In Starting from Paterson, Garret Keizer’s essays are by turns challenging, funny, searching, biting, and profound. In other words, there’s much to admire in each and every one of them.
Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls and the North Bath trilogy of Fool novels
These outstanding essays embody the essence of personal writing. Starting from Paterson is refreshingly propelled not by self-absorption, but by a vigorous and intimate engagement with the surrounding world. And no matter how ordinary that world may appear—whether it’s the produce aisle of a local supermarket or the cozy book nook of an aging department store—it can gleam with a beatific luminosity. These essays perform a delicate alchemy as they subtly transmute the mundane into the magical.
Robert Atwan, founder and former series editor of The Best American Essays
Starting from Paterson is a pleasure from beginning to end, full of fresh insights and revealing observations of everyone from a Vermont grocery store clerk with a Las Vegas past to Doctor Johnson and Smokey Robinson. Keizer has the Chekhovian capacity to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, as well as to tease out unexpected complexity in figures we thought we knew well. His authorial voice is relaxed, unpretentious, and personal without ever sliding into self-absorption. The old Rutgers slogan applies to him: ‘Jersey Roots, Global Reach.’ The sort of man you'd like to have on the barstool next to yours.
Jackson Lears, author of Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street and Editor Emeritus of Raritan
In these marvelous essays, Keizer writes with teeth and tenderness—about mercy, music, labor, and love. From Marx to Motown, along the picket line, the church pew, the aisles of a rural Vermont grocery, his moral vision is capacious and unflinching, capable of articulating capitalism’s betrayals in a can of soup and finding grace in taking out the trash. I loved this book.
Ayad Akhtar, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of Homeland Elegies
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