All the Wrong Places

Philip Connors is the author of Fire Season, which won the Banff Mountain Book Competition Grand Prize, the National Outdoor Book Award, the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, and the Reading the West Book Award. Connors's writing has also appeared in Harper's, n+1, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. He lives in New Mexico.

"Combin[ing] lyricism with dark humor to draw lines between grief and the uncanny... Connors' story [is] told with harrowing and fierce prose." "Affecting... Sharply funny... [Told with] subtle, evocative prose and depth of feeling." "Find room on your bookshelf next to Wallace Stegner and Norman Maclean; Philip Connors is here to stay." -- Alexandra Fuller "Philip Connors probably had to write All the Wrong Places for his own peace of mind; but in the process, he has given all readers a gift. As this sparklingly well-written memoir bores deeper toward the heart of something that cannot be understood, it keeps getting impossibly better, becoming that much more absorbing, that much more tender, more thoughtful, wry, and heartfelt. This is a marvelous book." -- Charles Bock "In this story of a dark, and at times darkly funny, decade of the soul, Philip Connors doesn't so much set out to solve the mystery of his brother's suicide as struggle to escape its gravitational field-struggle and fail, wretchedly at times, in life if not on the page. On the page, he has salvaged a memoir of great honesty and artistry from the aftermath of grief." -- Donovan Hohn "Philip Connors possesses a quietly fierce and mesmerizing prose style, a skeptical and witty mind, a huge heart, and a haunted soul. Add it all up and you have one of the best younger writers in America. The story of All the Wrong Places is a moving one, but it's Connors's artistry that makes it transcendent." -- Sam Lipsyte "Philip Connors is one hell of a storyteller." -- Sean Wilsey