"Imagine the hundred things you enjoy doing most in the world. Reading Heating & Cooling is more fun than 95 of them." -Richard Russo The 52 micro-memoirs in the genre-defying Heating & Cooling offer bright glimpses into a richly lived life. They build on one another to arrive at a portrait of Beth Ann Fennelly as a wife, mother, writer, and deeply original observer of life's challenges and joys. Some pieces are wistful, some poignant, and many of them reveal the humor buried below the surface of everyday interactions. Heating & Cooling shapes a life from unexpectedly illuminating moments, and awakens us to these moments as they appear in the margins of our lives. "Insightful and precise. . . . A portrait of a life that is deeply felt and fully awake." -Ann Patchett "Strong and at the same time wonderfully vulnerable. There is a matter-of-fact revelation inherent in her work. I deeply enjoyed this book-deeply." -Dorothy Allison "The pieces . . . look like jewels-finely wrought, lyric and subtle-but they expose themselves as creatures: vital, writhing, surprising, alive." -Leslie Jamison

Author Biography

Beth Ann Fennelly is the author of three poetry collections, Unmentionables, Tender Hooks, and Open House; two memoirs, Heating & Cooling and Great with Child; and a novel, The Tilted World, coauthored with her husband, Tom Franklin. She teaches at the University of Mississippi, and is also the state's Poet Laureate. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi.