James Morrison

Finalist, Foreword INDIES Book Award for Essays

"What a remarkable and beautiful book this is: three brilliant writers each describe in these essays how, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, a person 'becomes who one is.' The book insists that love, self-becoming, and thinking cannot be separated, and, through a series of portraits and meditations, it shows how a largely forgotten corner of the world became a portal for these three to a world that could be known, inhabited, and acknowledged. This is one of the great books about education."

Charles Baxter

For two years, Brother Pete has lived as a monk in a rundown abbey on the outskirts of the city. He has run away from his life only to find himself among a group of outcasts and oddballs, from a former child star who's seen better days, to an old abbot who makes no secret of his love for drink and his hatred for almost everything else.

It's not exactly what Pete had in mind.

Then one day a stranger arrives and throws everything off balance.

Soon, it seems, Brother Pete will need to face his own past if he wants to find out whether this mysterious visitor is a danger - or a savior.

Finalist, Lambda Literary Award

Winner, Foreword Book of the Year Award in Short Fiction

In these nine stories, James Morrison chronicles the connections and disconnections among people across a wide range of experience. Whether recounting the tale of a well-to-do housewife under siege or the ups and downs of a grungy garage band, Morrison writes in a prose at once wry and tender, disconsolate and compassionate. 

In The Lost Girl, James Morrison finds a compelling lens through the eyes of a young person trying to understand the world and her place in it. In stylized prose both elegant and spare, saturated with irony but fraught with tenderness, Morrison raises questions about modern life that become more pressing by the day.

An acclaimed collection of personal essays about growing up gay in the suburbs of Detroit.