
Serious Face
Essays
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Narrated by:
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Jon Mooallem
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By:
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Jon Mooallem
About this listen
From the discovery of the author’s face in a century-old photograph to a triple-amputee hospice director working at the border of life and death, here are thirteen hopeful, heartbreaking, and profound essays from “one of the most intelligent, compassionate, and curious authors working today” (Elizabeth Gilbert).
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Kirkus Reviews
Beneath the self-assured and serious faces we wear, every human life is full of longing, guesswork, and confusion—a scramble to do the best we can and make everything up as we go along. In these wide-ranging essays, Jon Mooallem chronicles the beauty of our blundering and the inescapability of our imperfections. He investigates the collapse of a multimillion-dollar bird-breeding scam run by an aging farmer known as the Pigeon King, intimately narrates a harrowing escape from California’s deadliest wildfire, visits an eccentric Frenchman building a town at what he claims is the center of the world, shadows a man through his first day of freedom after twenty-one years in prison, and more—all with a deep conviction that it’s our vulnerability, not our victories, that connect us.
Mooallem’s powers of perception have established him as one of the most distinctive, empathic, and clear-sighted narrative journalists working today. The Wall Street Journal has called his writing “as much art as it is journalism,” and Jia Tolentino has praised his “grace and command.” In Serious Face, Mooallem brings to life the desperate hopes and urgent fears of the people he meets, telling their stories with empathy, humor, insight, and kindness. These elegant, moving essays form an idiosyncratic tapestry of human experience: our audacity and fallibility, our bumbling and goodwill. In moments of calamity and within the extreme absurdity of everyday life, can we learn to love the people we really are, behind the serious faces we show the world?
©2022 Jon Mooallem (P)2022 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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This best-selling, groundbreaking exploration of the Far North is a classic of natural history, anthropology, and travel writing.
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Integration of arctic experience and wisdom
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- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
It’s been five years since the accident that killed the love of her life and she’s almost a new person now—an artist with her own studio and sharing a brownstone apartment with her ride-or-die best friend, Joy, who insists it’s time for Feyi to ease back into the dating scene. Feyi isn’t ready for anything serious, but a steamy encounter at a rooftop party cascades into a whirlwind summer she could have never imagined: a luxury trip to a tropical island, decadent meals in the glamorous home of a celebrity chef, and a major curator who wants to launch her art career.
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Very well written but...
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The Invention of Nature
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- Unabridged
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Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was an intrepid explorer and the most famous scientist of his age. His restless life was packed with adventure and discovery, whether climbing the highest volcanoes in the world or racing through anthrax-infested Siberia. He came up with a radical vision of nature, that it was a complex and interconnected global force and did not exist for man's use alone. Ironically, his ideas have become so accepted and widespread that he has been nearly forgotten.
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Poignant origin story
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Critic reviews
“John Muir once said, ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.’ Was he talking about Jon Mooallem’s essay collection? I think he might have been! It’s hard to imagine how Mooallem manages to thread the complex lacework of thought so elegantly between the personal and the universal, the manmade and the natural, the profane and the mundane, the serious and the absurd. But somehow, he does it all. And what a gift for us that he does.”—Samin Nosrat, author of Salt Fat Acid Heat
“Every Jon Mooallem piece is a gift to the world, and a collection of such pieces is priceless. The varied topics reflect the boundless, whimsical curiosity of his mind. Each is like a puzzle box, with deeper profundities unfolding with every new passage. And the writing is just breathtakingly good; Mooallem is a master storyteller, working at the peak of his craft.”—Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes
“At some point in nearly every Jon Mooallem essay, there is an unspooling. He hits a pressure point in your tight little heart that you didn’t realize you were carrying around, and with his words—the meaning he wraps around the confusion of this world—he offers fleeting but quite potent relief. This is a book that might unexpectedly cause tears. This is a book that is good to keep near.”—Lulu Miller, co-founder of Invisibilia and author of Why Fish Don’t Exist
What listeners say about Serious Face
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Nathan Tower
- 06-06-22
A must read this summer
Exactly the brutally beautiful stories we need right now! I’ve sent a copy to the writers / readers in my life. One for the bookshelf!
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