Things No Longer There: A Memoir of Losing Sight and Finding Vision is a lovingly crafted collection of personal stories about the author's struggle toward enlightenment while losing her eyesight. It is also, more broadly, about invisible landscapes--places of the heart that linger long after they have disappeared from the world outside. In these ten brief tales and one novella-length intimate drama, Susan Krieger takes us on a series of adventures in vision, a journey both inward and to various parts of the country. We travel with her as she goes birdwatching before sunrise in the New Mexico desert, learns to walk with a white cane, revisits an old love, returns to a summer camp of her youth, and reflects on the nature of blindness and sight.
"We are all, to some extent blind, to some extent sighted," writes Krieger, "andeach of us moves in a world of unique inner vision, an interior landscape thatis composed of meanings, of sights and sounds, and feelings deeply held."
This book will reward both the general reader and those interested in disability studies, feminist ethnography, and lesbian studies.
Susan Krieger, a sociologist and writer, teaches in the Program in Feminist Studies at Stanford University. Her previous books are The Family Silver: Essays on Relationships among Women; Social Science and the Self: Personal Essays on an Art Form; The Mirror Dance: Identity in a Women's Community; and Hip Capitalism.
"Susan Krieger's book illustrates in a personal, reflective, and emotional way how the gradual erosion of interpersonal relationships and familiar environments requires great effort to maintain a sense of inner reality and balance. This book is beautifully written, with vivid, compelling images that stayed with me." --Esther Rothblum, University of Vermont
"Even before Krieger began losing her vision...she began compiling written snapshots, word pictures that captured exactly how things appeared to her at selected moments in time. Her verbal imagery borders on the poetic." --Donna Chavez, Booklist
"Krieger's ability to hold inner vision serves her well as her visual acuity diminishes, due to a rare condition known as birdshot retinochoroidopathy. But much more important - and essential to us all - is her ability to cultivate new vision...[Krieger] is one of our most insightful chroniclers of lesbian experience in the late 20th and early 21st centuries." --Carol Seajay, Books to Watch Out For
To order Things No Longer There from the University of Wisconsin Press, please call the Chicago Distribution Center at (773) 702-7000. To order online, visit Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Powell's Books. For an accessible eBook of Things No Longer There for the blind, contact Margaret Walsh, University of Wisconsin Press, phone (608) 263-1131; e-mail: mawalsh1@wisc.edu. For an audio book, please contact the author. For other alternative formats, see Accessible Versions.
Listen to an interview with the author:
- Forum radio interview ("Adventure in Vision" on KQED-fm, January 26, 2006), or directly stream the Forum program as an MP3
- Tech Nation interview (May 24, 2005, rebroadcast on ITConversations)
- To the Best of Our Knowledge interview ("Ways of Seeing," WPR , April 9, 2006)
Listen to a sample chapter:
- Introduction, mp3 (1.65MB)
- Chapter 4, Half Moon Bay, mp3 (5.52MB)
- Chapter 8, Losing My Vision, mp3 (5.37MB)
(From a recording by Barbara Byers, CNIB Library for the Blind, DC26697. Used by permission.)
Things No Longer There
A Memoir of Losing Sight and Finding Vision
by Susan Krieger
University of Wisconsin Press, 2005, 248 pages
ISBN 0-299-20864-8 Paper $19.95
Memoir / Disability / Gay and Lesbian Interest
For a press kit, please visit Things No Longer There on the University of Wisconsin Press website. To obtain a review copy and for further information, contact Benson Gardner, phone: (608) 263-0734; email: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu.
