February 2022
I’ve been a serious and devoted fan of Karen Brennan’s work for decades, and her new book is perhaps my favorite. It is a memoir and an anti-memoir. It tells the story of a life, but kaleidoscopically, elliptically, aphoristically, ecstatically. What it’s really about is the frenzy of the visible behind and beneath and beyond the life lived. In that way, deeply reminiscent of Edmund Carpenter’s Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me!—than which there is hardly higher praise.
–David Shields
“Imagine working in miniature and implying the whole world in each passage. Karen Brennan is that kind of writer, and she does it again and again in Television, a book that resonates not like a conventionally structured memoir, but something more intricate and alive: a hive of songs that are at once astringent, tender, comic, and rueful. I loved every word.”
—Paul Lisicky
I always thought Larks was a stupid name for a cigarette. They came in a maroon package and boasted innovative charcoal filters that tasted like cheap men’s cologne. I never liked them but smoked them out of loyalty to my husband who worked for the manufacturer. Thus, Larks were a constant in my life then, cartons strewn around our dwelling much like, in a later era, my shoes would be. Cartons opened and unopened, cigarette packages on every surface of our lives, along with the burnt and smoldering butts and the ubiquitous haze in the air of the world.
–from “Larks”