Acting My Age
By Thomas Farber with photographs by Wayne Levin and Geoffrey Fricker.
Elegant, exuberant, and idiosyncratic, Acting My Age is a memoir and meditation by one of America’s most playful and inventive writers.
“In Acting My Age, Thomas Farber gives us an unflinching, luminous, cleverly conceived meditation on his own mortality as well as on the extinction of the coral reefs, snow leopards, dolphins, and, ultimately, the human species. Couching his observations in a series of short, interconnected, almost-epigrammatic essays that read like prose poems, Farber creates a narrative style reminiscent of Joyce and Melville: oceanic in depth and all-encompassing in range.”—Mary Mackey, author of The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams
“A praise song, an exultation in the beauties and brutalities of being human. Though Thomas Farber is wide-eyed at the miracle of our existence, his prose details both the collapse of species and ultimate trajectory of our aging bodies. This polymathic dive into a writer’s remaining time—into the life of the earth, the sea, and meaning itself—is no mere memoir, but an elegant, instructive page-after-page of language-love.”—Gerald Fleming, author of The Choreographer
“Tom Farber is always good company, and his ‘late writings’ are more and more indispensable, full of comfort for the perplexed, rich in learning, humorous, masculine and tender, evoking large sensations and vast views; a reader thinks of Montaigne, Whitman, and others of the great truth-tellers, modest of tone, intimate in approach, friends bringing deep gifts.”—Robert Roper, author of Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita.
Thomas Farber is the author of more than two dozen books of fiction, nonfiction, and epigrams, as well as a screenplay and numerous collaborations on photography. Awarded Guggenheim and National Endowment fellowships for fiction and creative nonfiction, he has been a Fulbright Scholar, recipient of the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, and Rockefeller Foundation scholar at Bellagio. Former visiting writer at Swarthmore College and the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa, he teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
Wayne Levin received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from Pratt Institute in New York. His books and monographs include Kalaupapa: A Portrait (1989), Through a Liquid Mirror (1998), Other Oceans (2001), Akule (2010), Ili Nā Ho‘omana‘o o Kalaupapa (2012), and Flowing (2014). Levin’s photographs were also included in Kaho‘olawe: Nā Leo o Kanaloa (1996) and in such publications as Aperture, American Photographer, Camera Arts, and LensWork. He has exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad.
Geoffrey Fricker received an MFA in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. His book Sacrament: Homage to a River (2014) documents the many faces of California’s Sacramento River, and his work is included in The Altered Landscape: Photographs of a Changing Environment (2011). He has partnered with groups that include the Nature Conservancy, River Partners, and Sacramento River Preservation Trust. His work is in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and elsewhere.
192 pp., winter 2020 (32:2), $25
ISBN 978-0-8248-9038-4
Project Muse
MĀNOA 