From The Jewish Review: “The former Oregon Book Award Winner’s prose is elegant in its unpretentiousness. The depth of his insight is stunning. The breadth and detail of his knowledge of the ordinary lives of men and women in widely varying walks of life is astonishing.” Read the whole review here: http://www.jewishreview.org/arts/Nadelsons-new-stories-explore-how-we-cope

From the Ploughshares blog: “Nadelson creates characters so endearingly flawed that regardless of our actual similarities, we relate to each of them. Each page documents our own fears, insecurities, and heartbreaks. Each sentence becomes the moment we first remember hope failing.” Read the whole review here: http://word.emerson.edu/ploughshares/2011/11/22/aftermath/

From the Portland Monthly: “Nadelson is master of the anticlimax… Aftermath is an often-despairing testament to the elusiveness of closure, the infinite and insurmountable distance between even intimate lovers, but also to the human capacity for growth.” Read the whole review here: http://www.portlandmonthlymag.com/arts-and-entertainment/articles/scott-nadelson-aftermath-october-2011/

From Northwest Booklovers: “What illuminates these stories is how seamlessly Nadelson opens a window to the workings of the human heart.” Read the whole review here: http://www.nwbooklovers.org/2011/08/26/aftermath-by-scott-nadelson/

I’ve been busy giving interviews and writing essays about the book for blogs and websites. Here are a few recent ones:

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/snadelson/2011/08/scott-nadelson-the-tnb-self-interview/

http://www.nwbooklovers.org/2011/08/31/finding-an-angle-of-vision-by-scott-nadelson/

http://www.hawthornebooks.com/blog/2011/08/essay-from-scott-nadelson/

Beginning in the summer of 2004, Scott Nadelson’s life fell apart. His fiancée left him a month before their planned wedding. He moved into a drafty attic. His car’s brakes went out. He learned that his cat was dying. Over the next two years, he’d struggle, with equivocal and sometimes humiliating results, to get back on his feet, in the process re-examining his past to understand his present circumstances.

More than a collection of autobiographical essays, The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Progress is a literary self-portrait that revolves around the dissolution of a relationship but encompasses the long process of a young man’s halting self-discovery. Exploring episodes from the life of its author/narrator marked by failure, suffering, and hope, as well as literary and cultural influence, the book weighs the things that make us want to give up against the things that keep us going. Though many of the pieces are comic and self-deprecating—some self-lacerating—they are above all meditations on the nature of the self and the way it can be constructed through memory, desire, and the imagination. Together they form a larger narrative, a search for fulfillment and identity in a life often governed by fear.

With humor and unflinching honesty, Scott Nadelson scrutinizes his life to discover who he is and finds just how elusive such a discovery can be. To read the resulting book is to join him on a personal journey that is thoughtful, surprising, occasionally hilarious, and unapologetically human.