The Tao of Humiliation - Paperback

by Lee Upton (Author)

Chilling, funny, devastating: Upton's characters backtrack into the past, then make their way forward with humiliation as their guide.

"Readers will want to live inside this wonderful book - not just in its parties and wrecked gatherings and sophisticated conversations but in the sentences themselves, which are genuine shelters: long, erudite, warmhearted and capable, brimming with scholarship and knowledge. In its own way, each sentence is a container filled with something revelatory." -The New York Times Book Review, Sunday Shortlist

Author Biography

Lee Upton is the author of twelve other books, including the novella The Guide to the Flying Island, and a collection of essays about writing, Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition Boredom Purity & Secrecy. Her poetry has appeared in editions of The Best American Poetry and has been included in numerous anthologies as well as in The New Republic, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Harvard Review, New England Review, Poetry, and other magazines. More than three dozen of her short stories have been published, appearing in such journals as Antioch Review, Epoch, Short Fiction (England), Redivider, Northwest Review, Shenandoah, and Ascent. She has published more than fifty articles and essays about literature. Her awards include: the Lyric Poetry Award and The Writer/Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America; the Pushcart Prize; the National Poetry Series Award; the Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series Award; the BOA Short Fiction Prize; and the Mary Louise VanArtsdalen Prize for Scholarship, the Marquis Teaching Award, and the Jones Faculty Lecture Award at Lafayette College, where she is the Writer-in-Residence and a professor of Englis