About the Author

Charles D'Ambrosio is the author two collections of short stories, "The Point" (a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award) and "The Dead Fish Museum" (a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award), as well as the essay collection "Orphans." His work has appeared frequently in "The New Yorker," as well as in "Tin House," "The Paris Review," "Zoetrope All-Story," "A Public Space," and "Story." He's been the recipient of the Whiting Writers' Award, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and a USA Rasmuson Fellowship. He lives in Portland, OR.

Reviews

*Loitering makes NPR's 2014 Best of the Year list
*Time Out New York names Loitering one of the Top Ten Books of the Year
*Loitering makes the Pacific Northwest Bestseller List
*Loitering shortlisted for the PNBA awards "[W]e can see he is one of the strongest, smartest and most literate essayists practicing today. This, one would hope, is his moment. . . .These [essays] are highly polished, finished, exemplary performances.--Phillip Lopate "New York Times Book Review"

... Powerful... highlights D'Ambrosio's ability to mine his personal history for painful truths about the frailty of family and the strange quest to understand oneself, and in turn, be understood.-- "Publishers Weekly, Starred Review"

D'Ambrosio is a masterful writer. The essays are candid, playful, funny, and often wrenching.-- "Guernica"

Erudite essays that plumb the hearts of many contemporary darknesses.-- "Kirkus"

Every [essay] is a pleasure, diamond-cut and sharp in its incisive observations on how to be a human.-- "Flavorwire"

His writing is all guts and heart.-- "Esquire.com"

If you're a fan of well-written essays, checking out this collection, which encompasses both D'Ambrosio's earlier Orphans and work he's completed since then, is a must. D'Ambrosio is equally good at channeling his own tortured family history and evoking the history of a place or work of literature.-- "Vol. 1 Brooklyn"

As a witness to human longing and delusion, D'Ambrosio is among our most eloquent voices. Reading Loitering I thought about David Foster Wallace a lot. D'Ambrosio is a different sort of writer: more personal, more openly haunted, preoccupied by the rites of Catholicism. But he shares with Foster Wallace a gift for exactitude, erudition, and moral concern. Both take an obvious delight in language as an instrument of truth--and perhaps more so as a weapon in the war against the American habit of falsehood.-- "The Daily Beast"

Charles D'Ambrosio's essays are excitingly good. They are relevant in the way that makes you read them out loud, to anyone who happens to be around. Absolutely accessible and incredibly intelligent, his work is an astounding relief--as though someone is finally trying to puzzle all the disparate, desperate pieces of the world together again.--Jill Owens, Powell's

Important . . . one of the most profound essayists at work today.-- "Bookforum"

Loitering seems at heart an act of remembrance, a collection that grapples with the past in order to bring it to us still warm and pulsating. The brutality of D'Ambrosio's nostalgia saves it from romanticism and instead transforms it into a deeply physical experience.-- "The Carolina Quarterly"

Loitering: New and Collected Essays should help position D'Ambrosio as one of the major essayists now working in the genre.-- "Los Angeles Review of Books"

Once you tune your brain into D'Ambrosio's strange and beautiful frequency, you'll find yourself searching for it the rest of your days. These are funny, ravishing, and deeply honest works of prose, marbled with lexical pleasures. That these legendary essays are finally available to a wide readership is cause for a national holiday.--Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See

Throughout the collection, D'Ambrosio's words conjure metaphorical 'thought light bulbs' in the reader's mind as he strikes feelings deep within -- about TV news reporters, whale conservation and the magic of trains -- all eloquently described in his rich, affecting prose.-- "The Inlander"

What I admired most about these essays is the way each one takes its own shape, never conforming to an expected narrative or feeling the need to answer all the questions housed within. D'Ambrosio allows his essays their ambivalence, and this gives ideas space to move freely across time...--Hannah Gersen, "The Millions"