Research Catalog

Title

Mr. Apology and other essays / Alec Wilkinson.

Author

Wilkinson, Alec, 1952-

Publication

Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 2003.

Supplementary Content

Publisher description

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

329 p.; 24 cm.

Summary

"Mr. Apology and Other Essays is a miscellany of misfits, cranks, daredevils, nuts, eccentrics, and lone wolves. From a piece on a Romanian cab driver who intends to cross the Bering Strait in his taxi to a celebration of two renowned hockey fighters, from Ry Cooder's collaboration with Cuban musicians in 1996 (which resulted in the acclaimed Buena Vista Social Club) to a behind-the-scenes look at a Rolling Stones dinner party in 1983, Wilkinson brings to these pieces an intelligence and a compassion that tap our deepest sense of humanity. The breadth of these essays is rare; with the same sensitivity and insight, Wilkinson explores Paul Simon's writer's block as well as the puzzling epidemic of blindness that afflicted 150 Cambodian women, refugees from the Khmer Rouge. In the title piece, Wilkinson describes the experience of a New York City artist who invites people to call and leave an apology - any kind of apology, for anything - on his answering machine. When one caller seems to divulge a deadly secret, the line becomes a complicated vehicle for both confession and delusion."--BOOK JACKET.

Contents

Cameos -- Dependents -- Elmore's Legs -- Perfect -- Spy -- One Green Dog -- Bruisers -- Another Green Dog -- Ms. Ramos -- Sophie's Guernica -- The Gift -- Facing the Shooter -- An American Original -- Fatherhood -- At Home Outside the World -- My Mentor -- Mr. Apology -- Conversations with a Killer -- The Archive of Stopped Time -- A Changed Version of God -- The Enormous Monitor.

ISBN

0618123113

LCCN

2003047837

OCLC

ocm51983501

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries