What Is It Like to be Alive?: Fourteen Attempts at an Answer

In What is it Like to be Alive?Fourteen Attempts at an Answer, prize-winning essayist Chris Arthur looks into life’s mirror and offers an account of what can be seen in ordinary things. Each of the book’s fourteen essays is an exercise in seeing beyond the obvious, and finding hidden depth in the places and things we might otherwise take for granted. Arthur ranges over subjects as various as a patch of lichen growing on a windowsill, memories of a childhood barber’s shop, the inscriptions on park benches, goldcrests (Europe’s smallest bird), different ways of seeing a statue, and the dimensions of a moment. Whether he’s writing about the plight of nineteenth century Japanese prostitutes, a ferret’s momentary appearance through a letterbox, a girl’s obsession with the Holocaust, or a black and white photograph of a child holding a horse in a snowy field in Sweden, these unorthodox meditations, with striking lyricism, tap into unexpected seams of mystery in our everyday terrain. The book offers a virtuoso demonstration of the potential of the creative essay, and shows how different it is from the tedious academic assignments that share its name.

＂If anyone can lure out of hiding the mysterious secrets of the things of this world, and turn the familiar unfamiliar, the everyday, magical, it’s Chris Arthur. One of our greatest living essayists....＂ -Philip Lopate, author of Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, and A Year and A Day: An Experiment in Essays

＂Belfast-born Chris Arthur is not only the most accomplished Irish essayist working at present, he also stands among the finest practitioners of the form in the Anglophone world.＂ -Eoghan Smith, author of The Failing Heart and A Provincial Death