Maps to Anywhere [Paperback]

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.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.

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

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.

Bernard Cooper is extremely gifted. This book is fascinating.

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.

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.

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 realitieslÃ-