In 'The Other City,' about the months she spent reporting on death investigations and autopsies in Cleveland, Kisner writes: 'Leaving the office every night, I’d get breathless rushes of reality.' That’s a lot like what these essays feel like, too: reminders of the weird in-between feeling of being alive.' - Lauren Christensen, The New York Times Book Review

'Kisner displays an impressive range of narrative modes in, bouncing nimbly between gravity (in her ethnography and her bird’s-eye philosophizing) and comic relief, which she peppers in just when our heads are starting to spin. Intellectually curious and emotionally engaging, the essays in Thin Places manage to be both intimate and expansive, illuminating an unusual facet of American life, as well as how it reverberates with the author’s past and present preoccupations.

How should she understand the appearance of her own obsessive compulsive disorder at the very age she lost her faith? Her celebrated essay “Thin Places” ( Best American Essays 2016), about an experimental neurosurgery developed to treat severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, asks how putting the neural touchpoint of the soul on a pacemaker may collide science and psychology with philosophical questions about illness, the limits of the self, and spiritual transformation. Not sure why her religious conviction had come or where it had gone, she did what anyone would do: “You go about the great American work of assigning yourself to other gods: yoga, talk radio, neoatheism, CrossFit, cleanses, football, the academy, the American Dream, Beyoncé.”Ī curiosity about the subtle systems guiding contemporary life pervades Kisner’s work. She was, she writes, “just naturally reverent,” a fact that didn’t change when she-much to her own confusion-lost her faith as a teenager. When Jordan Kisner was a child, she was saved by Jesus Christ at summer camp, much to the confusion of her nonreligious family. In this perceptive and provocative essay collection, an award-winning writer shares her personal and reportorial investigation into America’s search for meaning

Thin places essays from in between