Description

This is a book about ownership. It begins with an essay about being given a man’s furniture while he’s on trial for murder and follows with essays that question corporeal, familial, and intellectual forms of ownership. What does it mean to believe that a hand, or a child, or a country, or a story belongs to you? What happens if you realize you’re wrong? Mining her own life and those of others, Sarah Viren considers the contingencies of ownership alongside the realities of loss in this debut essay collection.

About the author(s)

Sarah Viren is a writer, translator, and former newspaper reporter. A graduate of the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program, she teaches at Arizona State University.

Reviews

Deeply inquisitive and probing, generous and judicious, Sarah Viren's MINE is a series of meditations, memories buoyed to the surface by love and loss and wonder. She transforms and illuminates the world as she mines it.--2020 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Creative Non-fiction

At times it feels that Viren is offering her readers the empirical results of an experiment in human curiosity that resists all exploitation and relies wholly on generosity.--The Iowa Review

At times it feels that Viren is offering her readers the empirical results of an experiment in human curiosity that resists all exploitation and relies wholly on generosity.--The Iowa Review

Viren's essays do what the best nonfiction does: they transform the story that is hers into a story that becomes all of ours.--River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative

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