A Carnival of Losses

A CARNIVAL OF LOSSES

Notes Nearing Ninety


New essays from the vantage point of very old age, once again “alternately lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny,” (New York Times) from the former poet laureate of the United States 

Donald Hall has lived a remarkable life of letters, one capped most recently by the New York Times bestseller Essays After Eighty, a “treasure” of a book in which he “balance[s] frankness about losses with humor and gratitude” (Washington Post). Now nearing ninety, Hall delivers a new collection of self-knowing, fierce, and funny essays on aging,

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New essays from the vantage point of very old age, once again “alternately lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny,” (New York Times) from the former poet laureate of the United States 

Donald Hall has lived a remarkable life of letters, one capped most recently by the New York Times bestseller Essays After Eighty, a “treasure” of a book in which he “balance[s] frankness about losses with humor and gratitude” (Washington Post). Now nearing ninety, Hall delivers a new collection of self-knowing, fierce, and funny essays on aging, the pleasures of solitude, and the sometimes astonishing freedoms arising from both. He intersperses memories of exuberant days—as in Paris, 1951, with a French girl memorably inclined to say, “I couldn’t care less”—with writing, visceral and hilarious, on what he has called the “unknown, unanticipated galaxy” of extreme old age.

“Why should a nonagenarian hold anything back?” Hall answers his own question by revealing several vivid instances of “the worst thing I ever did,” and through equally uncensored tales of  literary friendships spanning decades, with James Wright, Richard Wilbur, Seamus Heaney, and other luminaries.

Cementing his place alongside Roger Angell and Joan Didion as a generous and profound chronicler of loss, Hall returns to the death of his beloved wife, Jane Kenyon, in an essay as original and searing as anything he’s written in his extraordinary literary lifetime.

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  • Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Hardcover
  • July 2018
  • 224 Pages
  • 9781328826343

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About Donald Hall

Donald HallDonald Hall, who served as poet laureate of the United States from 2006 to 2007, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts, awarded by the president. He lives in New Hampshire.

Praise

“Donald Hall writes about love and loss and art and home in a manner so essential and direct it’s as if he’s put the full force of his life on the page. There are very few perfect books and A Carnival of Losses is one of them.”—Ann Patchett