Notes on Postcards - by Jennifer Croft (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

International Booker Prize-winning translator Jennifer Croft's memoir of wanderlust, love, and motherhood seen through a lifelong collection of postcards

Postcards have accompanied Jennifer Croft throughout her life, providing comfort, beauty, humor, and inspiration. When she left her hometown for the first time, she used them to stay in touch with her grandmother. As a translator travelling the world, she bought and mailed them to remain connected to the growing list of countries she called home. She fell in love with her husband while shopping for postcards at a flea market.

In this poetic memoir, Croft takes a closer look at her trusty companions, sharing her collection with the reader and documenting the lifespan of a form of communication that permanently altered the way we see and inhabit the world. Parallel to the story of postcards runs Croft's own history of familial and romantic love and its culmination in her desire for a child. As she experiences pregnancy, then several devastating family losses, and eventually the birth of twins, she's forced to rethink everything she thought she knew as a translator and traveler about communication, distance, and desire.

Notes on Postcards is profoundly intimate and honest while also being far-reaching, posing fundamental questions about why and how we connect to each other, to our histories and geographies, our languages, pictures, and ourselves.

Review Quotes

Literary Hub, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year
BookPage, A Most Anticipated Nonfiction Book of Fall

"A charming memoir . . . Poetic, engaging, and pithy--as befits a celebration of postcards." --Kirkus Reviews

"[Croft's] writings are often poetic in this whimsical book, and the cards themselves are beautifully reproduced and fascinating for both their pictures and their content in this tribute to the past." --Booklist

"Readers will appreciate Croft's personal tone alongside a unique history of communication. For fans of micro-histories, epistolary novels, and memoirs, this book arrives at the intersection of all three." --Library Journal

"An earnest, elegant meditation on place and purpose . . . Interspersed with this personal narrative--which is cleverly captured via fragments of text of postcard dimensions--is the history of the postcard . . . The book presents life, appealingly, as a concatenation of everywhere one has been, all that has happened--and positions the translator as linguistic and cultural go-between. In paring her story back to the basics, Croft has produced something that, much like a postcard, is simultaneously telltale and intimate . . . ephemeral and lasting. A charming illustrated history of the postcard, alongside postcard-sized fragments of ruminative prose tracing how places and events shaped Croft's life as a daughter, translator, and mother." --Shelf Awareness

About the Author

JENNIFER CROFT won a Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel The Extinction of Irena Rey, the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her memoir, Homesick, and the International Booker Prize for her translation of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk's Flights. She is also the translator of Federico Falco's A Perfect Cemetery, Romina Paula's August, Pedro Mairal's The Woman from Uruguay, and Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob. She has received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She lives in Tulsa.