I’m very excited about this forthcoming title, In the Flesh: Twenty Writers Explore the Body. The idea for a book of writing about the body first came to me over ten years ago, and I worked for a while on it with my friend Sue Thomas. It went through various metamorphoses, lay dormant for a while and then, in collaboration with another friend, Lynne Van Luven, it was distilled into its current form and taken up by Brindle & Glass.
Each writer was invited to choose (or, in some cases, gently steered towards!) a particular body part and asked to write a candid personal essay exploring that part and their relationship with it. The assumption was that writers had to possess (or have possessed) a particular part in order to write about it. However, we abandoned this rule in the case of two very significant parts, as you will see below.
The twenty essays that resulted from our rather odd invitations are fascinating and utterly distinctive in content and tone. Witty, sad, quirky, passionate: each one reads beautifully alone; put together, they create a fascinating, multi-dimensional portrait of the human body and our experience of living within it.
Here, to whet your appetite, is the contents page: [click to continue…]
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