Loitering: New and Collected Essays - Softcover

*Loitering makes NPR's 2014 Best of the Year list *Time Out New York names Loitering one of the Top Ten Books of the Yea *Loitering makes the Pacific Northwest Bestseller Lis *Loitering shortlisted for the PNBA award

Erudite essays

Loitering, by Charles D Ambrosio, gets something deeply right about being uncertain, being in-between, being human. Its essays refuse the violence of imposing too much resolution on the world. This praise might sound abstract, but it s more like a kind of closed-eye, clenched-fist gratitude: Thank you. These essays help me believe in what s holy in the mess.--Leslie Jamison"

D'Ambrosio hasn't published anything less than brilliant, but Loitering is remarkable even by his standards.

His writing is all guts and heart.

Every [essay] is a pleasure

D Ambrosio is a masterful writer.

If you re a fan of well-written essays, checking out this collection, which encompasses both D Ambrosio s earlier Orphans and work he s completed since then, is a must

[D'Ambrosio's] toolkit, finite and familiar, is the English language, the same one ticker-taping through your conscious mind and mine, but with it he constructs sentences, paragraphs, entire pages of such sustained insight and fluency that you can't help but feel a little fraudulent as a fellow user of the same mother tongue.

Loitering, by Charles D'Ambrosio, gets something deeply right about being uncertain, being in-between, being human. Its essays refuse the violence of imposing too much resolution on the world. This praise might sound abstract, but it's more like a kind of closed-eye, clenched-fist gratitude: Thank you. These essays help me believe in what's holy in the mess.--Leslie Jamison

Charles D’Ambrosio’s essay collection Orphans spawned something of a cult following. In the decade since the tiny limited-edition volume sold out its print run, its devotees have pressed it upon their friends, students, and colleagues, only to find themselves begging for their copy’s safe return. For anyone familiar with D’Ambrosio’s writing, this enthusiasm should come as no surprise. His work is exacting and emotionally generous, often as funny as it is devastating. Loitering gathers those eleven original essays with new and previously uncollected work, so that a broader audience might discover one of our great living essayists. No matter his subject—Native American whaling, a Pentecostal “hell house,” Mary Kay Letourneau, the work of J.D. Salinger, or, most often, his own family—D’Ambrosio approaches each piece with a singular voice and point of view; each essay, while unique and surprising, is unmistakably his own.