Sven Birkerts

Harvard Book Store is thrilled to welcome back essayist, literary critic, and Harvard Book Store alum SVEN BIRKERTS as he takes us through his most recent collection of essays, The Other Walk.

Throughout his life, Sven Birkerts has carved out time for himself—to walk, to swim, to read, to contemplate. Now in his late fifties, he has clocked up many thousands of hours of reflection. It shows in his prose, which proceeds at a refreshingly deliberative pace as it draws the reader into his patterns and rhythms.

In this new collection of essays, Birkerts looks back through his life, as well as at the generations before him, and ahead at the lives of his children. He shares his son’s frightening sailing accident, how he feels when he encounters his own prose from years ago, how finding a lost ring releases a cascade of memories. The objects he sees around him are excavated, their layers exposed.

Most winning of all is the emerging character of Birkerts himself. We come to have great respect for this competitive but loyal friend, the caring father who respects his children’s independence even as he tries to connect with them, the traveler, the onetime bookseller, the writer at all stages of his writing life, and throughout it all, the attentive, passionate reader.

"In 45 short pieces, noted critic and essayist Birkerts sketches his life with an awareness that 'memory does not obey time lines, but associations.' . . . More than revealing the insights he obtains through contemplation, Birkerts sheds light on the process of allowing connections to fuel ruminations that lead to a greater understanding of self. Readers will delight in the humor and insights conveyed in these enchanting and well-crafted essays." —Publishers Weekly (starred)