Awkward: A Detour
![Bellevue Literary Press, June 2007
A Los Angeles Times Bestseller!
Click here to order Awkward: A Detour from Amazon.com
The body was awkward, and then it vanished. (A life could be described this way). What had it become in its awkwardness? What would it become hereafter?
“FINALLY, there is a study of awkwardness in all its many forms: speech, touch, breathing in public, clumsiness. Author Mary Cappello writes of situational awkwardness; of immigration and its attendant awkwardness; of how it pops up between family members, even nations; and of the important place it has assumed in the lives of creative people (Emily Dickinson, Henry James and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, to name a few).
In Awkward, Cappello has written the book she wanted to read. It is an unplanned manifesto against the shiny smoothness of thought, movement and desire. “Let us turn away. Let us turn awkwardly and see where we arrive. Toward an alternative system of ardor and gist, of ebullience and drift, of being and bearing. Toward speaking with the breath held. Un-toward.”
-- Susan Salter Reynolds, “Discoveries,” Los Angeles Times
New! Hear Cappello’s Interview on Illinois Public Radio station WILL’s program, Afternoon Magazine, hosted by Celeste Quinn!
New! Mary Cappello now has a BLOG. Click here for marginalia, poetic forays, "free" writing, peripheral intensities, the cicchetto as a literary form, and queer encounters of the Italian kind.
New! Awkward reviewed in Philadelphia Stories
Awkward chosen as “Essayest American Essay”
Hear audio excerpts from Awkward: A Detour, read by the author
Read an interview in which Cappello explains the origins of Awkward
Listen to Mary Cappello and James Morrison reading live at the Ocean State Summer Writing Conference
View Mary Cappello’s Awkward YouTube Videos
Click here for Cappello’s Calendar of Spring Readings
Praise for Awkward
“This vivid collection from [Mary] Cappello (Night Bloom) is a rare and insightful series of meditations that takes readers to Russia [and] Italy . . . through the literary and cultural landscape, and into the uncomfortable corners of the human condition: "Why is there nothing more right, in terms of an image of awkwardness, than shoes on the wrong feet?" Titling each short essay with a single evocative word ("Spasmodic," "Untoward," "Tactless," "Jamesian"), the author finds more than 70 ways to approach her subject, from Emily Dickinson's "efforts to perfect an awkward idiom" to Cappello's accidentally eating dog treats in Northern Italy. The huge range of experiences here prove endlessly fascinating, and her prose never loses its grace or delicacy, even as she suffers the embarrassment of a party faux pas: "a wringing of hands to the tune of the memory of my insensitive blurt." With keen skills of observation and careful attention to language, Cappello has crafted an elegant illustration of her conclusion that ‘awkwardness isn't something to grow out of but to grow into.’”
-- Publisher’s Weekly
“The term ‘awkward’ brings to mind gangly adolescence and uncomfortable silences—a glitch or inconsistency in an otherwise perfect system. But Mary Cappello sees this glitch as the rule, not the exception, and shows us examples of its dominance everywhere—in all ages of life, in speech as well as in silence, and in the psychological, cultural, social, and spiritual worlds we inhabit. On this autobiographical and poetic ‘detour’ she talks of Emily Dickinson, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and her immigrant grandparents with enough candor and dedication to possibly achieve awkwardness's opposite: grace.”
-- C. Schwennsen, The Elliott Bay Book Company Review of Books
“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 Tipping the Velvet, and The Night Watch
“With Awkward: A Detour, Mary Cappello becomes to my mind now the Kepler of human flesh and bone and of the soul of the worlds in which they move. Kepler showed the gorgeous imbalance of ellipses making heavenly motions true. Cappello likewise shows the careful tremor of human ungainliness inclining all of us towards love and towards the adventure of unprecedented harmonies. Hers is a wonderful, suddenly essential book.”
-- Donald Revell, author of Arcady, and Invisible Green: Selected Prose
“At once comforting and startling, Awkward: A Detour is a new kind of memoir, each sentence more of a discovery than a reporting back. The fluent subtlety of Cappello's adventurous meditation--her talent for atmosphere and for letting certain words get the better of her--makes memory seem like something worth re-making, and not the casual currency it has become. It is a remarkable achievement.”
-- Adam Phillips, author of Terrors and Experts; On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored; and Going Sane: Maps of Happiness.
“‘I would seek out awkwardness over and against revelation,’" Mary Cappello writes, and her inventive, associative taxonomy of discomfort does exactly that, investigating the terms we use for those moments when we're ‘uncoordinated,’ ‘clueless,’ ‘ass-backwards’-- moments which turn out, in her patient and eager excavations, to be revelatory indeed.”
--Mark Doty, author of Heaven’s Coast, and Atlantis
“Mary Cappello performs a brilliant literary hopscotch across continents and decades--alighting here on a luminous memory of an imperfect expression of fellowship or affection, there on an arresting insight into the infelicitous nature of language, of manners, of the body, of love. Daring in both content and form, Awkward is a wonderfully unpredictable riff on the human predicament.”
--Dawn Raffel, author of In the Year of Long Division, and Carrying the Body
“Awkward: A Detour explores various ways of not quite belonging--culturally, coming from an immigrant family, here or in Italy, and personally, being among various groups. The awkwardness provokes a sensation of self-consciousness, which, thoroughly examined becomes a wise self-awareness--and this book exhibits plenty of wisdom in a thoroughly lucid and intense way. It's an original, psychologically and culturally insightful book, a great pleasure to read.”
--Josip Novakovich, author of Apricots From Chernobyl, and Salvation and Other Disasters
CONTACT INFORMATION
Mary Cappello is represented by Malaga Baldi, Malaga Baldi Literary Agency, baldibooks@gmail.com
Mary Cappello can be reached directly at:
mcapp@uri.edu
Professor of English
University of Rhode Island
Department of English
Independence Hall
Kingston, RI 02881
This website was assembled with the assistance of the inimitable Russell A. Potter
Thanks also to Sheri Wills for help with the audio file!
RELATED LINKS
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Director Ang Lee Says He is Shy and Socially Awkward](Awkward_files/shapeimage_1.png)
