Anne Gisleson via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Anne Gisleson:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Anne Gisleson
- City: New Orleans
- Country: United States
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Anne Gisleson is the author of The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving and Reading (Little, Brown), a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, The Oxford American, The Believer and many other publications.
Her essays have been featured in several anthologies such as Best American Non-Required Reading, Life in the Wake, and others. She co-edited and co-wrote How to Rebuild a City: Field Guide from a Work in Progress, about ground-up rebuilding efforts in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and wrote the accompanying essays for photographer Michel Varisco’s Shifting, a book about the beauty and degradation of the coastal wetlands.
She teaches creative writing at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts and is co-founder of the literary and visual arts non-profit Antenna.
Contact Information
- Email: agisleson@gmail.com
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Book Purchases: http://annegisleson.com/The-Futilitarians
- ▶ Website: http://annegisleson.com
- ▶ Stories: http://annegisleson.com/Selected-Writing
More
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Quotes, Notes & Etc.
On Anne Gisleson’s The Futilitarians (Little, Brown) —
“Gisleson writes with wit, warmth, and a spiritual devotion to books... Her search for purpose and connection amid chaos and loss permeates even the most heart-wrenching moments of The Futilitarians-- and it’s what turns the book from a meditation on reading to a celebration of being.” -- Jason Heller, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO
“Essential... this is a shattering and very important important book...one of the best books of this year.”
— Dave Eggers
“Truly great writing...Gisleson conjures the strange beauty of her world... An affecting memoir.”
-- Keziah Weir, ELLE
“With beautiful writing, Gisleson effortlessly weaves existentialism around narrative, challenging and engaging readers with a seamless blend of theory and memoir. Writer and educator Gisleson’s first book-length work weighs heavy with life’s toughest questions and then instantaneously elevates the soul with hope, making a charming, captivating, and incredibly smart must-read.” -- Melissa Norstedt, Booklist
“Sets out a search for meaning in grand terms and resolves the search in the beauty of loving detail...Plus, spoiler, it ends in fireworks and a reading list you do not want to miss.”
— Louise Erdrich
“A beautiful book about things that matter-- love, death, grief, anger, regret, renewal, the life of the mind, the life of the heart, and the life of the world around you.”
— Sam Lipsyte
Praise for The Futilitarians —
“The Futilitarians sets out a search for meaning in grand terms and solves the search in the beauty of loving detail. From suicide to set painting, lunch pies to Death Row, from decayed eternity to the complex rebirth of New Orleans, this book never loses the treasure of abiding doubt. Plus, spoiler, it ends in fireworks and a reading list you do not want to miss.”
— LOUISE ERDICH, National Book Award–winning author ofLaRose
“This is a shattering and very important book—and will, if there is justice (and there must be justice), be considered one of the best books of this year. There is an ocean of hurt here, but Gisleson manages to sail through it and show us everything that’s beautiful about this sea of pain. If you love existential literature, or New Orleans, or your family, or are curious about the meaning of life, then you will find The Futilitarians to be an essential book.”
— DAVE EGGERS, New York Times bestselling author of The Circle and What Is the What
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging through New Orleans and Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... and Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
