Book Summary and Reviews of The Tao of Humiliation by Lee Upton

The Tao of Humiliation by Lee Upton

The Tao of Humiliation

American Readers Series

by Lee Upton

  • Critics' Consensus (2):
  • Published:
  • May 2014, 312 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

Alternately chilling, funny, devastating, and hopeful, these seventeen stories introduce us to a theater critic who winds up in a hot tub with the actress he routinely savages in reviews; a biographer who struggles to discover why a novelist stopped writing; a student who contends with her predatory professor; and the startling scenario of the last satyr meeting his last woman.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. These 17 tales explore personal and familial relationships with both pathos and humor - and all are well worth reading." - Kirkus

"This is a smart and highly entertaining book." - Publishers Weekly

"Upton, award-winning poet and literary critic, shows her mastery of the short form … This entertaining collection will appeal to fans of a variety of literary authors, such as Grace Paley, Edith Pearlman, and Louis Norda." - Booklist

This information about The Tao of Humiliation 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.

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Author Information

Lee Upton

Lee Upton is the author of twelve other books, including the novella The Guide to the Flying Island, and a collection of essays about writing, Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition Boredom Purity & Secrecy. Her poetry has appeared in editions of The Best American Poetry and has been included in numerous anthologies as well as in The New Republic, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Harvard Review, New England Review, Poetry, and other magazines. More than three dozen of her short stories have been published, appearing in such journals as Antioch Review, Epoch, Short Fiction (England), Redivider, Northwest Review, Shenandoah, and Ascent. She has published more than fifty articles and essays about literature. Her awards include: the Lyric Poetry Award and The Writer/Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America; the Pushcart Prize; the National Poetry Series Award; the Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series Award; the BOA Short Fiction Prize; and the Mary Louise VanArtsdalen Prize for Scholarship, the Marquis Teaching Award, and the Jones Faculty Lecture Award at Lafayette College, where she is the Writer-in-Residence and a professor of English.

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