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An enduring account of love and loss from one of the great writers of our time, the New Yorker's Kathryn Schultz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
Eighteen months before Kathryn Schulz's beloved father died, she met the woman she would marry. In Lost & Found, she weaves the stories of those relationships into a brilliant exploration of how all our lives are shaped by loss and discovery—from the maddening disappearance of everyday objects to the sweeping devastations of war, pandemic, and natural disaster; from finding new planets to falling in love.
Three very different American families form the heart of Lost & Found: the one that made Schulz's father, a charming, brilliant, absentminded Jewish refugee; the one that made her partner, an equally brilliant farmer's daughter and devout Christian; and the one she herself makes through marriage. But Schulz is also attentive to other, more universal kinds of conjunction: how private happiness can coexist with global catastrophe, how we get irritated with those we adore, how love and loss are themselves unavoidably inseparable. The resulting book is part memoir, part guidebook to living in a world that is simultaneously full of wonder and joy and wretchedness and suffering—a world that always demands both our gratitude and our grief.
A staff writer at the New Yorker and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Kathryn Schulz writes with curiosity, tenderness, erudition, and wit about our finite yet infinitely complicated lives. Crafted with the emotional clarity of C. S. Lewis and the intellectual force of Susan Sontag, Lost & Found is an uncommon book about common experiences.
What do you do when you’ve hit a slump?
...dge by Sommerset Maugham Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence Daniel Martin by John Fowles Warlight by Michael Ondaatje Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz and Ordinary Love and Good Will by Jane Smiley (Best two short novels ever written.)
-Kassapa
What are you reading this week? (7/17/2025)
You know, her journey of discovering herself as a writer, wasn't written that well. Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz was a million times better.
-Kassapa
"[S]tunning...By the end of these exquisite existential wanderings, Schulz comes to a quiet truce with her finding that 'life, too, goes by contraries...by turns crushing and restorative...comic and uplifting.' Schulz's canny observations are a treasure." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Fresh and evocative ... a poignant, loving, wise, and comforting meditation on grief from both a personal and collective perspective." - Booklist (starred review)
"Elegant and thought-provoking, Schulz's book is as much a celebration of the circle of life as it is an elegant reminder to all that 'we are here to keep watch, not to keep.' A searchingly intelligent memoir and psychological meditation." - Kirkus Reviews
"This is an extraordinary gift of a book, a tender, searching meditation on love and loss and what it means to be human. I emerged feeling as if the world around me had been made anew." - Helen Macdonald, author of Vesper Flights
"Lost & Found is a deeply moving, richly illuminating exploration of loss and bliss. Schulz is never anything but the very best company, speaking nuanced truths from and about the deepest reaches of the heart." - Leslie Jamison, author of Make It Scream, Make It Burn
"Kathryn Schulz has a singular way of turning a familiar idea around and around until it becomes cosmic, geological, wondrous. In Lost & Found she turns a memoir of love and death into an exploration of the way chance becomes fate and grief intertwines with gratitude. To read her is to be quietly amazed at hidden depths and histories—as if you were to discover a map of a continent written in the palm of your hand." - Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror
This information about Lost & Found 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.
Kathryn Schulz is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of Being Wrong. She won a National Magazine Award and a Pulitzer Prize for "The Really Big One," her article about seismic risk in the Pacific Northwest. Lost & Found grew out of "Losing Streak," a New Yorker story that was anthologized in The Best American Essays. Her work has also appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Best American Travel Writing, and The Best American Food Writing. A native of Ohio, she lives with her family on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
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