Degas at the Gas Station: Essays

by Thomas Beller

Overview

In his latest collection, Thomas Beller trains his piercing literary eye on how a single, seismic event indelibly shapes the trajectory of the common and mundane experiences of one’s life. Weaving together a charming set of autobiographical stories, Beller interrogates the randomness and contingencies that separate sadness from joy, death from life. His father escaped the Nazis, only to die in America from cancer when Beller was nine years old. Beller measures how this loss impacted his life as the father of two young children and became both a catalyst for understanding an ever-present sorrow. At the same time, ordinary moments—from retrieving an iPod from the subway tracks to encountering the police at a Kinks concert to observing his young tutued ballerina daughter at a gas station—lead to instances of penetrating insight, self-deprecation, and humor. Degas at the Gas Station presents an endearing and bracingly honest portrait of the author as an ever-curious observer of the mysteries and profundities of everyday life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478061786
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	10/03/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	681 KB

About the Author

Thomas Beller is a long time contributor to the New Yorker and the author of several books including Lost in the Game: A Book about Basketball, also published by Duke University Press; J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist; and The Sleep-Over Artist. A 2024-25 Guggenheim fellow, he is a founding editor of Open City Magazine and Books and Mrbellersneighborhood.com, and  Professor and Director of creative writing at Tulane University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  xiii
Introduction: The Misunderstandings  1
The Frozen River, Part I  15
iPod on the Tracks  18
The Stuff of Life  21
The Bad News Bears and Breaking Away  26
The Kinks at the Garden  34
The Lost Glove  46
On Moving Out  49
A Visit to the Library  66
The Laundry Room  71
Us and Them  77
The Topographical Soul  85
Negative Space  89
The Purple Krama  99
Loose Teeth  107
Degas at the Gas Station  111
Thanksgiving Panic  115
The Pink Comma  121
How I Found My iPhone in New Orleans  127
The Two-Thousand-Dollar Popsicle  134
On Finding a Spot  140
Saying Goodbye to Now  146
Remembrance of Snows Past  151
Repeat, Memory  160
The Perils of Precocity  164
Drain You  169
Her Party  173
Napoleon on the Back Stairs  178
The Egg Cream in Mid-Manhattan, 1982  186
Somebody’s Mother Is Waiting in the Lobby  197
The Time My Band Opened for Blur  203
Death of a Movie Theater  209
A Few Words About Jerry Stiller  216
Loitering with Intent at Manet/Degas  220
The Rights  226
Evacuation  237
The Frozen River (Reprise)  243

Editorial Reviews

“Thomas Beller writes with wit, irony, skepticism, and brio. Degas at the Gas Station is one of the finest collections of personal essays I have seen in a long while.”
-- Phillip Lopate, author of My Affair with Art House Cinema: Essays and Reviews

“The true power of this excellent collection comes through Thomas Beller’s ability to dig down into the ordinary and commonplace for new and revelatory insight. A master of the small moment, Beller is one of the strongest personal essayists in contemporary literature.”
-- Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, author of American Estrangement: Stories

“This is a treasure trove of glimmering pieces on fatherhood and youth, odd jobs and urban life. The essay lives every time Thomas Beller picks up the pen.”
-- Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams: A Novel

"Beller’s lucid writing makes even the ordinary magical. The result is a penetrating meditation on the human condition."
-- Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2025-07-19
Miscellaneous essays on travel, family, and other topics.

The title essay, one of three dozen, is a slice-of-life reminiscence of a moment with the author’s young daughter, fresh from a tap dance lesson and drinking a soda in a pose and light that, Beller writes, might have inspired Edgar Degas to pick up his brush “if he went on a field trip to the Stop & Shop.” Beller’s wife, the constant voice of reason throughout, reminds him that Degas didn’t have much regard for his subjects, but no matter. It’s a nice enough vignette, but it doesn’t amount to much. Other of the essays have an academic, workshoplike feel, and there’s not much there, either; Beller’s musings on the meaning of theBad News Bears film franchise seem particularly slight in that regard. Somewhat more successful is a piece that traces memory through the fog of time, in this instance the author’s recollections of being busted at a Kinks concert in 1981, which occasioned an embarrassed correction when he incorrectly credited the rousting to the NYPD. “Maybe this is what happens at a certain point in life, when one’s faith in one’s own memory begins to wobble and a sense of incredulity at what you know happened rises up to challenge your own version of the facts,” he writes in a footnote. The best pieces move beyond the POV of a put-upon professor to real-world ruefulness, as when Beller recounts trying to chase down inner-city kids who’ve stolen cash and a phone from him. A doubting detective wonders what he’s doing in that bad part of town in the first place, saying of Beller’s sesquipedalian reply, “It’s my experience that the longer and more convoluted someone’s answer is, the less likely I am to believe them. And that was pretty convoluted.” They’re the sharpest lines in the book.

A mixed bag, with few standouts.

Kirkus Reviews