The Art Of series is a new line of books reinvigorating the practice
of craft and criticism. Each book will be a brief, witty, and useful
exploration of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry by a writer impassioned by
a singular craft issue. The Art Of volumes will provide a series of
sustained examinations of key but sometimes neglected aspects of
creative writing by some of contemporary literature's finest
practioners.
In The Art of Time in Memoir, critic and memoirist Sven Birkerts
examines the human impulse to write about the self. By examining memoirs
such as Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory; Virginia Woolf's unfinished
A Sketch of the Past; and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, Birkerts
describes the memoirist's essential art of assembling patterns of
meaning, stirring to life our own sense of past and present.