How to Change History

A Salvage Project

Robin Hemley (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

198 Seiten

2025
University of Nebraska Press (Verlag)
978-1-4962-4032-3 (ISBN)

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In How to Change History Robin Hemley grapples with the individual’s navigation of history and the conflict between personal and public histories. In an attempt to restore, resurrect, and reclaim what might otherwise be lost, Hemley meditates and speculates on photography, scrapbooks, historical markers, travelogues, TV shows, real estate come-ons, washed up rock stars, incontinent dachshunds, stalkers, skeletons in the closet, and literature. He also examines his parents’ lives as writers, documenting their under-seen influence on the art movements of the day.

In one essay, he writes about his mother’s first cousin, Roy, a survivor of Pearl Harbor whose troubled daughter murdered him. The essay “Jim’s Corner” examines the notion of memorial plaques and how they often highlight erasure rather than forestall it. Hemley writes about a stranger whose World War II experiences were chronicled in a scrapbook Hemley bought at an estate sale. In this book about reconstruction, Hemley posits that while we cannot change events once they have passed, we can return to those events to learn and sometimes perhaps change our understanding of them.

Robin Hemley is the author or editor of sixteen books, including Oblivion: An After Autobiography, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (with Xu Xi), and Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood (Nebraska, 2020). An innovator of the contemporary essay, Hemley has won numerous fellowships, residencies, awards, and Pushcart Prizes. He is the founder of the international nonfiction conference NonfictioNOW.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Prologue: Moments of Attention

Part 1. Indescribable People
In the Waiting Room of Dick Van Dyke
Reading History to My Mother
The Incomplete History of Mary Hilliard
Jim’s Corner
In the Theater of Half-Truths
In the Storeroom of Figments
A Word from Our Sponsors
The Unmentionable One

Part 2. Ghosts I Follow
How to Change History
Of the Affection of Fathers for Their Children
A Reincarnation When I Didn’t Want One
The Dachshund Endures
On the Island of Our Fathers’ Ghosts
For the Spirits of Guinaang
Feast for the Departed
In the Storeroom of Petty Hatreds

Part 3. Salvage Projects
How to Remove a Curse
Something Must Be Understood
Skinny Dipping with James Agee
The Hypocrite’s Guide to Saving the Earth
The Air Supply Guide to Matrimonial Bliss
How to Change History, Redux
The Writer across the Table
In the Basement of Afflictions

Erscheinungsdatum	17.01.2025
Zusatzinfo	6 photographs
Verlagsort	Lincoln
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
ISBN-10	1-4962-4032-4 / 1496240324
ISBN-13	978-1-4962-4032-3 / 9781496240323
Zustand	Neuware