Maps to Anywhere - by Bernard Cooper (Paperback)

About the Book

Writing on subjects ranging from his family to the origin of the barbershop pole, Bernard Cooper digs into the glimmering surface of the southern California landscape, observing the collision of the American Dream with the realities of everyday life.

Book Synopsis

The essays in Maps to Anywhere plot terrain that is at once familiar and subtly strange. Writing on subjects ranging from his family to the origin of the barbershop pole, Bernard Cooper digs into the glimmering surface of the southern California landscape, observing the collision of the American Dream with the realities of everyday life. From the fragments, he discovers landmarks by which he attempts to make sense of contemporary America.

Review Quotes

An astonishing collection of daring and highly evocative texts [which, ] dictated by Cooper's love of language, his reverence for memory and the quirky shapes experience takes, and arranged according to the rhythms of reunion, expand the notions of what fiction can be.

--PEN/Hemingway Award Committee

Bernard Cooper is extremely gifted. This book is fascinating.

--Annie Dillard

The images Cooper conjures up in Maps to Anywhere become quickly stated poems or paintings whose surfaces are dazzlingly luminous. . . . I enjoyed this book very much.

--Ann Beattie

This set of essays captures the open-ended, rootless feel of modern life. . . . [These] dazzling, elusive shards [are] crafted with precision.

--Publishers Weekly

When [an] author has this much intelligence, verbal dexterity, warmth, and honesty, we can safely predict we will be reading him with relish for years to come.

--Phillip Lopate

About the Author

Bernard Cooper is the author of "Guess Again," "A Year of Rhymes," and "Truth Serum." He has won numerous awards, including an O. Henry Prize, a PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Getty Center for the Arts and Humanities Fellowship. He has taught at Antioch University, Los Angeles, and the UCLA Writer's Program.