Blueberries

Product Description

Blueberries could be described as a collection of essays, the closest term available for a book that resists classification; a blend of personal essay, polemic, prose poetry, true-crime journalism and confession that considers a fragmented life, reflecting on what it means to be a woman, a body, and an artist. It is both a memoir and an interrogation of memoir. Drawing comparisons to Maggie Nelson, Leslie Jamison, Ada Calhoun and Eula Biss, this is a new horizon in storytelling. In crystalline prose, Savage explores the essential questions of the examined life: What is it to desire? What is it to accommodate oneself to the world? And at what cost?

Review

“Blueberries feels like laying down on the train tracks and looking up at the sky―a reverie, shot through by a feeling of acceleration, of something vast coming at you. Ellena’s essays are heartstopping epics of self-inquiry and world-inquiry.”―Maria Tumarkin, author of Axiomatic
“Once I started reading Blueberries, I found it almost impossible to put down. It’s fascinating to watch Ellena Savage’s mind at work in this book―her essays unfurl, expand, and dance in unexpected and satisfying ways. This is a masterful, fearless book in which strength and vulnerability collide.”―Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I’m Someone Else
“Ellena Savage is savagely smart and talented.”―Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room
“Ellena Savage is a rare kind of true intellectual, a voice that rises above the cacophony with remarkable insight. In Blueberries, she cuts fearless swathes through the ways that we write and think and live now and leaves us far better for it: the book is unsettling, life-affirming and essential.”―Jean Edelstein, author of This Isn’t Really About You
“Reading Ellena Savage’s Blueberries engaged me completely. Savage’s sparkling writing is bold, witty, insightful, fearless, and funny. It emerges from an astute mind at odds with itself, with culture and society. Savage wrestles and plays with received ideas of all kinds, and with what has and hasn’t shaped her. Savage’s fierce essays and stories are true to a lived life, and fascinating and irresistible.”―Lynne Tillman, author of American Genius, a Comedy
“Ellena Savage confronts the past convulsively, compulsively. In dialogic language and form, the author, facing memory’s traumas and perplexities, and also its delights, is constantly aware that it’s all about the translation of experience from the private to the public realm. In extremis, which is where Savage shines especially, it’s as if she saying to the “repressed”: go ahead and return; make my day.”―David Lazar, editor of Truth in Nonfiction, author of Occasional Desire, The Body of Brooklyn, and I’ll be Your Mirror
“Wrestling with the intricacies of memory, identity, class and trauma, [Blueberries] sees Savage contemplate her past with unflinching clarity…Take it to your next book club.”―ELLE Magazine
Blueberries is an adamant and unruly book. It is also the most exciting work of creative non-fiction to be published in this country since Maria Tumarkin took up the pen.―The Australian
“Savage deftly shifts between stylistic devices, narrative voices and time, and the result is breathtaking.”―The Guardian
“Savage plays with form like a poet, and excavates the roots of her experience with an impressive generosity and fierce intelligence that mirror her mentor, Maria Tumarkin… Fans of Tumarkin and Jia Tolentino should hunt this down…”―InDaily
Blueberries does not always offer answers to the questions raised in its essays. In this way, however, it manages to be an endlessly curious and intriguing collection of work…[it] is clever, candid, and thoroughly fresh. Just read it.”―ArtsHub

About the Author

Ellena Savage is an author and academic. Her work has been publishing widely in anthologies and literary journals including, recently, the 
Paris Review Daily, 
Sydney Review of Books, 
Choice Words and 
Lifted Brow. Ellena is the recipient