The Effects of Knut Hamsun on a Fresno Boy

These powerful personal narratives by the renowned author of Living Up the Street are clear and precise renderings of seemingly mundane moments. There is a delirious joy in Soto's writings, and heartbreak. This collection features his much-lauded essays "The Jacket" and "Like Mexicans," along with new essays such as "Childhood Worries, or Why I Became a Writer," "Getting It Done," and the title essay in which Soto fashions himself to be Fresno's own Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian writer of the 1920s who lived on nothing more than his five senses. Written from the heart, tempered by intelligence and enlivened by imaginative spirit, these clear and deceptively simple accounts surprise, enlighten, and refresh.