Contents
Foreword: Discovering the Hermit Crab Essay
Brenda Miller
Introduction: A Natural History of the North American Hermit Crab
Essay
Kim Adrian
Grand Theft Auto
Joey Franklin
Ok, Cupid
Sarah McColl
Rubik’s Cube, Six Twisted Paragraphs
Kathryn A. Kopple
Solving My Way to Grandma
Laurie Easter
Genome Tome
Priscilla Long
As Is
Brian Oliu
Falling in Love with a Glass House: Twenty-Four Views of Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House
Jennifer Metsker
Son of Mr. Green Jeans: An Essay on Fatherhood, Alphabetically
Arranged
Dinty W. Moore
Snakes & Ladders
Anushka Jasraj
Math 1619
Gwendolyn Wallace
Stagecraft
Mary Peelen
We Regret to Inform You
Brenda Miller
The Six Answers on the Back of a Trivia Card
Caitlin Horrocks
Piecing the Quilt of Valor
Judith Sornberger
Self-Portrait as a 1970s Cineplex Movie Theatre (an
Abecedarian)
Steve Fellner
The Forgetting Test
Lee Upton
#MISCARRIAGE.EXE
Ingrid Jendrzejewski
SECTION 404
Cheyenne Nimes
The Body (an Excerpt)
Jenny Boully
Questionnaire for My Grandfather
Kim Adrian
The Petoskey Catechism, 1958
Elizabeth Kerlikowske
What Signifies (Three Parables)
David Shields
The Marriage License
Judy Bolton-Fasman
The Heart as a Torn Muscle
Randon Billings Noble
The Spectrum (of Miracles and Mysteries)
Steve Edwards
“Easy as Pie,” That’s a Lie
Amy Wallen
Outline toward a Theory of the Mine versus the Mind and the Harvard
Outline
Ander Monson
The Clockwise Detorsion of Snails: A Love Essay in Sectors
Karen Hays
Postscript: Forms on the Page
Cheyenne Nimes
Source Acknowledgments
Contributors
Contributor’s Note
Michael Martone
Kim Adrian is a Boston-based creative writer and a
visiting lecturer of nonfiction writing at Brown
University. She is the author of Sock, part of the Object
Lesson series, and the forthcoming memoir The Twenty-Seventh Letter
of the Alphabet (Nebraska, 2018). Adrian is the recipient of a
Bread Loaf scholarship, a PEN/New England Discovery Award, and an
artist’s grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Brenda
Miller directs the MFA in Creative Writing and the MA in
English Studies at Western Washington University. Cheyenne
Nimes is a cross-genre writer currently working on
poetry/nonfiction hybrids on the nature of evil and Jonestown. She
won the Edwin Ford Piper Scholar Award and was a University of Iowa
Art Museum resident writer.
"The Shell Game may serve to expand what readers may think of when
they think of the essay. Among the grocery lists and Post-It notes,
comic sketches and sermons, and the other ephemera of our everyday
lives, essayistic elements exist—searching for their shells."—Sadaf
Ferdowsi, Punctuate
"Of course you’ll want to let essay fans know they’ll enjoy this
book. But also be sure to let people know that, if they’re also a
writer or if they teach writing, this collection can serve as a
model. You've always been somewhat of a rebel, so you'll want
writers, especially those who stick to more rigid forms, to read
this book to encourage them to have fun with their work. To take
risks and chances."—Hippocampus Magazine
"The essays in this collection bring with them a sense of hope
about literature and its capacity for evolution and change. . .
. Ultimately, maybe it’s this promise of transformation and
adaptation that makes hermit crab essays so appealing. They
encourage us to move forward, and they show us how many different
paths we might take."—Vivian Wagner, Millions
"If you are looking for a book that fits into the genre of
"Creative Nonfiction," especially as an introduction, your best bet
is to pick up The Shell Game immediately. . . . This book is
the science fiction of creative nonfiction, or better yet, the
Ulysses of the modern essay. It's a shell for itself, in that,
without claiming these essays as "essays," one wouldn’t know what
to call them, what to do with them. The Shell Game is far from the
five paragraphs that grammar schools teach, and it makes readers
feel as if they are learning what an essay is (or could be) all
over again."—Cody Lee, New Pages
"If good creative writing sparks the instinct to write, The Shell
Game provides ample embers to inspire a wide range of writers. . .
. If any writer stumbles into The Shell Game, even for a few
essays, they are bound to come away with some fresh ideas and new
perspectives, a renewed hankering to examine the quotidian and
evaluate the details and textures around them to render them in
new, yet recognizable ways."—Rachel Kathryn Rueckert, Columbia
Journal
"Hermit crab essays, without proper care, are at risk of devolving
into cute pets . . . but The Shell Game makes a unique and
significant contribution to helping avoid this fate."—Rebecca Fish
Ewan, Split Rock Review
“Daring, innovative, and mind-bending, this anthology
showcases the best of what is arguably the most exciting new thing
on the literary landscape today: the borrowed form
essay.”—Kathy Fish, coauthor of Rift and author of Wild Life
“Virginia Woolf asked of the essay ‘simply that it should give
pleasure.’ The Shell Game fulfills this request, even
exceeds it, bringing startling diversity of subject, voice, and
form. Each essay is a new surprise, a prettier shell than ordinary,
demonstrating astonishing originality in mimicry and providing, for
this reader at least, pure joy.”—Patrick Madden, author of Sublime
Physick and Quotidiana
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