A Los Angeles Times Bestseller
A Lit Hub | Chicago Review | Ms. Magazine March pick
A Lambda Literary Most Anticipated Book
In this perceptive and provocative essay collection, an award-winning writer shares her personal and reportorial investigation into America's search for meaning
When Jordan Kisner was a child, she was saved by Jesus Christ at summer camp, much to the confusion of her nonreligious family. She was, she writes, "just naturally reverent," a fact that didn't change when she—much to her own confusion—lost her faith as a teenager. Not sure why her religious conviction had come or where it had gone, she did what anyone would do: "You go about the great American work of assigning yourself to other gods: yoga, talk radio, neoatheism, CrossFit, cleanses, football, the academy, the American Dream, Beyoncé."
A curiosity about the subtle systems guiding contemporary life pervades Kisner's work. Her celebrated essay "Thin Places" (Best American Essays 2016), about an experimental neurosurgery developed to treat severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, asks how putting the neural touchpoint of the soul on a pacemaker may collide science and psychology with philosophical questions about illness, the limits of the self, and spiritual transformation. How should she understand the appearance of her own obsessive compulsive disorder at the very age she lost her faith?
Intellectually curious and emotionally engaging, the essays in Thin Places manage to be both intimate and expansive, illuminating an unusual facet of American life, as well as how it reverberates with the author's past and present preoccupations.
- Mother's Day Reads
- Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month
- Jewish American Heritage Month
- May the 4th Be With You
- Celebrating Cinco de Mayo
- Mental Health Awareness
- A Family Affair: Bridgerton Read Alikes
- Our Librarians Love Steampunk!
- Blake Crouch: Dark Matter and More
- She doesn't even go here!: For fans of Mean Girls
- April Showers Bring May Flowers
- Not Just Another Teen Book- YA for Adults
- Retro Reads - Books from the 1900s
- See all
- Mother's Day Reads
- Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month
- Jewish American Heritage Month
- May the 4th Be With You
- Celebrating Cinco de Mayo
- Mental Health Awareness
- Poetry Is Meant To Be Spoken
- A Family Affair: Bridgerton Read Alikes
- Our Librarians Love Steampunk!
- She doesn't even go here!: For fans of Mean Girls
- Page to Screen
- Not Just Another Teen Book- YA for Adults
- Retro Reads - Books from the 1900s
- See all
- #ownvoices / Diverse Books
- Antiracism Resources
- Sheet Music & Song Books
- Bücher auf Deutsch / Books in German
- Civil Service Test Prep
- The Great Courses
- QuickReads Collection
- See all