AN IMAGE OF MY NAME ENTERS AMERICA: Essays
#2 on New York Magazine's 10 Best Books of 2024
A November 2024 Indie Next Great Read
Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2024
Again, today, if I must choose between love and memory, I choose memory.
What would you risk to know yourself? Which stories are you willing to follow to the bitter end, revise, or, possibly, begin all over? In this collection of five interrelated essays, Lucy Ives explores identity, national fantasy, and history. She examines events and records from her own life—a childhood obsession with My Little Pony, papers and notebooks from college, an unwitting inculcation into the myth of romantic love, and the birth of her son—to excavate larger aspects of the past that have been suppressed or ignored. With bracing insight and extraordinary range, she weaves new stories about herself, her family, our country, and our culture. She connects postmodern irony to eighteenth-century cults, Cold War musicals to a great uncle’s suicide to the settlement of the American West, museum period rooms to the origins of her last name to the Assyrian genocide, and the sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem to the development of modern obstetrics. Here Ives retrieves shadowy sites of pain and fear and, with her boundless imagination, attentiveness, and wit, transforms them into narratives of repair and possibility.
PRAISE
“Part criticism, part personal essay, part intellectual jubilation, An Image of My Name Enters America is the most inventive and exciting work of nonfiction this year.” —Maris Kreizman, Vulture’s Best Books of 2024
“From the expansive mind of novelist, poet, and critic Lucy Ives, stylish, sweeping essays that consider the lure of period rooms, Alanis Morissette, Heidegger, and more.” —Vanity Fair
“Lucy Ives is a genius . . . one of the most thrilling writers that the United States has produced so far this century. . . . On the page, Ives remains a virtuoso, inventive and agile. . . . An Image of my Name Enters America is a book driven by curiosity. It’s a celebration of questions rather than the didactic results of scattered research projects. It’s a vulnerable book. . . . It is also deeply and profoundly humane.”
—James Webster, Los Angeles Review of Books
“I tore through the poet, art critic, and novelist Lucy Ives’s essay collection with glee. . . . By revealing the ideology behind an object (whether it’s a film or antique furniture), she patiently dismantles our fantasies about America and ourselves. It’s painful to let go of these delusions; it’s also the only way to go on. . . . In the aftermath, at least we can cling to her voice—lively, cathartic, and undeniably charming.” —Celine Nguyen, The Believer
“Virtuosic . . . a high-wire act of the mind.” —Liz Brown, 4Columns
"Ives writes with a madcap intellectualism—think David Sedaris with a Ph.D. . . . Readers are advised to sit back and enjoy the many splendors of Lucy Ives' magpie brilliance." —BookPage, starred review
"It is rare for a mind as mercurial and voracious as Lucy Ives's to possess such obvious lexical facility in guiding readers from one thought to the next, but here we are: Ives is one of our brilliant weirdos and must be protected at all costs." —Jonny Diamond, Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2024
“Extraordinary...a dazzling display of knowledge, wit, ratiocination, and prose style.” —Kirkus Reviews
"Lucy Ives is probably the most talented, and must be the most interesting, American writer working in the public eye right now." —D. W. White, L'Esprit Literary Review
"Uniformly rigorous, intellectually demanding, and packed with insight delivered in lean, rousing prose. The author's polymathic breadth of knowledge—literary theory, cinema, history, apocalypticism, obstetrics—is breathtaking. . . . I am now convinced that Lucy Ives is the most intelligent human I have ever read." —Melissa Holbrook Pierson, On the Seawall
"[Ives's prose] is insightful, witty, and in on the joke; it is poignant, biting, and vibrant. It is sometimes elliptical but nearly always concrete. It delights in sound and image. . . . If there is a central motivating idea of this work, it is that we simply cannot capture everything in words: something unnamable is always lost in the translation from life to language. Thankfully for the rest of us, that doesn't stop Ives from trying, bringing this remarkable achievement of a collection into existence along her way." —Devyn Andrews, Chicago Review of Books
"Readers of her other books know that Ives is brilliant: getting to know the person, the gorgeous mind, behind those books is a total treat." —Courtney Eathorne, Booklist
"A dazzling and deeply intelligent tour de force of wit and style. . . . It's a deft and enlightening collection fit for re-reads to come; Ives is truly an original." —Sam Franzini, Our Culture Mag
"Ives has written perhaps the keenest retrospective of those years just before and just after the new millennium. …a sweeping tour de force.” —Erik Anderson, Cleveland Review of Books
“This is the kind of book you want to read aloud to people you love, to assign, to give as a present—but don’t loan this one; you might not get it back.” —Alexander Chee
"Ives's writing simply has to be experienced. There are paragraphs and even sentences here that make whole essays in themselves, with a sculptural intensity you can circumnavigate, and the light of her thinking pours from the apertures." —Jonathan Lethem
