“In his concentrically self-aware, amused, and ironic voice, David Lazar explores the trappings of memory, the trapdoors of memory, the way we gild or codify, select, soften, and self-delude ourselves based on our understanding of the past. His own process of selection and reflection reminds us of how far this literary form can take us, bound only by the limits of desire and imagination.”

David Lazar created the undergraduate and Ph.D. programs in Nonfiction Writing at Ohio University, and directed the creation of the undergraduate and M.F.A. programs in Nonfiction Writing at Columbia College Chicago. He is the founding editor of the literary magazine Hotel Amerika, now in its thirteenth year. A major theorist, teacher, practitioner, and historian of the essay, David Lazar is the author of two collections of essays, Occasional Desire (just out from the University of Nebraska Press), and The Body of Brooklyn (U/Iowa), as well as Powder Town, a collection of prose poems (Pecan Grove); Michael Powell: Interviews; and, Conversations with M.F.K. Fisher (both from U/Mississippi Press). Editor of and contributor to the landmark collection, Truth in Nonfiction, Lazar is also the editor, most recently of Essaying the Essay (Welcome Table Press), and, the forthcoming, After Montaigne (University of Georgia Press).