If you missed J.D. Daniels's crackerjack letters when they first appeared in the Paris Review, The Correspondence is your chance to catch up with this talented, funny, often dark master of the personal essay. Mostly nonfiction, the six pieces in this collection by the Whiting Prize-winning Daniels include experiences as diverse as training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, laboring as a deckhand on a Mediterranean ship out of Tunisia, kicking around his hometown of Louisville, Ky., and attending a group psychotherapy retreat. They paint a picture of a man who embraced the contrary, did more than his share of drugs and alcohol, stumbled in and out of college, handled marriage poorly, dabbled in therapy and wound up becoming a writer, despite some of the whiny, self-centered colleagues in his writing classes.
Each entry is a striking piece of prose with Daniels's sharp take on life nested inside humor and clever wordplay, but "Letter from Kentucky," about his return to his hometown, is perhaps his most sensitive, observant essay. It opens with a biblical begats list of his ancestors, touches harshly on his parents and the religion pounded into him, tastes the bars and alleys that shaped his youth, and captures the heart of the culture in drive-by panoramas: "I drove past Magic Vapor Shop and Tri-State Floors... Urban Creek Holiness Church... Jimbo's 4-Lane Tobacco and the Federal Correctional Institution." Daniels catches something true about every piece of the unsettled world. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.