a sage.”—Sigrid Nunez, author of What Are You Going Through and National Book Award-winning The Friend
“Festival Days is an artistic triumph—vividly peopled, elegantly written, and full of surprises. Each essay and story is an electrically-charged tale of loss and partial redemption. Reading Jo Ann Beard is like setting out on a walk with a curious and intelligent friend who is determined to show you how seemingly unrelated things share a secret kinship.”—Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game
Suehyla El Attar sounds like a familiar friend telling us about the ups and downs of an exceptional day. She delivers the essays in this collection in a lively and engaging manner that makes this audiobook a quick listen. Dramatic settings and situations—from India to New York, from dying pets to buildings on fire—make up these nine works. Those looking for something interesting and brief to listen to during a drive, walk, or jog will be pleased with this selection. El Attar helps dramatize the dialogue and details from piece to piece, and shifts smoothly from one set of circumstances to another. The essays can be listened to in the order in which they are presented or at random. M.R. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
Suehyla El Attar sounds like a familiar friend telling us about the ups and downs of an exceptional day. She delivers the essays in this collection in a lively and engaging manner that makes this audiobook a quick listen. Dramatic settings and situations—from India to New York, from dying pets to buildings on fire—make up these nine works. Those looking for something interesting and brief to listen to during a drive, walk, or jog will be pleased with this selection. El Attar helps dramatize the dialogue and details from piece to piece, and shifts smoothly from one set of circumstances to another. The essays can be listened to in the order in which they are presented or at random. M.R. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
2021-01-27
Beard returns to creative nonfiction.
“Something happened to her while she was eating, or right afterward. She began turning in circles and couldn’t stop.” This is the opening line of the first piece, and it may take readers a few moments to realize that “she” is a dog. This sense of disorientation serves the piece well. Brief and heartbreaking, “Last Night” details the decision to euthanize a beloved pet, and anyone who has struggled with this choice knows that uncertainty is part of what makes it so difficult. One might assume that this vignette is personal, but the piece works without a biographical hook. The question of genre is significantly more complicated in “Werner,” the story of a man who escapes a tenement fire by diving from his apartment through a window in the building next door. The protagonist, Werner Hoeflich, is an actual person, and the author fleshed out what she learned from him with details of her own creation. The result is both gripping and meditative. Beard’s ambiguous approach is more disturbing in “Cheri,” which recounts the last days of a woman with terminal cancer who died with the assistance of Jack Kevorkian. This story was also based on interviews, this time with the protagonist’s daughter, but Beard has said that much of her piece is pure invention. In a 2011 Bookforum article, Beard said, “If I called it fiction, pretended Cheri Tremble was a figment of my imagination, it wouldn't be interesting to readers, and if I treated it as journalism and wrote just facts, it might have been mildly interesting to readers but not at all interesting to me as the writer.” Readers can make of that what they will, but the resulting piece lacks the immediacy of “Werner,” and it’s possible that trying to honor fact while indulging in fiction is part of what makes this piece feel ungainly. The rest of the essays vary in style, substance, and quality.
A rangy collection, sometimes insightful, uneven, and occasionally unsettling.
