Description
“The Truth”
familiar essays by Sam Pickering
ISBN: 978-1-956440-27-0 paperback $20.95
ISBN: 978-1-956440-28-7 ebook $9.99
October 2023
This summer Sam Pickering and his wife Vicki attended a pro-fessional wrestling match in a small arena in Nova Scotia. They sat in folding chairs on the front row. They ate “Montreal Sausages” drowning in ketchup and awash with onions. They cheered heroes and laughed at villains. In the middle of one match, a naughty wrestler leaned over the ropes and staring at Sam, said, “If you keep laughing that hard, old-timer, you’ll have a heart attack.” “What?” Sam said to Vicki. “Old-timer? Not me. That poor man had better see an eye doctor before he gets hurt.”
Cover art is Estella Canziani’s The Piper of Dreams,
The Medici Society, Grafton Street, Bond Street, London
Praise for Sam Pickering:
I’ve been reading Sam Pickering’s essays for nearly fifty years, and they have always been for me a touchstone, a place to go home. Now, in his 34th book, he seems even more comfortable in the genre—the personal essay—that he has so beautifully embraced and made utterly his own. These essays are uplifting, poetical, sometimes melancholy, always hugely entertaining. Pickering is an American original, and he’s writing here at the top of his form.
—Jay Parini, author of Borges and Me
Sam Pickering isn’t bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and naïve. His world, and pages, however, are green with life. In this collection of essays, he celebrates friendships and the memories of friendships. He rummages through closets of books, some so worm-eaten they are wondrously nourishing. He cures aches and pains by turning them into words. He meanders days and places and looking closely at life finds it intriguing. Under his pen, the imagination soars and the familiar becomes richly appealing, at once both familiar and unfamiliar. He is not a self-help writer, but his essays lighten one’s steps and make a person, even a vegan, want to eat a Montreal Sausage and cheer villains, and heroes, at a country wrestling match. Although Sam Pickering lives in Connecticut, he has long been a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
kpdavis –
Sam Pickering always searches for the absurd, even in the most trying of circumstances–old age. This collections of rambling essays read like a meditation, a recording of the mechanisms of old age, without maudlin tendencies.