Robin Hemley: 6 books

Robin Hemley's childhood made a wedgie of his memory, leaving him sore and embarrassed for over forty years. He was the most pitiful kindergartner, the least spirited summer camper, and dateless for prom. In fact, there's nary an event from his youth that couldn't use improvement. If only he could...

The evidence at hand: an autobiography—complete with their mother’s edits—written by his brilliant and disturbingly religious sister; a story featuring actual childhood events, but published by his mother as fiction; the transcript of a hypnotherapy session from his adolescence; and perjured...

For centuries writers have used participatory experience as a lens through which to better see the world at large and as a means of exploring the self. Considering various types of participatory writing as different strains of one style—immersion writing—Robin Hemley offers new perspectives and...

In this novel of a woman in search of the meaning of family, “Hemley draws a quirky, droll road map of the human heart, with all its foibles and dangers” (Publishers Weekly).   In 1963, when Lois Kulwicki’s father loses his job at Studebaker along with hundreds of other workers, he acts as...

A “touching and funny” story collection full of “sympathetic characters who are deeply flawed but just as deeply human”****(Booklist).   Reply All, the third volume of award-winning and widely anthologized short stories by Robin Hemley, takes a humorous, edgy, and frank look at the human...

Writers of the modern essay can trace their chosen genre all the way back to Michel de Montaigne (1533–92). But save for the recent notable best seller How to Live: A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell, Montaigne is largely ignored. After Montaigne—a collection of twenty-four new personal essays...