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Where Is the Light Coming From

Essays on Art and Regular People

Where Is the Light Coming From cover image

Book

Pages: 160

Illustrations: 12 illustrations

Release Date: March 23, 2027

Author: Dan Kois

Cultural critic and novelist Dan Kois explores the way art, literature, music, and theater make themselves relevant to all sorts of—as artists call them—“regular people”: postal workers writing their lives with the help of a legendary cartoonist; angry socialites protesting a tacky statue; readers falling in love with America’s cheesiest poet; librarians being asked to defend a modernist masterpiece that everyone knows is very dirty. Interspersed with Kois’s keen-eyed reporting are moving, funny personal narratives illustrating the rewards of staying alert to the possibilities of art: a life-changing decision based on a hopeless crush on a regional theater actress; a clarifying encounter with a grumpy traveler at an Italian hotel; and a previously unpublished story from inside a Kentucky memory-care facility, where Kois helps a MacArthur Fellow conjure an astonishing theater production starring dementia patients. Written with sharp critical insight and disarming honesty, these eleven essays offer a fresh angle on the age-old question of how art makes an impact on the world.

Praise

"One of America’s drollest, most insightful cultural observers, Dan Kois is at once a sharp reporter and a generous-hearted participant. In this funny, affecting collection of personal essays about the hunt for creativity, Kois paints a glorious portrait of a country of ordinary people as artists, deep in the struggle to build something truly beautiful and new." - Emily Nussbaum, New Yorker critic and author of I Like to Watch and Cue the Sun!

"Much like the quixotic subjects of his acutely observed, companionably funny essays, Dan Kois invites us along on adventures we’d have never thought to go on ourselves—tragicomic tours of late-capitalist aesthetics; off-handedly profound journeys to the creative imagination’s outer limits—but by which we are forever changed." - Megan O'Grady, author of How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves

"Where Is the Light Coming From is a masterclass in essay writing. These pieces are filled with effervescent humor, sharp cultural analysis, and a deep and abiding curiosity about art, about how it is made and how we consume it. They are also tremendously fun to read." - Mark O'Connell, author of A Thread of Violence and To Be a Machine

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Author/Editor Bios

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Dan Kois is an author, podcaster, and longtime editor and writer for Slate magazine. His books include Hampton Heights, Vintage Contemporaries, How to Be a Family, and The World Only Spins Forward.

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Sales/Territorial Rights: World

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Additional Information

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Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-4007-1 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-3514-5 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-6372-8 /