Souvenir

Kathryn Rhett is the author of Near Breathing, a memoir, and editor of the anthology Survival Stories: Memoirs of Crisis. Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Harvard Review, The Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The New York Times Magazine, River Teeth, and elsewhere. Her essays have been selected four times as Notable Essays for The Best American Essays. The recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowship in nonfiction, she teaches at Gettysburg College, in the low-residency M.F.A. program at Queens University in Charlotte, and at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival

Kathryn Rhett writes personal essays for grown-ups. At the least since Virginia Woolf appraised Middlemarch, critics have extolled the rare novel ＂written for grown-up people,＂ with George Eliot’s masterpiece as the apex. But where is the creative nonfiction so dear to the reader who has lived awhile? Kathryn Rhett writes it. In Souvenir, her impeccable reflections on life’s derailments and fulfillments, her wry yet open-minded observations remind and reveal how accumulated experiences, large and small, lay us low or lift us up in unexpected ways ---Barbara Jones, Executive Editor, Henry Holt & Company

In Kathryn Rhett’s elegant and perceptive Souvenir, a self-described ＂serial nester＂ leaves on journeys real and imagined, guiding her lucky readers through landscapes as inviting as her essays. Whether traveling by land, sea, air, or Subaru, or into a past that ＂never leaves you,＂ the destination is the same: the rich, varied terrain of the human heart ---Rebecca McClanahan, author of The Tribal Knot and The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings

Kathryn Rhett’s subtle, serpentine personal essays are utterly beguiling. [...] Rhett’s prose is impeccable, but unpretentious. Her style is clear and fluid, her voice quiet, but absolutely distinctive. After reading the essays in Souvenir, I feel I know their author and her world. I would recognize her work anywhere, with no name attached ---Emily Fox Gordon, author of Book of Days and The Mockingbird Years