Alibis Essays on Elsewhere [Paperback]

ABoston GlobeBest Nonfiction Book of 2011

Celebrated as one of the most poignant stylists of his generation, Andr? Aciman has written a luminous series of linked essays about time, place, identity, and art that show him at his very finest. From beautiful and moving pieces about the memory evoked by the scent of lavender; to meditations on cities like Barcelona, Rome, Paris, and New York; to his sheer ability to unearth life secrets from an ordinary street corner,Alibisreminds the reader that Aciman is a master of the personal essay.

Aciman ... has an ability to make the finest, the tiniest and most convincing distinctions between moods, responses, and registers. Everything is watched as it shifts and glitters and then hesitates and maybe is shadowed over ... This really is fiction at its most supremely interesting; every clause and subclause shimmers with a densely observed and carefully rendered invention that seems oddly and delightfully precise and convincing ... There are many layers and levels in this story. Colm T?ib?n,The New York Review of Books on Call Me by Your Name

From the acclaimed Egyptian-born author, gorgeous musings on longing and memory fueled by travel.

A virtuoso in literary criticism, memoir and fiction (Eight White Nights, 2010, etc.), Aciman revisits themes that have obsessed him since his youth growing up in Alexandria, when he and his family were waiting for years for visas to migrate to Europe, then the United States. Anticipation-and all the longing it held-proved the ideal, romantic, satisfying state, rather than the actual delivery. For example, longing for America all those years proved much more delicious and lasting than the actual naked reality of living there. In each essay, Aciman elegantly palpates these themes of place and displacement ('dispersion, evasion, ambivalence'). In 'Lavender,' the myriad scents of aftershave he will discover over the years mark milestones in his lifel#+