Heating & Cooling

The 52 micro-memoirs in genre-defying Heating & Cooling offer bright glimpses into a richly lived life, combining the compression of poetry with the truth-telling of non-fiction into one heartfelt, celebratory book. Ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these micro-memoirs build on one another to arrive at a portrait of Beth Ann Fennelly as a wife, mother, writer and deeply original observer of life's challenges and joys.

Some pieces are wistful, some wry and many reveal the humour buried in our everyday interactions. Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs shapes a life from unexpectedly illuminating moments and awakens us to these moments as they appear in the margins of our lives.

“"Wise, irreverent, funny....Everyone should read this book."”

"Heating and Cooling contains essays that are sometimes as short as 10 words… but add up to a surprisingly maximalist portrait of a life." -- The New York Times Book Review
"The micro-memoirs showcase a range of emotions that belies their brevity—taken from another standpoint, their brevity is what gives them power." -- The Wall Street Journal

Beth Ann Fennelly is the author of three poetry collections, Unmentionables, Tender Hooks, and Open House; two memoirs, Heating & Cooling and Great with Child; and a novel, The Tilted World, coauthored with her husband, Tom Franklin. She teaches at the University of Mississippi, and is also the state’s Poet Laureate. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

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