MINE: Essays

by Sarah Viren

This is a book about ownership. It begins with an essay about being given a man’s furniture while he’s on trial for murder and follows with essays that question corporeal, familial, and intellectual forms of ownership. What does it mean to believe that a hand, or a child, or a country, or a story belongs to you? What happens if you realize you’re wrong? Mining her own life and those of others, Sarah Viren considers the contingencies of ownership alongside the realities of loss in this debut essay collection.

163 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 1, 2018

About the author

Sarah Viren is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and author of two books of narrative nonfiction. Her essay collection Mine won the River Teeth Nonfiction Book Prize and the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, was a silver winner for essays in Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards, was longlisted for the Pen Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award (as well as being named one of LitHub’s favorite books of 2018). Her second book, To Name the Bigger Lie: A Memoir in Two Stories, is out on June 13 from Scribner. Sarah is a finalist for a National Magazine Award in Feature Writing and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Fulbright Student Grant to Colombia. In her work as a literary translator, Sarah has translated stories by the Latin American authors Pilar Quintana and Federico Falco along with Falco’s novella, Cordoba Skies. She teaches in the creative writing program at Arizona State University and lives in Tempe with her partner, two kids, and rescue dog Oki.