Cheston Knapp, "UP UP, DOWN DOWN"

The subjects Cheston Knapp, the managing editor of Tin House and an exceptional new voice in the literary community, examines in Up Up, Down Down are wildly different and equally engaging: From skateboarding camp to local professional wrestling to UFO enthusiasts, beer pong in fraternity basements, a neighbor’s murder, fathers, community and nostalgia. Taken together, these sharp, observant essays chronicle Knapp’s coming of age and tackle the Big Questions of life. Knapp deftly explores the hazards of becoming who you are.

Knapp’s remarkable essays will simultaneously make you cry from laughter and from an earth-shattering realization about what it means to be human. His sentences can soar into lyricism and descend into the most commonplace absurdities in the same breath. Much like David Foster Wallace’s collection Consider the Lobster, these essays are for the everyday reader and for the literati alike.