"Alex Lemon is a brave, headlong writer, and he captures the life of the body with vivid and memorable intensity."—Mark Doty
Brain surgery. Assault weapons in the bed of a pickup truck. Sophia Loren at the Oscars. Rilke, Rodin, and the craters of the moon. Recovery and disintegration. Monkeys stealing an egg outside a temple in Kathmandu. Brushing teeth bloody on long car rides under blue skies. Pain, ours and what we bring to others. Wildfires in southern California. Rats in Texas. Childhood abuse. Dreams of tigers and blackout nights. The sweetness of mangoes. A son born into a shadowy hospital room. Love. Joy.
In Feverland, Alex Lemon has created a fragmented exploration of what it means to be a man in the tumult of twenty-first-century America—and a harrowing, associative memoir about how we live with the beauties and horrors of our pasts. How to move forward, Lemon asks, when trapped between the demons of one's history and the angels of one's better nature? How to live in kindness—to become a caring partner and parent—when one can muster very little such tenderness for oneself? How to be here, now? How to be here, good?
Immersed in darkness but shot through with light, Feverland is a thrillingly experimental memoir from one of our most heartfelt and inventive writers.
Industry Reviews
Praise for Happy: A Memoir
"Lemon makes Happy harrowing and upbeat, writing with a poet's touch about the illness that overtook his jock life. . . . Nonfiction writers and poets have a secret alliance-working toward defining a truth instead of making it up. So when we get a twofer of a poet writing memoir, the results trend toward glinting precision."-Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Lemon takes his reader inside the terror and strangeness of illness-and gives us, along the way, a loving portrait of a devoted, wonderfully nutty mother. Lemon is a brave, headlong writer, and he captures the life of the body with vivid and memorable intensity."-Mark Doty
"The pyrotechnic prose of Lemon's memoir creates an electrifying portrait of a body in crisis, and the way the soul is inexorably, reluctantly, dragged along. . . . If ever a book was written in blood, it is this one."-Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
"Lemon packs the poignant wallop of a sprawling Dickensian novel with his taut, speedy memoir."-Denver Post
"This one is something special. . . . This is the story of a boy and his mother, but one whose tenderness sneaks up on you while you're distracted by all the blood and booze and hollering. The two of them can talk about nearly anything, but don't always have to. What Lemon and his mom have is that rarest of things in a trauma memoir, a parent-child relationship that is more than merely 'functional.' It's funkily, goofily, supremely life-affirming. Make that lifesaving."-Salon
"One of our time's most compelling memoirs . . . An electrifying portrait of a body in crisis."-Esquire
"A page-turner on par with the best thrillers . . . Lemon's exquisite prose blasts us out of our own time, heart, brain, and body into his, making an acute empathy possible. Read this and weep, laugh, weep."-Library Journal (Editors' Pick)
"Dazzling . . . An unnervingly intimate, relentlessly poetic recounting of debauchery, trauma and healing, Lemon's memoir is cut from the same cloth as David Carr's The Night of the Gun or James Frey's discredited A Million Little Pieces. But whereas those autobiographies reveled in the seamy details accompanying the wild life, Happy is far more concerned with the party's aftermath. . . . There are few modern works that so elegantly capture a mind and, by extension, a life on the verge of disintegration."-Fort Worth Star-Telegram
"Happy is graphically raw and in-your-face; Lemon's dexterity with words forces the reader into gritty latitudes no one would visit voluntarily, and the level of detail will cause some readers to squirm. But Happy is an honest voyage into Lemon's keen mind, remarkable spirit and loving heart, and it shouldn't be missed."-Minneapolis Star Tribune
