Garret Keizer -- Starting From Paterson

In Starting From Paterson, Garret Keizer, called “the finest essayist writing today” by Jeff Sharlet, collects essays on an adult’s supermarket perplexity, a child’s religious formation, the search for the Northwest Passage, meeting Colonel Sanders and Paul Farmer, his love for his father-in-law, and the labor struggles that led to an eight-hour day, all connected to the author’s roots in Paterson, NJ, and the woman he came to love there.

"In these marvelous essays, Keizer writes with teeth and tenderness—about mercy, music, labor, and love. From Marx to Motown, along the picket line, the church pew, the aisles of a rural Vermont grocery, his moral vision is capacious and unflinching, capable of articulating capitalism’s betrayals in a can of soup and finding grace in taking out the trash. I loved this book." — Ayad Akhtar, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of Homeland Elegies

“These outstanding essays embody the essence of personal writing. Starting from Paterson is refreshingly propelled not by self-absorption, but by a vigorous and intimate engagement with the surrounding world. And no matter how ordinary that world may appear—whether it’s the produce aisle of a local supermarket or the cozy book nook of an aging department store—it can gleam with a beatific luminosity. These essays perform a delicate alchemy as they subtly transmute the mundane into the magical.” — Robert Atwan, founder and former series editor of The Best American EssaysGarret Keizer is the author of ten books, including Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher, Privacy, and The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book about Noise. He was born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1953 and married his wife, Kathleen Keizer, in 1975. A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, Keizer is also a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine and Virginia Quarterly Review. In addition to those publications, his essays have appeared in The American Scholar, Best American Essays, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, Raritan, Salmagundi, The New Republic, and The New York Times, among others. He has been interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered and Marketplace, on The Diane Rehm Show, and on The Colbert Report and has spoken at a number of colleges and universities. He and his wife have lived and worked for more than 40 years in the rural Northeast Kingdom region of Vermont.