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Staff Pick
Cheston Knapp's Up Up, Down Down is funny and lovely, intelligent and unnerving, unexpected and utterly satisfying. (And deserving of even more praiseworthy adjectives!) In a year of great essay collections (so far), Portland writer (and Tin House editor) Knapp stands out as a keen chronicler of coming of age. His essays end up probing the nature of adulthood, identity, and self-awareness. This will be one of your favorite reads this spring. Recommended By Jill O., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
For fans of John Jeremiah Sullivan and Wells Tower, a "glittering," (Leslie Jamison), "always smart, often hilarious, and ultimately transcendent" (Anthony Doerr) linked essay collection from the managing editor of
Tin House that brilliantly explores the nature of identity.
Daring and wise, hilarious and tender, Cheston Knapp's exhilarating collection of seven linked essays, Up Up, Down Down, tackles the Big Questions through seemingly unlikely avenues. In his dexterous hands, an examination of a local professional wrestling promotion becomes a meditation on pain and his strained relationship with his father. A profile of UFO enthusiasts ends up probing his history in the church and, more broadly, the nature and limits of faith itself. Attending an adult skateboarding camp launches him into a virtuosic analysis of nostalgia. And the shocking murder of a neighbor expands into an interrogation of our culture's prevailing ideas about community and the way we tell the stories of our lives. Even more remarkable, perhaps, is the way he manages to find humanity in a damp basement full of frat boys.
Taken together, the essays in Up Up, Down Down amount to a chronicle of Knapp's coming-of-age, a young man's journey into adulthood, late-onset as it might appear. He presents us with formative experiences from his childhood to marriage that echo throughout the collection, and ultimately tilts at what may be the Biggest Q of them all: what are the hazards of becoming who you are?
With "an ordnance of wit" (Wells Tower) and "a prose style that feels both extravagant and exact, and a big, booming heart" (Maggie Nelson), Up Up, Down Down signals the arrival of a truly one-of-a-kind voice.
Review
Cheston Knapp is the managing editor of Tin House. He lives with his family in Portland, Oregon. Up Up, Down Down is his first book.
Review
"Up, Up, Down, Down is an always smart, often hilarious, and ultimately transcendent essay collection, full of thousand-dollar words and genuine goodness. You think you’re reading about tennis, low-rent wrestling, the death of a neighbor, or the perils of beer pong, but suddenly you’re pondering the biggest questions: What is kindness? What is self-consciousness? How does articulating an experience change it? It’s an unqualified pleasure to be in Knapp’s company." Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See
Review
"Full of wit and disquiet, Cheston Knapp’s Up Up, Down Down is a glittering collection of essays about nostalgia, skateboarding, fathers, waterslides, and all kinds of community. The path toward whatever we mean by “maturity” is a flowering vine of fruitful discomfort in these pages, and so much grows from it: acute self-awareness, intricate curiosity, tender interrogations. This book made me laugh out loud in embarrassing places—a quiet Swedish train, a darkened redeye flight—and its insights will keep echoing in me for a long time." Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams
Review
“Takes a firmly tongue-in-cheek approach to the existential crises of male maturity for the millennial generation… Knapp’s philosophizing is kept lively by exuberant and sometimes acerbically funny descriptions… This intelligent take on coming-of-age deserves to be widely read, if only for its effortless-seeming form and its expression of how style and content are irrevocably intertwined.” Publishers Weekly
Cheston Knapp on PowellsBooks.Blog
For me the novel clearly represented the supreme achievement of an individual imagination. It was a sustained act of verbal creation, “alive through every order of its Being,” as William Gass has it, and as an ambitious young writer, I thought I had to test my mettle against the culture’s most consequential form...
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