An Image of My Name Enters America
Essays
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From a "brilliant, one-of-a-kind maestro" (Booklist), a vibrant tapestry of memoir, research, and criticism
Again, today, if I must choose between love and memory, I choose memory.
What would you risk to know yourself? Which stories are you willing to follow to the bitter end, revise, or, possibly, begin all over? In this collection of five interrelated essays, Lucy Ives explores identity, national fantasy, and history. She examines events and records from her own life--a childhood obsession with My Little Pony, papers and notebooks from college, an unwitting inculcation into the myth of romantic love, and the birth of her son--to excavate larger aspects of the past that have been suppressed or ignored. With bracing insight and extraordinary range, she weaves new stories about herself, her family, our country, and our culture. She connects postmodern irony to eighteenth-century cults, Cold War musicals to a great uncle's suicide to the settlement of the American West, museum period rooms to the origins of her last name to the Assyrian genocide, and the sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem to the development of modern obstetrics. Here Ives retrieves shadowy sites of pain and fear and, with her boundless imagination, attentiveness, and wit, transforms them into narratives of repair and possibility.
About this Author
Lucy Ives is the author of three novels: Impossible Views of the World; Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World; and Life Is Everywhere. She is the 2023-2025 Bonderman Assistant Professor of the Practice in Literary Arts at Brown University.
Reviews
**Literary Hub's "most anticipated books of 2024**
"Extraordinary . . . a dazzling display of knowledge, wit, ratiocination, and prose style." --Kirkus Reviews
"Unconventional and resourceful, sorrowful and perceptive, a challenging, rewarding book full of irreverent humor, rich imagery and engrossing digressions" --Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Ives's writing simply has to be experienced. There are paragraphs and even sentences here that make whole essays in themselves, with a sculptural intensity you can circumnavigate, and the light of her thinking pours from the apertures." --Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel
"Reading Lucy Ives's essay collection is exhilarating. I was reintroduced to favorite topics and introduced to new favorites, always in the company of her extraordinary rigor, intelligence, and wit. This is the kind of book you want to read aloud to people you love, to assign, to give as a present--but don't loan this one; you might not get it back." --Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
"It is rare for a mind as mercurial and voracious as Lucy Ives's to possess such obvious lexical facility in guiding readers from one thought to the next, but here we are: Ives is one of our brilliant weirdos and must be protected at all costs." --Jonny Diamond, Literary Hub's "most anticipated books of 2024"
"Readers of her other books know that Ives is brilliant: getting to know the person, the gorgeous mind, behind those books is a total treat."--Courtney Eathorne, Booklist
"A dazzling and deeply intelligent tour de force of wit and style. . . . It's a deft and enlightening collection fit for re-reads to come; Ives is truly an original."--Sam Franzini, Our Culture Mag
"From the expansive mind of novelist, poet, and critic Lucy Ives, stylish, sweeping essays that consider the lure of period rooms, Alanis Morissette, Heidegger, and more."--Vanity Fair
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