The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard

by Jo Ann Beard

'Brilliant, like nobody else' Elizabeth McCracken'Beard's curiosity and amazement are contagious' Financial TimesWeaving a complex tapestry drawn from interviews, anecdotes, moments from Beard's own life, and sheer imagination, these extraordinary pieces embody the hospitality of spectacular they are spaces you fall into and are reluctant to leave. From the intimate drama of everyday life - school crushes, dog clinics, divorce - to the terror and excitement of a fox lurking by a campsite or a murderer in your home, Beard flawlessly distils what it means to live deeply as we hurtle through wonder and grief, love and heartbreak.Bringing together pieces from Beard's first collection, The Boys of My Youth, and Festival Days, which was published two decades later, The Collected Works showcases Jo Ann Beard's impressive breadth, quiet brilliance, and timeless prose.

Genres: Essays, Short Stories, Fiction

448 pages, Paperback

Published August 17, 2023

About the author

Jo Ann Beard is the author of a collection of autobiographical essays, The Boys of My Youth. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays, and other magazines and anthologies. She received a Whiting Foundation Award and nonfiction fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Reviews

[Lee]

(4.5) Some all-time essays in here.

[Chris]

Absolutely brilliant

[Filip Wijnings]

Ontiegelijk goed, misschien wel het beste van afgelopen jaar. In ieder geval heb ik er een nieuwe obsessie bij.

[Tarandeep Kang]

I must say I had never heard of this writer before reading some glowing reviews in the newspaper. I can certainly see why such praise is heaped upon her, and in finishing this collection of all of her works to date, I can't help feel that I've missed a treat for several years. I often feel the line between a great writer of fiction and a psychologist is a thin one. Ms Beard certainly crosses the line and is one of the most acute observers of human nature and foibles I have ever had the pleasure to read! She writes with compassion, empathy and humour for people at various turning points, and stages in their lives, some, confronting their own mortality. A treasure trove of insight, empathy, and beautiful writing I will be returning to!

[Juliano]

“Time stretched like rubber. Fascinated, he wandered around inside each moment as though it were a cavernous room.” This is the experience of the titular protagonist of ‘Werner’, a story-slash-essay in The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard, based on the true story of a man fleeing a burning building by jumping from his window into the (closed) window of an apartment in a building facing his own, a story told with such a vivid, mesmerising sense of panic and bewilderment. This collection brings together Beard’s two volumes of short ‘fiction’, 2021’s Festival Days followed by 1998’s The Boys of My Youth; I say ‘fiction’ because Beard describes herself as an “essayist by default” in the preface to Festival Days, and adds that though there are two fictional pieces in that volume, “They are also essays, in their own secret ways, and the essays are also stories.” I had only read Beard’s novella Cheri, a moving reconstruction of a woman’s final days, which is also in this volume. But I was astounded, through Festival Days, by these pieces blurring fact and fiction, by Beard’s control of the sentence and of plotting, cutting away from the action to the past, or the interior, deft and tantalising. One of the more fictional pieces, ‘The Tomb of Wrestling’, is a harrowing story of a woman fighting for survival, and among the best short stories I’ve ever read. If Festival Days is characterised by reflections on later life and survival and the collapse of structures in our personal lives — home, relationships, pets — then The Boys of My Youth, aptly titled, looks back more often to younger life and the formative experiences of our psychology. In that volume, I really loved ‘Coyotes’, ‘Against the Grain’, ‘The Family Hour’, and ‘The Fourth State of Matter’, a devastating, haunting essay about the 1991 University of Iowa shooting that Beard narrowly avoided, which claimed the lives of her colleagues and one of her close friends. Beard is such a master of form as well as craft on the smallest scale, pivoting from wry humour to emotional heft with admirably fine tuning.

[Davidg]

This collects two books: The Boys of My Youth and Festival Days, first published in 1998 and 2021 respectively.

Strangely, this volume puts the more recent book first. Here Beard tells true events as stories, often putting herself, and the reader, into the minds of the people whose events she is describing. The most famous is the story of Cheri, terminally ill, and following her through to her death. Other standout essays, though I am not sure if that is the best term for what this is, are Werner and The Tomb of Wrestling. The latter is the most disturbing. All are beautifully written.

Following this, the older book was a disappointment at first. All the material here, is based on episodes in Beard’s own life and is therefore less wide ranging. I struggled through the first few episodes, not being that bothered about her different cousins, for example. Then there was the wonderful piece of writing that is Coyote. This is followed by the devastating The Fourth State of Matter. The following pieces can’t have the same impact they continue the quality.

[John Watson]

Poignant, visceral and deadpan all at once. This collection will bring you to tears and make you smile in wry recognition of the tender truths revealed.

[Dave Van Rompaye]

4,5*. Some are among the best short stories I read. It feels more like an essay at times.

[Jenny Toune]

sheer brilliance!

[Werner Hammerstingl]

Reverse chronology i.e her later works are the first part of the book. I loved "Festival days" (the story) and "Boys of our youth" (again the story). She's most engaging when she appears to be chronicling her own life.