What do you think?
Rate this book
Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction
The best of short literary memoirs, essays, and reflections, many of which were written expressly for this collection. Also available
The late Judith Kitchen, editor of the perennially popular anthologies Short Takes, In Short, and In Brief, was greatly influential in recognizing and establishing flash creative nonfiction as a form in its own right. In Brief Encounters, she and writer/editor/actor Dinah Lenney expand this vibrant field with nearly eighty new shorts—as these sharply focused pieces have come to be known— representing an impressive range of voices, perspectives, sensibilities, and forms. Brief Encounters features the work of the emerging and the established—including Stuart Dybek, Roxanne Gay, Eduardo Galeano, Leslie Jamison, and Julian Barnes—arranged by theme to explore the human condition in ways intimate, idiosyncratic, funny, sad, provocative, lyrical, unflinching. From the rant to the rave, the meditation to the polemic, the confession to the valediction, this collection of shorts—this celebration of true and vivid prose—will enlarge your world.
The late Judith Kitchen, editor of the perennially popular anthologies Short Takes, In Short, and In Brief, was greatly influential in recognizing and establishing flash creative nonfiction as a form in its own right. In Brief Encounters, she and writer/editor/actor Dinah Lenney expand this vibrant field with nearly eighty new shorts—as these sharply focused pieces have come to be known— representing an impressive range of voices, perspectives, sensibilities, and forms. Brief Encounters features the work of the emerging and the established—including Stuart Dybek, Roxanne Gay, Eduardo Galeano, Leslie Jamison, and Julian Barnes—arranged by theme to explore the human condition in ways intimate, idiosyncratic, funny, sad, provocative, lyrical, unflinching. From the rant to the rave, the meditation to the polemic, the confession to the valediction, this collection of shorts—this celebration of true and vivid prose—will enlarge your world.
346 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 9, 2015
32 people are currently reading
214 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
December 16, 2015
I received a review copy of this from the publisher through Edelweiss, based on my request.
I have been trying to read more non-fiction, more essays, ever since taking a class on (writing) Creative Non-Fiction. This is a collection of super short essays, some only a paragraph, some a few pages. And like any collection, there are some I enjoyed more than others. I will highlight those I found most memorable. I think those that I liked the most felt like they couldn't have been otherwise, not missing something just to be shorter, not trying harder to be longer. And to be successful at a brief encounter, one must be quite concise and intentional.
"Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays" by James Richardson
I say I have no self-knowledge, but I know which things I will never tell you.
"Don't Let Me Be Lonely" by Claudia Rankine (I really need to read her stuff)
Why with such a nice smile are you trying to weep?
"Brief Treatise Against Irony" by Lia Purpura
Irony isn't equipped to navigate rough democracies.\
"No Results Found" by Nicholas Montemarano
No quotes but it is about losing a dog. :(
"Red" by Jericho Parms
A wonderful lyric essay about the color red. I would love a collection with an essay on each color!
"If Mr. Clean Had Been My Father" by Dinty W. Moore
A smell representing an unhappy childhood....
"The Nun" by Peggy Shumaker
"I hadn't until that moment put words to what had been building inside me, hadn't realized quite the sources of the pressure. 'No,' I thought. 'My husband's doing everything he promised to do. He's just married to the wrong woman.'"
"Gifts" by Suzanne Berne
About being far away from your mother, and being mothered by gifts. Seemed RATHER familiar.
"Reading" by Patricia Hampl
I'm going to use this entire essay for my class on reading!
I have been trying to read more non-fiction, more essays, ever since taking a class on (writing) Creative Non-Fiction. This is a collection of super short essays, some only a paragraph, some a few pages. And like any collection, there are some I enjoyed more than others. I will highlight those I found most memorable. I think those that I liked the most felt like they couldn't have been otherwise, not missing something just to be shorter, not trying harder to be longer. And to be successful at a brief encounter, one must be quite concise and intentional.
"Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays" by James Richardson
I say I have no self-knowledge, but I know which things I will never tell you.
"Don't Let Me Be Lonely" by Claudia Rankine (I really need to read her stuff)
Why with such a nice smile are you trying to weep?
"Brief Treatise Against Irony" by Lia Purpura
Irony isn't equipped to navigate rough democracies.\
"No Results Found" by Nicholas Montemarano
No quotes but it is about losing a dog. :(
"Red" by Jericho Parms
A wonderful lyric essay about the color red. I would love a collection with an essay on each color!
"If Mr. Clean Had Been My Father" by Dinty W. Moore
A smell representing an unhappy childhood....
"The Nun" by Peggy Shumaker
"I hadn't until that moment put words to what had been building inside me, hadn't realized quite the sources of the pressure. 'No,' I thought. 'My husband's doing everything he promised to do. He's just married to the wrong woman.'"
"Gifts" by Suzanne Berne
About being far away from your mother, and being mothered by gifts. Seemed RATHER familiar.
"Reading" by Patricia Hampl
I'm going to use this entire essay for my class on reading!
December 4, 2015
I love the "flash non-fiction" idea of this book and liked almost all the essays. A good mix of ideas and writing styles, almost none of them longer than five pages. There are a few clunkers, one of which solidified my dislike of Meghan Daum's writing. One caution: Don't read No Results Found if you've ever had a pet unless you want to cry like a big, ol' baby! Waaaah.
December 16, 2019
Of the 77 flash essays in this anthology, there are about 40 I loved, several I enjoyed. This was a great read. Notable mentions: Kim Barnes’s Spokane is a Coat, Geeta Kothari’s Listen, Abigail Thomas’ How to Banish Melancholy.
March 5, 2017
So many stories and writers contained here! I loved getting a glimpse into the minds and snippets of life of these writers--this anthology is aptly named Brief Encounters. I read this book as part of the required reading for a creative writing class and am glad I was introduced to it. An inspiration for my own creative non-fiction writing practice.
Stories and sentences that stood out:
The entirety of "One Long Sentence" by Sven Birkerts. pg. 38
The entirety of "No Results Found" by Nicholas Montemarano. pg. 85
"This I loved to do. It was laborious, but I enjoyed watching my progress--order obliterating chaos. I've always liked repetitive, incremental tasks like that." pg. 105 (about placing mahjong pieces from "The Renaissance" by Lynn Sharon Schwartz)
"Red is the dying leaves just as dying stars exhibit a Mars-like tint before they go--evidence of their passing, yet just as much evidence of their life." pg. 146 (from "Red" by Jericho Parms)
"The kind of weeping--silent, full--that might be reserved for blue, except that it hoods our lids and circles the underside of the eye in red. This, the kind of weeping I learned from my mother, the kind you wake to the next morning and nurse like jet lag, like a hangover, face puffed, swollen, a little older around the eyes. The red of rage and grief and euphoric sadness; the red-eye of weightlessness, or rebirth." pg. 147 (from "Red" by Jericho Parms)
The entirety of "Star Light, Star Bright" by Jane Brox. pg. 153
The entirety of "What the Osprey Knows" by Pam Houston. pg. 166
The entirety of "Foul Ball" by Greg Glazner. pg. 174
"The stadium is left alone and the fan too returns to his solitude: to the I who had been we. The fan goes off, the crowd breaks up and melts away, and Sunday becomes as melancholy as Ash Wednesday after the death of Carnival." pg. 185 (from "The Fan" by Eduardo Galeano)
"Between 1976 and 1995, I'd see my father a handful of times--funerals, weddings, a chance meeting or two--and in those times we'd talk about nothing in particular, a gulf of anger and sadness filled with ellipses of conversation. When those silences became too much, when it became clear that genetics alone could not fill in for words, he'd turn to baseball." pg. 187 (from "Joltin' Joe Has Left and Gone Away" by Tod Goldberg)
"When I didn't respond, because I was somewhere between crying and vomiting, the two poles I typically battled in his presence, he changed the subject." pg. 189 (from "Joltin' Joe Has Left and Gone Away" by Tod Goldberg)
The entirety of "Swerve" by Brenda Miller. pg. 253
The entirety of "Between" by Stuart Dybek. pg. 255
"When I walked the Gulf Coast beach for the first time, age fifteen, I was that girl from the cold city, tanning too quickly in her stringy striped bikini, bare feet marking sand, sun-blond and uneasy in her long swimmer's body, no tattoos yet, or surgeries, or histories of love." pg. 261 (from "Crease" by Barrie Jean Borich)
"She will not remember if she longed for any part of those bare-chested linebackers, collarbones glinting with Italian gold, their bodies taut as they dove into the breakers. She will only be sure of what she did not want: their babies, their houses, their hovering mothers, their jealous breath in her ear." pg. 262 (from "Crease" by Barrie Jean Borich)
The entirety of "Gifts" by Suzanne Berne. pg. 275
"I pretend that a memory remains as still and compliant as a photo, but a memory is not a photograph: a memory morphs, slipping undetected from one side of the brain to the other and back again, excising plot lines, adding characters, altering the personal politics of the figures. Though memories retell themselves at every opportunity, shape-shifters that can't be trusted, they do, after Sontag, become the norm for the way things appear. They do change the very idea of reality. What's real becomes what-was which becomes what-is. Try and frame that." pg. 284 (from "The Blur Family" by Joe Bonomo)
"Both of these women are writers which is to say they are born and bred readers, people who begin and end the day with words streaming before them on the page, on the screen, moving from gutter to margin, back and forth in the sublime rhythm of that most intimate of relations: writer's mind to reader's mind." pg. 314 (from "Reading" by Patricia Hampl)
"You can see this happiness, the contentment of absolute independence of mind, on the subway, people performing this bravura act of interiority in public, reading their way past the uncaring crush of strangers, into the mysterious liberation they achieve in those secret pages. It's the privacy of reading that amazes. The writer's audience is always just one sequestered soul at a time." pg. 314 (from "Reading" by Patricia Hampl)
"I am speaking here of the nature of rhythm, pitch, melody, phrasing, and harmony. They five food groups of the soul." pg. 318 (from "The Revolution Needs a Song" by Marvin Bell)
Stories and sentences that stood out:
The entirety of "One Long Sentence" by Sven Birkerts. pg. 38
The entirety of "No Results Found" by Nicholas Montemarano. pg. 85
"This I loved to do. It was laborious, but I enjoyed watching my progress--order obliterating chaos. I've always liked repetitive, incremental tasks like that." pg. 105 (about placing mahjong pieces from "The Renaissance" by Lynn Sharon Schwartz)
"Red is the dying leaves just as dying stars exhibit a Mars-like tint before they go--evidence of their passing, yet just as much evidence of their life." pg. 146 (from "Red" by Jericho Parms)
"The kind of weeping--silent, full--that might be reserved for blue, except that it hoods our lids and circles the underside of the eye in red. This, the kind of weeping I learned from my mother, the kind you wake to the next morning and nurse like jet lag, like a hangover, face puffed, swollen, a little older around the eyes. The red of rage and grief and euphoric sadness; the red-eye of weightlessness, or rebirth." pg. 147 (from "Red" by Jericho Parms)
The entirety of "Star Light, Star Bright" by Jane Brox. pg. 153
The entirety of "What the Osprey Knows" by Pam Houston. pg. 166
The entirety of "Foul Ball" by Greg Glazner. pg. 174
"The stadium is left alone and the fan too returns to his solitude: to the I who had been we. The fan goes off, the crowd breaks up and melts away, and Sunday becomes as melancholy as Ash Wednesday after the death of Carnival." pg. 185 (from "The Fan" by Eduardo Galeano)
"Between 1976 and 1995, I'd see my father a handful of times--funerals, weddings, a chance meeting or two--and in those times we'd talk about nothing in particular, a gulf of anger and sadness filled with ellipses of conversation. When those silences became too much, when it became clear that genetics alone could not fill in for words, he'd turn to baseball." pg. 187 (from "Joltin' Joe Has Left and Gone Away" by Tod Goldberg)
"When I didn't respond, because I was somewhere between crying and vomiting, the two poles I typically battled in his presence, he changed the subject." pg. 189 (from "Joltin' Joe Has Left and Gone Away" by Tod Goldberg)
The entirety of "Swerve" by Brenda Miller. pg. 253
The entirety of "Between" by Stuart Dybek. pg. 255
"When I walked the Gulf Coast beach for the first time, age fifteen, I was that girl from the cold city, tanning too quickly in her stringy striped bikini, bare feet marking sand, sun-blond and uneasy in her long swimmer's body, no tattoos yet, or surgeries, or histories of love." pg. 261 (from "Crease" by Barrie Jean Borich)
"She will not remember if she longed for any part of those bare-chested linebackers, collarbones glinting with Italian gold, their bodies taut as they dove into the breakers. She will only be sure of what she did not want: their babies, their houses, their hovering mothers, their jealous breath in her ear." pg. 262 (from "Crease" by Barrie Jean Borich)
The entirety of "Gifts" by Suzanne Berne. pg. 275
"I pretend that a memory remains as still and compliant as a photo, but a memory is not a photograph: a memory morphs, slipping undetected from one side of the brain to the other and back again, excising plot lines, adding characters, altering the personal politics of the figures. Though memories retell themselves at every opportunity, shape-shifters that can't be trusted, they do, after Sontag, become the norm for the way things appear. They do change the very idea of reality. What's real becomes what-was which becomes what-is. Try and frame that." pg. 284 (from "The Blur Family" by Joe Bonomo)
"Both of these women are writers which is to say they are born and bred readers, people who begin and end the day with words streaming before them on the page, on the screen, moving from gutter to margin, back and forth in the sublime rhythm of that most intimate of relations: writer's mind to reader's mind." pg. 314 (from "Reading" by Patricia Hampl)
"You can see this happiness, the contentment of absolute independence of mind, on the subway, people performing this bravura act of interiority in public, reading their way past the uncaring crush of strangers, into the mysterious liberation they achieve in those secret pages. It's the privacy of reading that amazes. The writer's audience is always just one sequestered soul at a time." pg. 314 (from "Reading" by Patricia Hampl)
"I am speaking here of the nature of rhythm, pitch, melody, phrasing, and harmony. They five food groups of the soul." pg. 318 (from "The Revolution Needs a Song" by Marvin Bell)
April 11, 2020
"Think of this book as a gallery...here one writer ends, another begins...Woven all the way through, to keep you situated and as if we'd planned it, notions about place and displacement..."
I have to write a review because the way this book has existed in my life in the past two-three weeks is so wonderfully peculiar.
The title of this book, Brief Encounters, perfectly describes the magic of how I stumbled upon this collection of short creative-non fiction essays. This book was wedged among several books in a Little Free Library that I stopped at. It was 1am and I was taking a dummy-long walk around gentrified parts of my city, about 4 hours long. When I took the book out of that wooden treehouse, I decided to stop at every bench I saw, to begin reading immediately the introduction and one essay-per-streetlamp until I found my way back home.
And this book quickly became worn, as if I had owned it for years. Brand new, seamless with fresh pages...now, missing the cover, worn and wrinkled pages as if it had been read over and over again and passed amongst several people- and yet, only I have read it once all the way through. What really happened is that the wind knocked a vase of flowers over and gave this book a good bit of water damage. But it really was a good book for reading outside between tasks, for reading a few stories after waking and before sleeping- to read for the sake of reading.
Creative non-fiction, I have decided, is definitely my favorite genre. Each author wrote with honesty and unveiled beautiful intimate moments of their lives. And the editors organized each essay in a way that created smooth transitions into each possible topic. I loved every bit of this book and hope that other aimless wanderers stumble upon it in the way that I did, and that they find themselves just as emersed in the provided truths, reflections, and amusements that refuse to keep life experiences on the individual plane.
I have to write a review because the way this book has existed in my life in the past two-three weeks is so wonderfully peculiar.
The title of this book, Brief Encounters, perfectly describes the magic of how I stumbled upon this collection of short creative-non fiction essays. This book was wedged among several books in a Little Free Library that I stopped at. It was 1am and I was taking a dummy-long walk around gentrified parts of my city, about 4 hours long. When I took the book out of that wooden treehouse, I decided to stop at every bench I saw, to begin reading immediately the introduction and one essay-per-streetlamp until I found my way back home.
And this book quickly became worn, as if I had owned it for years. Brand new, seamless with fresh pages...now, missing the cover, worn and wrinkled pages as if it had been read over and over again and passed amongst several people- and yet, only I have read it once all the way through. What really happened is that the wind knocked a vase of flowers over and gave this book a good bit of water damage. But it really was a good book for reading outside between tasks, for reading a few stories after waking and before sleeping- to read for the sake of reading.
Creative non-fiction, I have decided, is definitely my favorite genre. Each author wrote with honesty and unveiled beautiful intimate moments of their lives. And the editors organized each essay in a way that created smooth transitions into each possible topic. I loved every bit of this book and hope that other aimless wanderers stumble upon it in the way that I did, and that they find themselves just as emersed in the provided truths, reflections, and amusements that refuse to keep life experiences on the individual plane.
August 8, 2017
Out of 77 essays, I liked 13. Another two had a few good quotes but were not memorable as a whole.
The ones I liked were:
The Revolution Needs a Song by Marvin Bell
A Phone Call with my Father by Paul Lisicky
Thanksgiving Picnic by Naomi Shihab Nye
Gifts by Suzanne Berne
Mom x 3 by Joan Wickersham
The Wardrobe Series by Kate Carroll de Gutes
If Mr. Clean had been my Father by Dinty W. Moore
Hoffmanniana by Marjorie Sandor
Ichthyosis by Jennifer Culkin
Red by Jericho Parms
The Renaissance by Lynne Sharon Schwartz
Thoughts on Time by Chris Daley
Cocoons by Barbara Hurd
The ones I liked were:
The Revolution Needs a Song by Marvin Bell
A Phone Call with my Father by Paul Lisicky
Thanksgiving Picnic by Naomi Shihab Nye
Gifts by Suzanne Berne
Mom x 3 by Joan Wickersham
The Wardrobe Series by Kate Carroll de Gutes
If Mr. Clean had been my Father by Dinty W. Moore
Hoffmanniana by Marjorie Sandor
Ichthyosis by Jennifer Culkin
Red by Jericho Parms
The Renaissance by Lynne Sharon Schwartz
Thoughts on Time by Chris Daley
Cocoons by Barbara Hurd
January 20, 2021
Read some of this for a creative nonfiction writing class I took several months ago and finished it little by little since then. Some of the pieces are stunning. Some I didn’t connect with at all. But I appreciate such an in-depth survey of a sub-genre I had never really read before... even if it kinda feels like a sub-genre that’s by and for participants in MFA programs.
January 30, 2019
My kind of short pieces~varied and unique.
May 15, 2019
3.5: Read for my college writing class. Uneven collection but some good selections to assign for students.
March 5, 2016
I was hoping to use this book as a textbook for a creative nonfiction class.
Sadly, I cannot. There are simply too many essays here that utilize two of my most peevy peeves--the use of second person and the utter lack of paragraphing. As a reader, I enjoy when writers (like those featured here) deploy them--good writers know why and how they're throwing the rules away, and the effect they generate is intentional. My students, however...cannot yet do that.
That said, there are a number that are very good--innovative in structure and creative. Several that seem to be about related topics cluster together nicely. There are a few pieces I find more 'prose poem' than 'lyric essay', too self consciously clever of words and breaking sentences and being obfuscatory than interested in conveying a powerful meaning.
Sadly, I cannot. There are simply too many essays here that utilize two of my most peevy peeves--the use of second person and the utter lack of paragraphing. As a reader, I enjoy when writers (like those featured here) deploy them--good writers know why and how they're throwing the rules away, and the effect they generate is intentional. My students, however...cannot yet do that.
That said, there are a number that are very good--innovative in structure and creative. Several that seem to be about related topics cluster together nicely. There are a few pieces I find more 'prose poem' than 'lyric essay', too self consciously clever of words and breaking sentences and being obfuscatory than interested in conveying a powerful meaning.
November 5, 2016
I all slowly worked my way through these short stories. I would go through spurts. There were many i loved there were some i started and skipped, like the one that was one super long run on sentence. It bothered me so much I couldn't read it. I enjoyed the flow of the book and how one story slightly connected to the next by one theme that slightly connected it to next with a shift or different theme.
Read
January 24, 20164 stars and highly recommended. This is the kind of book I'd like to find on a guest room bedside table or in a dentist's waiting room, when I'm unprepared with an engrossing novel but wanting to read something smart. -Sarah
January 24, 2016
Didn't like it.
January 24, 2016
Terrific. It's interesting and varied and full of wonderful [mostly accessible] creative nonfiction. I can't think of a better snow day collection of writing.
August 17, 2016
Useful collection of 'shorts'.
November 23, 2016
Almost the whole year!
April 25, 2017
I love the curation of pieces here, as one short essay moved into the next
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews