“Powerful” essays exploring the experience of the writer—and the nature of experience itself (MinneapolisStar-Tribune).
Shortlisted for the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Award in Nonfiction
Jenny Boully’s essays are ripe with romance and sensual pleasures, drawing connections between the digression, reflection, imagination, and experience that characterize falling in love as well as the life of a writer. Literary theory, philosophy, and linguistics rub up against memory, dreamscapes, and fancy—making the practice of writing a metaphor for the illusory nature of experience. Betwixt-and-Between is, in many ways, simply a book about how to live.
“[Boully’s] prose is reminiscent of Lydia Davis’—spare, elliptical, unexpected—and sometimes, in her rhythmic cadences, of Gertrude Stein’s . . . Graceful meditations on love, loneliness, and the magic of words.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Jenny Boully is a deeply weird writer—in the best way.” —Ander Monson