Blueberries

In this electric collection of personal essays, Savage leads readers through a range of subjects There is so much to admire in Savages literary style Savage deftly shifts between stylistic devices, narrative voices, and time, and the result is breathtaking The collection, for all its differences in tone, content, and structure, comes together beautifully. -- Roz Bellamy * The Guardian * Savage explores the sites of identity trauma, gender, class, religion, the body in clear rhythmic prose. -- Natasha Randall * TLS * Ellena Savage is savagely smart and talented. -- Rachel Kushner, author of <i>The Mars Room</i> Ellena Savage is a rare kind of true intellectual, a voice that rises above the cacophony with remarkable insight. In Blueberries she cuts fearless swathes through the ways that we write and think and live now and leaves us far better for it: the book is unsettling, life-affirming and essential. * Jean Hannah Edelstein, author of <i>This Really Isnt About You</i> * Once I started reading Blueberries, I found it almost impossible to put down. Its fascinating to watch Ellena Savages mind at work in this book her essays unfurl, expand and dance in unexpected and satisfying ways. This is a masterful, fearless book in which strength and vulnerability collide. -- Chelsea Hodson, author of <i>Tonight Im Someone Else</i> Blueberries feels like laying down on the train tracks and looking up at the sky a reverie, shot through by a feeling of acceleration, of something vast coming at you. Ellenas essays are heartstopping epics of self-inquiry and world-inquiry. -- Maria Tumarkin, author of <i>Axiomatic</i> Quite simply one of the best essay collections of the last twenty years. -- Chloe Walker * CultureFly * A breathtaking interrogation of the self in the world; the self within structures of power and oppression Blueberries is exciting and distinctive. STARRED REVIEW * Books+Publishing * Reading Ellena Savages Blueberries engaged me completely. Savages sparkling writing is bold, witty, insightful, fearless, and funny. It emerges from an astute mind at odds with itself, with culture and society. Savage wrestles and plays with received ideas of all kinds, and with what has and hasnt shaped her. Savages fierce essays and stories are true to a lived life, and fascinating and irresistible. -- Lynne Tillman, author of <i>Men and Apparitions: A Novel</i> Ellena Savage, in Blueberries, confronts the past convulsively, compulsively. In dialogic language and form, the author, facing memorys traumas and perplexities, and also its delights, is constantly aware that it's all about the translation of experience from the private to the public realm. In extremis, which is where Savage shines especially, it's as if she saying to the "repressed": go ahead and return; make my day. -- David Lazar, Professor of Creative Writing, Columbia College Chicago Savage navigates delicate and difficult terrain with wit, ruthless scrutiny and painfully sharp analysis If Yellow City is any indication, Blueberries will be one of the most exciting debuts of the new year. * Overland * The 15 essays contained here wear various guises, from experimental prose to poetry, memoir to polemic to cultural critique. Savages idealism and eloquence are a much-needed counterbalance to our by-now-threadbare belief that all the hard questions of how to order our world have been answered, that everything unsettling such certainty is a glitch, to be soldered onto the technocratic motherboard and run through the circuits of the polity. Blueberries is an adamant and unruly book. It is also the most exciting work of creative nonfiction to be published in this country since Maria Tumarkin took up the pen. -- Geordie Williamson * The Australian * In fifteen wor

Ellena Savage is an Australian author and academic. She is the author of the chapbook Yellow City (The Atlas Review, 2019) and numerous essays, stories, and poems published in literary journals internationally. Ellena is the recipient of several grants and fellowships, including most recently the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship 20192021. She lives in Athens, Greece, with her husband, Dominic Amerena.