Beautiful Work

The stories one tells about pain are profound ones. Nothing is more legible than these stories. But something is left out of them. If there were no stories, there might be a moment of innocence. This book explores pain as common property, and as the basis for a radically reconceived selfhood.

“ Beautiful Work employs the strategies of twentieth century modernism to satisfy its ‘hunger for storylessness,’ but is a work of dazzling contemporanaeity. Poetry, fiction, autobiography, philosophy, and theology comfortably coexist and seamlessly merge in this delicate but fearless probing of the unanswerable questions that are the source of all serious writing. Cameron is a wonderful addition to the small choir of low, clear voices dedicated to the performance of the difficult and strange.”-Janet Malcolm “ Beautiful Work is a remarkable book. It is the key that fits the lock-this is the possibility of living without pain turning into suffering, of freeing the body to heal in the heart.”-Stephen Levine “In Beautiful Work Sharon Cameron tries to locate the origin of pain, tries to free it from narrative, so that it can be known as something in itself. It is an obsessive yet disciplined search. Cameron’s prose is lyrical, even incantatory, and its descriptive acuity carries the reader to the far reaches of consciousness, to a place where language both embodies sensation and moves beyond it, creating a delirium of awareness, a place where the presence of nothing (disembodied yet whole) and death are agents of illumination. Beautiful Work in itself is a beautiful work, a profound and original one.”-Mark Strand

Sharon Cameron is Kenan Professor of English at The Johns Hopkins University. Her previous books include Choosing Not Choosing: Emily Dickinson’s Fascicles; Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau’s Journal, and Thinking in Henry James .