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Serious face : essays / Jon Mooallem.

by Mooallem, Jon, author.

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New York : Random House, [2022]

American essays -- 21st century.

0525509941 (hardcover)

9780525509943 (hardcover) :

ix, 308 pages ; 22 cm

A house at the end of the world -- Why these instead of others? -- This is my serious face -- Can you even believe this is happening? (A monk seal murder mystery) -- The outsiders -- At the precise center of a dream -- We have fire everywhere -- This story about Charlie Kaufman has changed -- Swing state -- Birdman -- A cloud society -- Neanderthals were people, too -- Take me out.

"Beneath the self-assured and serious faces we wear, every human life is full of longing, guesswork, and confusion--a scramble to do the best we can and make everything up as we go along. In these wide-ranging essays, Jon Mooallem chronicles the beauty of our blundering and the inescapability of our imperfections. He investigates the collapse of a multimillion-dollar bird-breeding scam run by an aging farmer known as the Pigeon King, intimately narrates a harrowing escape from California's deadliest wildfire, visits an eccentric Frenchman building a town at what he claims is the center of the world, shadows a man through his first day of freedom after twenty-one years in prison, and more--all with a deep conviction that it's our vulnerability, not our victories, that connect us. Mooallem's powers of perception have established him as one of the most distinctive, empathic, and clear-sighted narrative journalists working today. The Wall Street Journal has called his writing "as much art as it is journalism," and Jia Tolentino has praised his "grace and command." In Serious Face, Mooallem brings to life the desperate hopes and urgent fears of the people he meets, telling their stories with empathy, humor, insight, and kindness. These elegant, moving essays form an idiosyncratic tapestry of human experience: our audacity and fallibility, our bumbling and goodwill. In moments of calamity and within the extreme absurdity of everyday life, can we learn to love the people we really are, behind the serious faces we show the world?" --

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