Festival Days

Jo Ann Beard doesn't write—or at least publish—a lot, but, boy, when she does... She's in her mid-sixties, and this is just her third book; her first, The Boys of My Youth, made her a bit of a cult hero in the rather uncultish world of essay writing. I am a card-carrying member of that cult (it was a Phinney by Post selection a few years ago), so when I say that her new book, Festival Days, is as good as that one, please understand that makes it the best new book I've read this year. Why are these essays (and two pieces she calls "stories") so heart-flutteringly good? There is her tender, clear-eyed intimacy with mortality (most of the stories concern the dying and the dead); there is the equally tender, lively presence of animals (dogs, mostly) through nearly every story. But most of all it is the structure of these stories, subtly ricocheting and reverberating between mourning and laughter, between memory and the moment, that gives them the fullness that only the most observed and felt life ever achieves.