Some books start at point A, take you by the hand, and carefully walk you to point B, and on and on. This is not one of those books. This book is about mood, and how it works in and with us as complicated, imperfectly self-knowing beings existing in a world that impinges and infringes on us, but also regularly suffuses us with beauty and joy and wonder. You don’t write that book as a linear progression—you write it as a living, breathing, richly associative, and, crucially, active, investigation. Or at least you do if you’re as smart and inventive as Mary Cappello. What is a mood? How do we think about and understand and describe moods and their endless shadings? What do they do to and for us, and how can we actively generate or alter them? These are all questions Cappello takes up as she explores mood in all its manifestations: we travel with her from the childhood tables of “arts and crafts” to mood rooms and reading rooms, forgotten natural history museums and 3-D View-Master fairytale tableaux; from the shifting palette of clouds and weather to the music that defines us and the voices that carry us. The result is a book as brilliantly unclassifiable as mood itself, blue and green and bright and beautiful, funny and sympathetic, as powerfully investigative as it is richly contemplative. “I’m one of those people who mistrusts a really good mood,” Cappello writes early on. If that made you nod in recognition, well, maybe you’re one of Mary Cappello’s people; you owe it to yourself to crack Life Breaks In and see for sure.

Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack

Humor & Entertainment

Cappello, Mary

Humor

University of Chicago Press

Capello (English, University of Rhode Island) combines the bilingual journals of her grandfather, her mother's poetry, Sicilian folklore, and dreamwork with her own reminiscences of growing up in an immigrant family in a working-class suburb of Philadelphia. She explores the contradictions of her father's rage and gardening, and her mother's poetry and agoraphobia. As a lesbian who has entered the middle class, she celebrates the subversive desire in her family's responses to the forces shaping their lives. No index. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Night Bloom: A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Beacon Pr

Of the mysterious Night Blooming Cereus, Mary Cappello writes: "The flower fell into our neighborhood like a shooting star." That neighborhood was a working-class suburb of Philadelphia riven by class distinction and haunted by contradiction. In tracing the marks that immigration and assimilation have left on her Italian-American family, Cappello also offers us her family's unsung art-their gardens, letters, and rosary beads-for the lessons they teach us about desire, creativity, and loss.

Night Bloom: An Italian-American Life (Bluestreak)

Beacon Press

Foreword Book of the Year Award Independent Publishers Award (IPPY) Lambda Literary Award Finalist Publishing Triangle Award Finalist GAMMA Award, Best Feature from The Magazine Association of the Southwest for "Getting the News," The Georgia Review, Summer 2009 Notable Essay of the Year Citation in Best American Essays 2010 for "Getting the News" Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Guerilla Girls On Tour and by WILLA: Women in Literary Arts and Letters An extended meditation on the nature of love and the nature of time inside illness, Called Back is both a narrative and non-narrative experiment in prose. The book moves through the standard breast cancer treatment trajectory (diagnosis, surgery, chemotherapy, radiation), with the aim of discovering unexpected vectors of observation, meaning and desire inside each phase of the typically mandated four-part ritual. A lyrical feminist critique of living with cancer at the turn of the twenty-first century in the United States, the book looks through the lens of cancer to discover new truths about intimacy and essential solitude, eroticism, the fact of the body, and the impossibility of turning away. Offering original exegeses of the work of Marsden Hartley, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Marcel Proust, Called Back relies on these artists' queer aesthetics to tease the author back to life. What might a person tutored as a reader of signs "see" inside breast cancer's paces, protocols, and regimes? What does the experience occlude, and what can we afford to liberate? The first chapter paves the way for the book's central emphases: a meditation on the nature of "news" and the new, on noticing, on messages--including those that the body itself relies upon in the assumption of disease--and the interpretive methods we bring to them in medical crisis. Language is paramount for how we understand and act on the disease, how we imagine it, how we experience it, and how we treat it, Cappello argues. Working at the borders of memoir, literary nonfiction, and cultural analysis, Called Back aims to displace tonal and affective norms-- infantilizing or moralizing, redemptive, sentimental or cute--with reverie, rage, passionate intensity, intelligence, and humor.

Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Diseases & Physical Ailments

Fordham University Press

“Mary Cappello's Called Back shimmers on the page. Ezra Pound said a writer has to ‘make it new’ and Cappello has done that rare feat. Cancer books have become a genre that nobody wants to read, except this book. Read this book. Called Back is exquisite.”—Patty Dann author of Mermaids, and of The Goldfish Went on Vacation: A Memoir of Loss (and Learning to Tell the Truth About It) “There is no scarier moment than when the doctor looks at his feet, clears his throat, and mutters that you have cancer. The earth opens under you. After a while, most patients summon a remarkable courage to confront the relentless disease and the rugged cures. But few have summoned the clear-eyed, large-hearted intelligence that Mary Cappello has to describe the experience in harrowing, redemptive detail. With precision, passion, wit, and a poet’s eye for the incongruous and devastating—that is to say, the human—she has written a book that will open your eyes and touch your heart…Called Back is an astonishing literary achievement.”—J.D. McClatchy, editor of The Yale Review, author of Mercury Dressing “The momentum of Called Back…derives from [Mary Cappello’s] extraordinarily capacious mind: her intelligence, wit, and emotional candor; the clarity and alertness of her train of thought; the restlessness of her style… Cappello makes stunning connections between literature, art, her life, medicine, cancer. A brilliant book.”—David Shields, author of The Thing About Life is One Day You’ll Be Dead, and Reality Hunger “I loved being offered the companionship of Cappello’s feeling mind… I loved her insistence on taking everything in, not rushing to be ‘healed’ before experience registers. I loved the precision and passion with which this book about facing mortality attends to the particulars of being alive—both in the body and in language.”—Jan Clausen author of If You Like Difficulty, and From a Glass House, and Apples and Oranges: My Journey through Sexual Identity
In her intensely personal and insightful memoir, Mary Cappello wonders aloud for us what breast cancer awareness really makes us aware of, and responds as if for the first time to the deceivingly simple command: “tell me what you’re feeling.” Unable to eat on chemotherapy, Cappello feasts on the paintings of Marsden Hartley, yearns in the tradition of Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein, keeps company with Marcel Proust, and lets queer artists tease her back to life. Called Back looks through the lens of cancer to discover—often with humor—new truths about intimacy and essential solitude, eroticism, the fact of the body, and the impossibility of turning away.
Mary Cappello is the author of two previous books of literary nonfiction, Night Bloom and Awkward: A Detour, a Los Angeles Times bestseller. Her essays and experimental prose appear in such places as The Georgia Review, Salmagundi, Southwest Review, and American Letters and Commentary, and they have been awarded the Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination from Teachers and Writers Collaborative, the Lange-Taylor Prize from Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, and Notable Essay of the Year citations in The Best American Essays. A former Fulbright Lecturer at the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow, Russia, Cappello is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island.

Arts & Literature

Alyson Pubns

Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them

Product Description An American half-dollar. A beaded crucifix. Tooth roots shaped like a tiny pair of pants. A padlock. Scads of peanut kernels and scores of safety pins. A metallic letter Z. A toy goat and tin steering wheel. A Perfect Attendance Pin. One of the most popular attractions in Philadelphia's world-famous Mütter Museum is the Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection: a beguiling set of drawers filled with thousands of items that had been swallowed or inhaled, then extracted nonsurgically by a pioneering laryngologist using rigid instruments of his own design. How do people's mouths, lungs, and stomachs end up filled with inedible things, and what do they become once arranged in Jackson's aura-laden cabinet? What drove Dr. Chevalier Jackson's peculiar obsession not only with removing foreign bodies from people’s upper torsos but also with saving and cataloging the items that he retrieved? Animating the space between interest and terror, curiosity and dread, award-winning author Mary Cappello explores what seems beyond understanding: the physiology of the human swallow, and the poignant and baffling psychology that compels people to ingest non-nutritive things. On a quest to restore the narratives that haunt Jackson’s uncanny collection, she discovers that all things are secretly edible. Combining original research with a sympathetic and evocative sensibility, Cappello uncovers a history of racism and violence, of forced ingestion and "hysteria," of class and poverty that left children to bank their family’s last quarters in their mouths. Here, the seemingly disparate but equally marvelous worlds of the circus and the medical amphitheater meet in characters ranging from sword swallowers and women who lunched on hardware to the sensitive, bullied boy who grew up to be the father of endoscopy. Advance Praise "Swallow is a surprising and original work. It is biography on the slant, a meditation that transcends boundaries and genres, written with scholarship, humor, and panache. I urge you to take this journey." Ricky Jay "I was astonished and delightedgrabbed by the throat, indeedby this most remarkable book, which took me down a thousand little red lanes, and laid out in excruciating and fascinating detail all those myriad of itemscorks to safety pins to draughts of lye and three-foot swordsthat have managed to pass down there too. It is a wonderful and bizarre book: gorge yourself on it, and gulp.” Simon Winchester, author of Atlantic: The Biography of an Ocean "Swallow is a wonderful, intriguing book, a fascinating glimpse into a true medical pioneer and a life's work. Mary Cappello delves into what it means to ingest things we weren’t meant to eat, and how the line between our bodies and foreign bodies can sometimes blur. Every object tells a story, and the stories here are marvelous." Colin Dickey, author of Crankiolepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius About the Author Mary Cappello's three previous books of literary nonfiction are Awkward, a Los Angeles Times bestseller; Called Back, a critical memoir on cancer that won a ForeWord Book of the Year Award and an Independent Publisher Book Award; and the memoir Night Bloom. A recipient of the Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination from Teachers and Writers Collaborative and the Dorothea LangePaul Taylor Prize from Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, she is a former Fulbright lecturer at the Gorky Literary Institute (Moscow) and currently a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island. She lives in Providence.

Professionals & Academics

The New Press

In this fascinating and lyrical book, the seemingly disparate but equally marvelous worlds of the circus and the medical amphitheater meet in characters ranging from the sword swallowers and women who lunched on hardware to the sensitive, bullied boy who grew up to be the father of endoscopy. The Mütter Museum’s Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection, a cabinet filled with thousands of items that have been swallowed or inhaled, then extracted nonsurgically by a pioneering laryngologist using rigid instruments of his own design, sets the stage for award-winning author Mary Cappello’s moving investigative portrait of Dr. Chevalier Jackson (1865-1958), his cosmology of objects, and the lives he saved. Its own uncanny, deeply rewarding assemblage, Swallow brings together the complex physiology of the human swallow and the menace of a button box; a willed ingestion of non-nutritive things that is little understood and a social history of hunger; the humanitarian mission that bred the Federal Caustic Poison Act of 1927 and a crusade to make the world foreign body conscious.”

Los Angeles Times Bestseller Mary Cappello[’s] inventive, associative taxonomy of discomfort . . . [is] revelatory indeed.” MARK DOTY, author of Dog Years: A Memoir and Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems A wonderful, multi-layered piece of writing, with all the insight of great cultural criticism and all the emotional pull of memoir. A fascinating book.” SARAH WATERS, author of The Night Watch and The Little Stranger Without awkwardness we would not know grace, stability, or balance. Yet no one before Mary Cappello has turned such a penetrating gaze on this misunderstood condition. Fearlessly exploring the ambiguous borders of identity, she mines her own life journeysfrom Russia, to Italy, to the far corners of her heart and the depths of a literary or cinematic textto decipher the powerful messages that awkwardness can transmit. Mary Cappello is the author of four books of literary nonfiction, including Awkward: A Detour, which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life, which won a ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award and an Independent Publishers Prize, and Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them. Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, she lives in Providence, Rhode Island and Lucerne-in-Maine, Maine.

Awkward: A Detour

Bellevue Literary Press

"[Cappello's] excellent new book-length essay,Lecture... at once defends the lecture and calls for holistic and creative improvements to the form."--The Atlantic In twenty-first century America, there is so much that holds or demands our attention without requiring it. Imagine the lecture as a radical opening. Mary Cappello'sLecture is a song for the forgotten art of the lecture. Brimming with energy and erudition, it is an attempt to restore the lecture's capacity to wander, question, and excite. Cappello draws on examples from Virginia Woolf to Mary Ruefle, Ralph Waldo Emerson to James Baldwin, blending rigorous cultural criticism with personal history to explore the lecture in its many forms--from the aphorism to the note--and give new life to knowledge's dramatic form.

Lecture (Undelivered Lectures)

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

Transit Books

Buffalo Trace: A Threefold Vibration

A compelling hybridization of sex and critical theory. —Kirkus 
What a remarkable and beautiful book this is: three brilliant writers each describe in these essays how, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, a person "becomes who one is." The book insists that love, self-becoming, and thinking cannot be separated, and, through a series of portraits and meditations, it shows how a largely forgotten corner of the world became a portal for these three to a world that could be known, inhabited, and acknowledged. This is one of the great books about education. Charles Baxter, author of The Soul Thief and There’s Something I Want You to Do
At a time when the university humanities are under siege, this heady, fascinating trio of novella-length autobiographical accounts of grad school literary studies is an absolute treat: bracingly honest, self-aware, witty, probing, exquisitely written, lucid and humane. What's been missing in most current memoirs is the subjects' intellectual growth, alongside their traumas or sexual adventures. This book has it both ways: the romance of learning and pedagogy merging with an education in eros. Its mixture of enchantment and rue feels just right. It should be read by every graduate student, every professor teaching in grad school, and everyone contemplating applying to grad school—plus everyone else looking for a lively, stimulating read. Phillip Lopate, author of A Mother’s Tale and To Show and to Tell 
Buffalo Trace is a gloriously honest, richly triangulated, generous, shimmering portrait of a generation. In coming of age, coming out, and coming into various kinds of self-determination, its authors—and we—become accomplices in the ancient mysteries of love and theft, confusion and knowledge, doubt and the most bafflingly powerful of recognitions. This collective work is the stuff not just of shared lives but of shared consciousness, lovingly tracing “by what strange paths any of us finds the other.” Elizabeth Willis, author of Meteoric Flowers and Alive: New And Selected Poems
By following the tenderly intertwined intellectual and sexual awakenings of three friends, Buffalo Trace: A Threefold Vibration eroticizes academia. Their stories embrace the contradictions and rigors and limitations of academia, and yet this trilogy of essays can also be read as an ode to Buffalo, the deeply American town that provided cover and even salvation for these three writers. Who can resist the assertion that “Buffalo was itself a kind of Paris of the rust belt”? Ultimately, this is a love story, among friends, lovers, literature, and even Buffalo. Lucy Jane Bledsoe, author of A Thin Bright Line and The Evolution of Love
Smart, honest, and beautifully written, these three tales of grad school life in the 1980s could be called Love in the Time of Deconstruction. A hothouse world of brains, bodies, books, and doubt (in Buffalo, no less), it's all a bit mad, but in the exciting, necessary way of life in your twenties. Buffalo Trace: A Threefold Vibration is a strange, original, wonderful book. Christopher Bram, author of Gods and Monsters and Mapping the Territory

MORRISON, JAMES

Walton, Jean

Parenting & Relationships

Spuyten Duyvil Publishing

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cappello, Mary. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Cappello, Mary

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cappello, Mary. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack

Night Bloom: A Memoir

Night Bloom: An Italian-American Life (Bluestreak)

Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life

Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life

Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them

Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them

Awkward: A Detour

Lecture (Undelivered Lectures)

Buffalo Trace: A Threefold Vibration