In Many Ways

At once a log of pandemic life in New York City and a meditation on selfhood, memory, and language, Emily Simon's first book is a lyrical and timely experiment in prose fragments.

IN MANY WAYS describes a self in process, at odds, and enthralled, in search of the origins of her unsatisfiable pursuit of meaning. The writerly drive to fix the fleeting moment comes up against a contradictory impulse to escape—through writing—the binds of formal codes and conventions. Simon's shifts and disjunct...