Serious Face

Praise

“John Muir once said, ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.’ Was he talking about Jon Mooallem’s essay collection? I think he might have been! It’s hard to imagine how Mooallem manages to thread the complex lacework of thought so elegantly between the personal and the universal, the manmade and the natural, the profane and the mundane, the serious and the absurd. But somehow, he does it all. And what a gift for us that he does.”—Samin Nosrat, author of Salt Fat Acid Heat

“Every Jon Mooallem piece is a gift to the world, and a collection of such pieces is priceless. The varied topics reflect the boundless, whimsical curiosity of his mind. Each is like a puzzle box, with deeper profundities unfolding with every new passage. And the writing is just breathtakingly good; Mooallem is a master storyteller, working at the peak of his craft.”—Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes

“At some point in nearly every Jon Mooallem essay, there is an unspooling. He hits a pressure point in your tight little heart that you didn’t realize you were carrying around, and with his words—the meaning he wraps around the confusion of this world—he offers fleeting but quite potent relief. This is a book that might unexpectedly cause tears. This is a book that is good to keep near.”—Lulu Miller, co-founder of Invisibilia and author of Why Fish Don’t Exist

“Jon Mooallem’s essays are literary alchemy. All this hard work and discovery and thought and humanity gets distilled in the alembic of his Jon Mooallem brain until this gleaming thing emerges: a piece unlike any you could have imagined. He questions the givens, rethinks the dogma, visits one more person, ponders, asks, explores. He’s just so damn good.”—Mary Roach, author of Stiff

“A master essayist ranges far and wide with aplomb. In his latest book, New York Times Magazine writer at large [Jon] Mooallem gathers a diverse dozen of his thoughtful, probing essays. He suggests that the thread holding them together is one line: ‘Why are we not better than we are?’ . . . A winning, captivating, engrossing collection.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Mooallem brings together the best of his journalistic essays to create an intellectually moving collection. Readers will laugh and tear up as Mooallem makes us care about his subjects and feel better off for knowing their stories.”—Booklist (starred review)

“[A] rich collection of essays . . . Mooallem has a real knack for evoking places, people, and emotions, and the individuals he writes about put a human face on larger issues such as climate change and conservation. This is well worth the price of admission.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)