My Heart & I Agree - by Lucy Sante (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From Pulitzer Prize finalist Lucy Sante (I Heard Her Call My Name), a new collection of essays and reflections, mixing memoir with incisive writing about photography, music, literature, and film.

Here she learns to dance by watching Soul Train, dissects the image of the cowboy, reads the telephone book, visits famous writers, tours dead factories, wonders whatever happened to the revolution, plunges into the vast sea of discarded snapshots, asks whether "surrealist photography" might be a redundancy, imagines Andy Warhol's unmade movie, traces how Bob Dylan wrote his songs, observes the transience of all things with the Kinks.

Many of the pieces here were written on commission for magazines, publishers, and art catalogs, yet Sante's writing always coheres around an enduring set of concerns: cities, social progress, photography, the semi-popular arts, and the detritus of daily life. Beginning with poems and concluding with fiction and memoir, the collection is divided into segments based on affinity. The first stretches back to the night of a century and a half ago; the second traces the long fall of utopian hopes over the last fifty years; the third observes great narrative travelers on their roads; the fourth is all image and flash; the fifth has a rhythm track running under it. There are hit singles here, as well as album cuts, non-LP B-sides, import-only EPs, and at least one bootleg.

Review Quotes

"Sante is a superb writer who can give astonishing form to floating moods and thoughts that no one noticed before."

--John Ashbery

"One of the handful of living masters of the American language, as well as a singular historian and philosopher of American experience."
--Peter Schjeldahl

"At once tough in her thinking, empathic in her analysis, and liberated in expression, Sante selects barbed details, tunes in to danger and suspense, and dispenses wry humor and sure insight."
--Booklist

"Sante has a talent for the striking, impressionistic insight and the ability to write transcendental prose."
--New York Times Book Review