From the winner of the 2004 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Creative NonfictionIn his award-winning memoir In the Shadow of Memory, Floyd Skloot told the hard story of coming to terms with a brain-ravaging virus. A World of Light, written with the same insight, passion, and humor that distinguished the earlier volume, moves Skloot s story from the reassembly of a self after neurological calamity to the reconstruction of a shattered life. More than fifteen years after a viral attack compromised his memory and cognitive powers, Skloot now must do the vital work of recreating a...

In December 1988 Floyd Skloot was stricken by a virus that targeted his brain, leaving him totally disabled and utterly changed. In the Shadow of Memory is an intimate picture of what it is like to find oneself possessed of a ravaged memory and unstable balance and confronted by wholesale changes in both cognitive and emotional powers. Skloot also explores the gradual reassembling of himself, putting together his scattered memories, rediscovering the meaning of childhood and family history, and learning a new way to be at home in the world. Combining the author's skills as a poet and...

The End of Dreams is a celebration of the human capacity for adaptation amid the cycles of loss and renewal that characterize our intimate lives. Floyd Skloot mixes dramatic monologue with meditative and narrative verse in poems that explore family experiences, the lives of artists, historical crisis, love, nature, illness, and sudden, unpredictable change. The poet describes moments rich in complexity: when a grandfather's intentional loss at cards is really a victory of love; when Flannery O'Connor's waxing and waning illness becomes a merciful strengthening of her faith in death and...

In his three previous memoirs, Floyd Skloot grappled with the brain-ravaging virus that struck him at forty-one. He was, as the San Francisco Chronicle noted, shaping the experience of crippling illness into dazzling literature. How such alchemy is performed where, in fact, the magic comes from is the subject of Skloot s new book, a memoir of the making of a writer.
Sifting through memories and observations to discover how circumstance and nature conspired to make him the writer he is, Skloot enacts in this book the very process he describes, the shaping of a writer s life. Among...

From the winner of the 2004 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction In his award-winning memoir In the Shadow of Memory, Floyd Skloot told the hard story of coming to terms with a brain-ravaging virus. A World of Light, written with the same insight, passion, and humor that distinguished the earlier volume, moves Skloot's story from the reassembly of a self after neurological calamity to the reconstruction of a shattered life. More than fifteen years after a viral attack compromised his memory and cognitive powers, Skloot now must do the vital work of recreating a cohesive life...

Floyd Skloot was named "one of the fifty most inspiring authors in the world" by the magazine Poets & Writers, and he has been called "the Willie Mays of memoirists" by The San Francisco Chronicle. In Skloot's short fiction, people face the starkest challenges, including bodily maladies, the most harrowing of which often come with aging. Gathering stories that originally appeared in excellent journals such as The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ontario Review, North American Review, Glimmer Train, and Witness, this new book by an acclaimed memoirist, novelist and poet shows how bewildering...

On a street in Dorchester, England, there is a gateway between real and imagined lives. A plaque identifies a Barclays Bank building as lived in by the Mayor of Casterbridge in Thomas Hardy s story of that name written in 1885.
In this imaginative novel, worlds continue to collide as Floyd, an American writer recovering from a devastating neuro-viral attack, and his wife, Beverly, immerse themselves in Hardy s world. While pondering the enigma of a fictional character living in a factual building, Floyd is approached by Hardy himself despite his death in 1928.
This phantom possibly...

One March morning, writer Floyd Skloot was inexplicably struck by an attack of unrelenting vertigo that ended 138 days later as suddenly as it had begun. With body and world askew, everything familiar had transformed. Nothing was ever still. Revertigo is Skloot s account of that unceasingly vertiginous period, told in an inspired and appropriately off-kilter form.
This intimate memoir tenuous, shifting, sometimes humorous demonstrates Skloot s considerable literary skill honed as an award-winning essayist, memoirist, novelist, and poet. His recollections of a strange, spinning...

Floyd Skloot's eighth poetry collection, Approaching Winter, evokes the fluid and dynamic nature of memory as it ebbs and floods through our daily lives. Here the real and the imagined intermingle freely: In one poem, the cry of eagles reflects the wails of an infant daughter, long since grown and gone; in another, an aging Samuel Beckett prepares to throw the first pitch at Ebbets Field. Traveling from Portland's Willamette River, which borders Skloot's home, to the hushed landscapes of the afterlife, the poems in this collection acknowledge the passage of time and the inevitable darkness...