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PRAISE FOR SOUL RETRIEVAL
“Shanna McNair is a writer of great astringency, intensity, and lucidity, but also one of deep feeling. She's perhaps a lapsed idealist, as Mary McCarthy said of one other . . . The model for this elevated, poignant, lacerating, romanticist vision of human longing is the Denis Johnson of the early period, the guy who wrote Angels, and perhaps, via Denis Johnson, the Isaac Babel of Red Cavalry, where the very worst human tendencies are somehow the long slow way, the very costly way to God.”
—RICK MOODY, author of The Ice Storm and Hotels of North America
“. . . The rhythm of McNair’s prose is as pronounced and musical as it is raw. The narrative voice evokes the radical awareness of an individual who is often too smart for her own good and riddled with flaws that she wears as humble marks of her humanity. Hers is a wayward voice finding its way back to itself, a woman’s voice with nothing left to lose, a wounded voice that is twisted and plied and battered until it bleeds heart-shredding images, a porous voice on the trail of healing and connection and love . . . from abuse and mental illness to loss and addiction, weeping tears of joy as well as pain, and where one least expects it, trip-wiring stunning flashes of beauty.
—DIANE OATLEY, author of Swoon and translator of The History of Bees
“Though Shanna McNair’s Soul Retrieval is a novel, nothing seems invented here. This book sustains the clarity and no-word-wasted dramatic propulsion of the best memoirs. McNair tells a story that desperately needs telling, a story told in Soul Retrieval with the chronic intensity found only in someone who has lived what she knows. Mary Dixon, the central character, trucks no patience for cleverness or camouflage when it comes to saying what is essential to her life. Page by page, the quiet and not-so-quiet discomforts that teethe on our days—that drive us to make distraction a sacrament—are illuminated for us in this expertly rendered and readable book.”
—TIM SEIBLES, author of Fast Animal and Voodoo Libretto
“Haunted by family trauma and a sense of locational and spiritual displacement, Mary sets out on a journey of the soul that takes her from one end of the country to another, from childhood to the present, and from the miasma of self-loathing, addiction, and violence to a shaky but ever-brightening place of awareness and love . . . the rat-a-tat wordplay and rhythms of Jack Kerouac with the bell-clear reflectiveness of Marguerite Duras . . . A fierce, technicolour ride, brimming with calamity, sorrow, flashes of wild humour, and an overarching love for whom we meet and what we might become.
—ALEXANDRA OLIVER, author of Hail, The Invisible Watchman and Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway
PRAISE FOR SOUL RETRIEVAL
“Shanna McNair is a writer of great astringency, intensity, and lucidity, but also one of deep feeling. She's perhaps a lapsed idealist, as Mary McCarthy said of one other . . . The model for this elevated, poignant, lacerating, romanticist vision of human longing is the Denis Johnson of the early period, the guy who wrote Angels, and perhaps, via Denis Johnson, the Isaac Babel of Red Cavalry, where the very worst human tendencies are somehow the long slow way, the very costly way to God.”
—RICK MOODY, author of The Ice Storm and Hotels of North America
“. . . The rhythm of McNair’s prose is as pronounced and musical as it is raw. The narrative voice evokes the radical awareness of an individual who is often too smart for her own good and riddled with flaws that she wears as humble marks of her humanity. Hers is a wayward voice finding its way back to itself, a woman’s voice with nothing left to lose, a wounded voice that is twisted and plied and battered until it bleeds heart-shredding images, a porous voice on the trail of healing and connection and love . . . from abuse and mental illness to loss and addiction, weeping tears of joy as well as pain, and where one least expects it, trip-wiring stunning flashes of beauty.
—DIANE OATLEY, author of Swoon and translator of The History of Bees
“Though Shanna McNair’s Soul Retrieval is a novel, nothing seems invented here. This book sustains the clarity and no-word-wasted dramatic propulsion of the best memoirs. McNair tells a story that desperately needs telling, a story told in Soul Retrieval with the chronic intensity found only in someone who has lived what she knows. Mary Dixon, the central character, trucks no patience for cleverness or camouflage when it comes to saying what is essential to her life. Page by page, the quiet and not-so-quiet discomforts that teethe on our days—that drive us to make distraction a sacrament—are illuminated for us in this expertly rendered and readable book.”
—TIM SEIBLES, author of Fast Animal and Voodoo Libretto
“Haunted by family trauma and a sense of locational and spiritual displacement, Mary sets out on a journey of the soul that takes her from one end of the country to another, from childhood to the present, and from the miasma of self-loathing, addiction, and violence to a shaky but ever-brightening place of awareness and love . . . the rat-a-tat wordplay and rhythms of Jack Kerouac with the bell-clear reflectiveness of Marguerite Duras . . . A fierce, technicolour ride, brimming with calamity, sorrow, flashes of wild humour, and an overarching love for whom we meet and what we might become.
—ALEXANDRA OLIVER, author of Hail, The Invisible Watchman and Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway
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