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True Lies and Short Takes
Assorted Life Writing Essays
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2022
Summary
This gathering of autobiographical essays focuses on different experiences and periods of the author’s life and hybrid identity: a childhood spent in Austria, teenage years in an American school and then a lycèe in France, coming to the U.S. as a young adult and attending college, studying in England for two years, and then settling permanently in the U.S. into an academic career. The word “essay” in the title is meant in its original or French sense, as an attempt or trial. The twenty-four items in this gathering are a kaleidoscopic collection of such attempts at different modes of self-reflexivity. They are arranged not so much in the chronological order of their composition as by way of loosely assembled thematic clusters. “True lies” suggests that by transforming lived experiences into language--by way of memory, imagination, and reflection--and often years and decades later, we inevitably alter them as we write them down. But we also re-experience them, and in so doing shift them into another register. These recollections cover a wide range of experiences: Stelzig’s early years, his absurd encounter with a barber in Salzburg, his mysterious Buddha experience in Hong Kong, his travel misadventure in Spain, his career as an aspiring poet, his commitment to teaching Shakespeare’s plays, his love of dogs and of tennis, and the death of a nineteen-year old Austrian au pair girl. True Lies is divided into three parts. “Austrian Roots” addresses Stelzig’s early years, including his relationship with his Austrian parents. “Adult Branchings” focuses on his American adult life and identity. The final section, “Falling Leaves,” is for the most part a set of reflections on the later stages of life and the sense of mortality and of time running out—the challenge of “being in time” and the question of “what remains.”
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2022
ISBN-Print
978-0-7618-7326-6
ISBN-Online
978-0-7618-7327-3
Publisher
Hamilton Books, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
210
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
Preface No access
Acknowledgments No access
Austrian Roots No access
True Lies No access
Viktor No access
Bipolar No access
Tennis Lessons No access
Scrip No access
Remembering Dieta No access
What Goes Around, or My Suitcase Fiasco in Spain No access
My Buddha Experience No access
Loving and Losing Dogs No access
My Obscure Career as an Aspiring Poet No access
Archetypal Dreams No access
Vespa Dreams No access
Rereading Old Books No access
Reflections on Visiting Weimar and Buchenwald No access
Suicide on the Mind No access
Timepieces No access
Being in Time No access
Autumn Leaves No access
Time’s Relativity No access
The Inevitable Tipping Point of Mortality No access
Reading Obituaries No access
What Remains No access
Shakespeare and No End: My Long, Imaginative Relationship with the Stratford Bard No access
Reading Letters from College Friends in These Pandemic Times No access
