Feverland

Brain surgery. Assault weapons in the bed of a pickup truck. Sophia Loren at the Oscars. Rilke, Rodin, and the craters of the moon. Recovery and disintegration. Monkeys stealing an egg outside a temple in Kathmandu. Brushing teeth bloody on long car rides under blue skies. Pain, ours and what we bring to others. Wildfires in southern California. Rats in Texas. Childhood abuse. Dreams of tigers and blackout nights. John Wayne and stomach cancer. The sweetness of mangoes. A son born into a shadowy hospital room. Love. Joy. In Feverland, Alex Lemon has created a fragmented exploration of what it means to be a man in the tumult of twenty-first-century America-and a harrowing, associative memoir about how we live with the beauties and horrors of our pasts. Along the way, Lemon navigates questions of recovery, redemption, and humanity in the face of suffering. How to move forward when trapped between the demons of one's history and the angels of one's better nature? How to live in kindness-to become a caring partner and parent-when one can muster very little such tenderness for oneself? How to be here, now? Lemon asks. How to be here, good? Immersed in darkness but shot through with light, Feverland is an intensely felt and thrillingly experimental memoir from one of our most heartfelt and inventive writers.