Readers' rating:
Published Mar 2016
216 pages
Genre: Essays
Publication Information
An award-winning essayist explores the lives of some of America's most interesting and obscure women: At the Dreamland, women and girls flicker from the shadows to take their proper place in the spotlight.
In this lyrical collection, Sonja Livingston weaves together strands of research and imagination to conjure figures from history, literature, legend, and personal memory. The result is a series of essays that highlight lives as varied, troubled, and spirited as America itself. Harnessing the power of language, Livingston breathes life into subjects who lived extraordinary lives- as rule-breakers, victims, or those whose differences made them cultural curiosities-bringing together those who slipped through the world largely unseen with those whose images were fleeting or faulty so that they, too, remained relatively obscure. Included are Alice Mitchell, a Memphis society girl who murdered her female lover in 1892; Maria Spelterini, who crossed Niagara Falls on a tightrope in 1876; May Fielding, a "white slave girl" buried in a Victorian cemetery; Valaida Snow, a Harlem Renaissance trumpeter; a child exhibited as Darwin's Missing Link; the sculptors' model Audrey Munson; a Crow warrior; victims of a 1970s serial killer; the Fox Sisters; and many more.
"Starred Review. Radiant essays inspired by 'slivers and bits' of real women's lives... Wise, fresh, captivating essays." - Kirkus Reviews
"A vibrant and textured creation of women throughout history, some of them famous, others notable for the bravery of their more private lives. Line by line, the writing sings. What a marvelous collection of essays. What a glorious celebration." - Lee Martin author of The Bright Forever
"A swirling, wise dream of a book, filled with gorgeous writing and a poignant crowd of characters, rescued from the stream of history with ardent insight." - Harriet Scott Chessman author of The Beauty of Ordinary Things
"These essays--sometimes charming, sometimes searing, always revealing?investigate history, gender, and the bittersweet stories of those often veiled or suppressed. Livingston writes with a gentle and inquiring spirit, a keen intellect, and a deeply compelling lyrical voice. " - Kristen Iversen, author of Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats
"What's remarkable about [Livingston's] latest work is how she's captured the ability to sustain engaging narratives through such vividly reflexive poetic prose." - Hans Rollman PopMatters
This information about Ladies Night at the Dreamland was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sonja Livingston is an assistant professor in the MFA Program at the University of Memphis. Her first book, Ghostbread (Georgia), won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Book Prize for Nonfiction. She is also the author of the recent essay collection Queen of the Fall: A Memoir of Girls and Goddesses.
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