I Will Take The Answer

I Will Take the Answer

A moving and wide-ranging collection of essays by the author of Letter to a Future Lover The idea of connection permeates I Will Take the Answer, Ander Monson’s fourth book of utterly original and intelligent essays. How is our present connected to our past and future? How do neural connections form memories, and why do we recall them when we do? And how do we connect with one another in meaningful ways across time and space? In the opening essay, which extends across the book in brief subsequent pieces, a trip through a storm sewer in Tucson inspires Monson to trace the city’s relationship to Jared Lee Loughner, the gunman who shot Gabrielle Giffords and killed six bystanders, along with how violence is produced and how we grieve and honor the dead. With the formally inventive “I in River,” he ruminates on water in a waterless city and the structures we use to attempt to contain and control it. Monson also visits the exuberantly nerdy kingdom of a Renaissance Faire, and elaborates on the enduring appeal of sad songs through the lens of March Sadness, an online competition that he cofounded, an engaging riff on the NCAA basketball tournament brackets in which sad songs replace teams. As personal and idiosyncratic as the best mixtape, I Will Take the Answer showcases Monson’s deep thinking and broad-ranging interests, his sly wit, his soft spot for heavy metal, and his ability to tunnel deeply into the odd and revealing, sometimes subterranean, worlds of American life.

I Will Find the Answer

Erik has returned and has brought an interesting character to Holmes's attention: Dr. Henry Jekyll. It appears Jekyll is experimenting on an unsanctioned patient in an effort to prove his theories concerning human nature correct. But who is the patient he's found? Is it his mentally ill father, shut away for years in an institution? Is it Simon Stride, the jealous former suitor of Jekyll's fiancée? Or could it be the mysterious, unsavoury murderer, Edward Hyde, with whom Jekyll seems to have intimate knowledge? Sherlock Holmes, along with Erik and Watson, investigates this bizarre case. Holmes uses a very unorthodox method that brings him to the brink of insanity as he delves into the mind of a man obsessively devoted to his work. Will Holmes's own mind crack under the strain of this case?

The Congressional Globe