Great topics of the world

Albert Goldbarth's "essays" (for want of a better term) stitch together elements of the memoir, the short story, the stand-up comedy shtick, the scholarly thesis, and the richly textured prose poem, into what critic Robert Atwan calls "a whole new breed" of personal essay. Goldbarth, says Atwan, "has spliced together strands of the old genre with a powerful new gene - and the results are miraculous.". Great Topics of the World investigates everyday traumas and triumphs - the despairs, delights, and complexities of our lives - and places them in an historic, cosmologic context, in which Vermeer, Leeuwenhock, Amy Lowell, astronauts Kepler and Tycho Brahe, Krazy Kat creator George Herriman, and the Golem-conjuring Rabbi of Prague reenact their legendary dramas. And recurring throughout is the more intimate leitmotif of Goldbarth's own life and that of his family: the parents who inadvertently fed their boy's fascination with the flotsam and jetsam of American pop culture; the grandparents whose emigration from the old country was like "landing on Mars"; and the author himself, standing midway between the lore of Middle Europe and the lure of the New World, with its adventure comics, golden-haired enchantresses, and promises of a star-kissed future. At its core, Great Topics of the world is about one of the great topics of our century: the cultural and personal collisions brought about by a world in migration.