Within the recent explosion of creative nonfiction, a new type of form is quietly emerging, what Brenda Miller calls "hermit crab essays." The Shell Game is an anthology of these intriguing essays that borrow their structures from ordinary, everyday sources: a recipe, a crossword puzzle, a Craig's List ad. Like their zoological namesake, these essays do not simply wear their borrowed "shells" but inhabit them so perfectly that the borrowed structures are wholly integral rather than contrived, both shaping the work and illuminating and exemplifying its subject.
The Shell Game contains a carefully chosen selection of beautifully written, thought-provoking hybrid essays tackling a broad range of subjects, including the secrets of the human genome, the intractable pain of growing up black in America, and the gorgeous glow residing at the edges of the autism spectrum. Surprising, delightful, and lyric, these essays are destined to become classics of this new and increasingly popular hybrid form.
Contents
Foreword: Discovering the Hermit Crab Essay
Brenda Miller
Introduction: A Natural History of the North American Hermit Crab Essay
Kim Adrian
Grand Theft Auto
Joey Franklin
Ok, Cupid
Sarah McColl
Rubik's Cube, Six Twisted Paragraphs
Kathryn A. Kopple
Solving My Way to Grandma
Laurie Easter
Genome Tome
Priscilla Long
As Is
Brian Oliu
Falling in Love with a Glass House: Twenty-Four Views of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House
Jennifer Metsker
Son of Mr. Green Jeans: An Essay on Fatherhood, Alphabetically Arranged
Dinty W. Moore
Snakes & Ladders
Anushka Jasraj
Math 1619
Gwendolyn Wallace
Stagecraft
Mary Peelen
We Regret to Inform You
Brenda Miller
The Six Answers on the Back of a Trivia Card
Caitlin Horrocks
Piecing the Quilt of Valor
Judith Sornberger
Self-Portrait as a 1970s Cineplex Movie Theatre (an Abecedarian)
Steve Fellner
The Forgetting Test
Lee Upton
#MISCARRIAGE.EXE
Ingrid Jendrzejewski
SECTION 404
Cheyenne Nimes
The Body (an Excerpt)
Jenny Boully
Questionnaire for My Grandfather
Kim Adrian
The Petoskey Catechism, 1958
Elizabeth Kerlikowske
What Signifies (Three Parables)
David Shields
The Marriage License
Judy Bolton-Fasman
The Heart as a Torn Muscle
Randon Billings Noble
The Spectrum (of Miracles and Mysteries)
Steve Edwards
"Easy as Pie," That's a Lie
Amy Wallen
Outline toward a Theory of the Mine versus the Mind and the Harvard Outline
Ander Monson
The Clockwise Detorsion of Snails: A Love Essay in Sectors
Karen Hays
Postscript: Forms on the Page
Cheyenne Nimes
Source Acknowledgments
Contributors
Contributor's Note
Michael Martone
