How does reading about others become a bridge we use to cross back and forth between a lost dead self and the shaky promise of a new? In Shadow Work, Anderson sits down with her favorite authorsZadie Smith, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare, Percival Everettto discuss how they provide an invisible structure that supports creative work. Through a rigorous excavation of the power of the book, Anderson brings herselfand her readersback to life. -- Robin Coste Lewis, National Book Awardwinning author of Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems In these remarkable essays, Andersons bright curiosity lures readers toward philosophers metaphors, through horses stables, and into childrens backpacks; she draws insights equally from the threads of plots and the sinews of joints. Shadow Work may begin with loneliness, but it offers up the best kind of company: visceral and cerebral, unrepentantly bookish, and, most importantly, honest and warm. -- Sarah Mesle, senior editor at large, Los Angeles Review of Books Shadow Work makes legible the invisible laborand loveof reading, writing, and parenting. Anderson beautifully captures the companionship and solace provided by books. Her own book does the same, offering insight, connection, and deeply felt humanity. -- Julia Lee, author of Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America Emily Hodgson Anderson is a mother of young sons, an eighteenth-century British literature scholar, a long-distance runner, an accomplished equestrian, and a reader of raunchy British romance novels. She believes in the ability of the human mindand its great metaphor, languageto lend access to that illusory and intoxicating kind of knowing not otherwise possible in real life. Each brilliant essay contained herein celebrates the shadowy geographies of reading where we grope about and find one another, though find one another we do indeed. Machines, as powerful as they may be, cant tease out a human soul. Shadow Work shows us how, on this darkling plain, to seek any other human creatures heart and mind. -- Michelle Latiolais, author of A Proper Knowledge A graceful literary memoir. * Kirkus Reviews *
