Literary Nonfiction. Using his Denver apartment as a central locale, Erik Anderson walked a path that traced the letters Pastoral between February and March 2007. Navigating the various curves and corners of the city streets, Anderson charts the experiences of a writer in a man-made environment. Explorative, adventurous, and insightful, Anderson's meditations serve as a compelling social and aesthetic commentary.

The Poetics of Trespass

Literature & Fiction

Anderson, Erik

History & Criticism

Otis Books | Seismicity Editions

Literary Nonfiction. Fiction. Hybrid Genre. ESTRANGER begins with a memoirist's problem—the suppressed story of a grandfather's death on the south side of Chicago in 1984—but ESTRANGER is no memoir. ESTRANGER reexamines and reinvents genre, as one family's story enters an intricate constellation of subjects: animal intelligence, museum architecture, films by Werner Herzog and Michael Haneke and Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Camus's The Stranger, Thoreau's journals, the work of artists Kara Walker and Cy Twombly. In the tradition of writers such as W.G. Sebald, Michael Ondaatje, and Rebecca Solnit, Erik Anderson's second book blends essay and invention into an exploration of vulnerability and detachment, a book that pushes against the limits of both everyday thought and literary form. The result is a work of restless, precise intelligence and disquieting originality. So what does this have to do with strangeness, she asked. What does this have to do with your family? The obvious answer, I said, is that I'm here to figure it out, but on some level I don't really want to know. "Though a hallmark of Erik Anderson's virtuosity is his allergy to category, we might describe ESTRANGER as itself a catalog of everyday alienations, one organized by bottomless intellect and searing honesty. Anderson is a direct descendant of Thoreau and Herzog, while also extending their inquiry into the realm they didn't dare: fatherhood and family. A stunning, moving, essential book."—Claire Vaye Watkins "'Rumination,' the memoirist- narrator of ESTRANGER once told his wife, 'is the only thing I'm good at.' The 'only' is far too modest, I'm sure, but we feel no doubt as we read that we are in the hands of a world-class ruminator. This inward saga delights and surprises as its meanders become connections and as its themes—estrangement, engagement, art and sacrifice—gather critical mass. A man in search of the terms of his existence, who will allow nothing he notices, thinks or remembers to go unexamined, Anderson achieves a striking vibrancy of tone. ESTRANGER is subtle and gratifying."—Sven Birkerts "ESTRANGER is a beautiful book, a descent into the meaning of parenthood and selfhood, a reckoning with contentment. In the manner of Sebald, or the even more contemporary Knausgaard, Anderson's anti-hero is vulnerable and curious, reading his life as a series of texts—from film to novels—in an attempt to understand the world he both creates and rejects. This is the story of a self at once removed and embodied, a self wanting to be more alive than is possible. In Anderson's work, a narrator attempts through leaving to be more than a man who leaves—through escape, he hopes to be present, to love what he has been given, this one life, this blessing. What if I was wrong all along? The question haunts him, and us, too, as this book calls into question the artistic life, the very writerly space of restlessness."—Suzanne Scanlon

Estranger

Rescue Press

Literary Nonfiction. "FLUTTER POINT's essays are palpably haunted by the past and future of our species and planet. But Anderson does something rare and even hopeful, even so: his ruminations pry apart our default intuitions about humanness and animality, the natural and built environments, art, language, and the body, and hold them apart like parentheses for us, to find a little space inside. In that space, these essays search for truthful, appropriate kinds of mourning and pleasure, presence and detachment. The brilliance of FLUTTER POINT is that what results are fresh new forms of the essay—moving, intelligent, relentless, still, and made exactly for our time."—Kristin Dombek "Erik Anderson, in these very edgy essays of FLUTTER POINT, mines the rich ore of the 'or,' back slashing, back and forth, through the porous membranes of punctuated category, the skeletal strata of this gelatinous and layered world. To 'decide' is to cut, to sever, and Anderson is a katana smith par excellence, folding fluid steel, folding it back on itself again and again, peening home the sudden stunning serration less, it seems, than a molecule thick, while still separating out those old infinite spaces between the stars and the anxious quantum angstroms buzzing at the center of our very beings."—Michael Martone

FLUTTER POINT

Essays & Correspondence

Zone 3 Press

Silica: An abstraction in science fiction (from Collage: Three Short Plays for Off-Broadway)

Arts & Photography

Performing Arts

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

[2 W / 3 M] A silent comedy where a man and a woman and their daughter learn to embrace the final endings of heart disease (and death).

Room One: A silent comedy (Collage:Three Short Plays for Off-Broadway)

Dramas & Plays

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Hope, as Emily Dickinson famously wrote, is the thing with feathers. Erik Anderson, on the other hand, regards our obsession with birds as too sentimental, too precious. Birds don't express hope. They express themselves. But this tension between the versions of nature that lodge in our minds and the realities that surround us is the central theme of Bird. This is no field guide. It's something far more unusual and idiosyncratic, balancing science with story, anatomy with metaphor, habitat with history. Anderson illuminates the dark underbelly of our bird fetish and offers a fresh, alternative vision of one of nature's most beloved objects. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Bird (Object Lessons)

Bloomsbury Academic

I do have great success in my new life. But I could not be alive and have glory in my new life without God.

A Good Mistake: The Erik Anderson Accident Story: A Father's Journal

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

Christian Faith

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Books by Anderson, Erik