Impossible Owls
Page 29
—Hua Hsu, author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific
“Brian Phillips’s Impossible Owls takes the American essay in new directions—these narratives are simultaneously stories of questing and of strandedness. Characters and landscapes become knowable and disorienting. Tigers, royals, mysterious Russian artists, and foreign countries are subjects of Phillips’s close, careful journalism, as well as representatives of all the glittering, ungraspable things that lie outside us. Witty, pensive, sometimes whimsical, always truthful, Impossible Owls is a testament to Phillips’s gift for enchantment and his genius for knowing exactly where our alienation from the world meets our sympathy for it.”
—Supriya Nair
A Note About the Author
Brian Phillips is a former staff writer for Grantland and a former senior writer for MTV News. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Slate, among other publications, and his work has appeared in The Best American Sports Writing and The Best American Magazine Writing. He lives in central Pennsylvania. Impossible Owls is his first book. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Out in the Great Alone
Sea of Crises
Lost Highway
The Little Gray Wolf Will Come
Man-Eaters
In the Dark: Science Fiction in Small Towns
Once and Future Queen
But Not Like Your Typical Love Story
Acknowledgments
Praise for Impossible Owls
A Note About the Author
Copyright
FSG Originals
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
175 Varick Street, New York 10014
Copyright © 2018 by Brian Phillips
All rights reserved
First edition, 2018
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71770-4
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