ABOUT THIS BOOK

This book of practical writing and publishing advice celebrates the creative, community-building pleasures of humanist expertise.

Humanities experts today are embattled. In a world of crises undermining higher education at every turn, what can still motivate humanists to write? Galvanizing, imaginative, and unrepentantly nerdy, Sarah Mesle’s Reasons and Feeling offers practical writing and publishing advice alongside a forcefully affirmative account of why humanities writing matters.

Mesle proposes that writing can help envision sustainable community, but only when we recognize that humanist authority comes from both our reasons and our feelings. Alongside everyday compositional advice—including strategies for addressing different audiences, pitching publications, and managing writing anxiety—readers will find an account of how such craft practices connect to both their intellectual commitments and their historical conditions. Mesle shows how university-trained writers at all levels benefit from embracing a broader range of styles and affects. Doing so helps them harness their writing’s community-building potential and makes them better able to value their own expertise, whether they write for the classroom, in public venues, or for the specialized scholarly communities that share their niche, weird, or beloved, objects of study.

Reasons and Feelings draws on Mesle’s expertise as a professor of writing and her work as an editor helping academics shift between writing for scholarly venues and journalistic ones. In a voice that’s honest, warm, accessible, and bracingly funny, Reasons and Feelings gives humanists a path toward bolder fantasies of the worlds their writing can make.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Sarah Mesle is a professor of writing at the University of Southern California. The former senior humanities editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she is also a regular contributor, Mesle is the founding coeditor of the LARB channel Avidly and the short-book series Avidly Reads. Mesle's writing has also appeared in venues ranging from Studies in American Fiction to InStyle to The New York Times Magazine.

REVIEWS

“The world seems to be collapsing, the humanities are in crisis, but in this uncertain-at-best moment, Sarah Mesle offers writers a path not just toward hope but toward joy, as well. In this immensely readable, immensely useful book, Mesle reminds us why it remains worthwhile to sit down and put words to paper.”

— Naomi Fry, staff writer, The New Yorker

“Fresh, nerdy, sober, quirky, and only sort of optimistic, Reasons and Feelings wrestles with the angle that could make writing better—or even simply possible—as the humanities totter around us.”

— William Germano, author of "On Revision"

“With Reasons and Feelings, Mesle has given us a guide for the perplexed—for those who aren’t sure what intellectual life in the humanities will look like tomorrow, let alone several years from now; for those who aren’t certain how, why, or where to write about the books and ideas that matter to them; which is to say, for all of us. Writing as ally, therapist, expert, veteran, teacher, colleague, storyteller, and host, Mesle gives us a pioneer’s and survivor’s view of humanistic writing after the coming-apart of postwar structures and tells us that we’re not alone, that we’re (still) in this together.”

— Nicholas Dames, coeditor in chief of Public Books

"Mesle’s book (and certainly her own career as exemplar) demonstrates what it takes and what it means to be an academic humanist now: the thinning crossdisciplinarity, the disparate writing an academic does and what crossing genre boundaries look like. . . . it’s a book working to avail itself of a different style of the 'guide to writing' genre to attempt to know the world differently. It succeeds at that, in spades."

— Massachusetts Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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