The Kuhreihen Melody: Nostalgic Essays

by Peter Selgin

Once considered a disease, nostalgia has been described as a yearning to return to "a past that never was, "a place that can only be reached through the imagination. In its fifteen essays, The Kuhreihen Melody examines nostalgia from various angles through an array of lenses. In the title essay, the author revisits his ghost-ridden hometown. "Swimming with Oliver" presents a mosaic of memories of his watery friendship with author-neurologist Oliver Sacks ."The Strange Case of Arthur Silz "investigates the six¬ty-year-old murder of a Greenwich Village artist on a mountain in Mexico, while "The Opening Credits of Rebel Without a Cause" conducts a granular dissection of the first minute and twenty-three seconds of that iconic American film. From barbershops to stripes to a boy's drowning death blamed on the author, The Kuhreihen Melody turns a wistful eye on bygone people, places, and things, and finally on nostalgia itself.

220 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 9, 2020

About the author

Peter Selgin is the author of Drowning Lessons, winner of the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award for Fiction, Life Goes to the Movies, a novel, two books on the craft of fiction, and two children’s books. His stories and essays have appeared in dozens of magazines and anthologies, including Glimmer Train Stories, Poets & Writers, The Sun, Slate, Colorado Review, Writers and Their Notebooks, Writing Fiction, and Best American Essays 2009. Confessions of a Left-Handed Man: An Artist’s Memoir, was recently published by the University of Iowa Press and was short-listed for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. His latest novel, The Water Master, won this years’ Pirate’s Alley / Faulkner Society Prize, and his essay, The Kuhreihen Melody, won the Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. Selgin’s visual art has graced the pages of the The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Outside, Gourmet, and other publications. Selgin has had several plays published and produced, including Night Blooming Serious, which won the Mill Mountain Theater Competition. His full-length play, A God in the House, based on Dr. Kevorkian and his suicide device, was a National Playwright’s Conference Winner and later optioned for Off-Broadway. He teaches at Antioch University’s MFA writing program and is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Georgia College.