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Interior States

Essays

Author Meghan O'Gieblyn
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Ebook
Knopf | Anchor
On sale Oct 09, 2018 | 288 Pages | 9780385543842
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Winner of The Believer Book Award for Nonfiction

"Meghan O'Gieblyn's deep and searching essays are written with a precise sort of skepticism and a slight ache in the heart. A first-rate and riveting collection."
--Lorrie Moore

A fresh, acute, and even profound collection that centers around two core (and related) issues of American identity: faith, in general and the specific forms Christianity takes in particular; and the challenges of living in the Midwest when culture is felt to be elsewhere.

What does it mean to be a believing Christian and a Midwesterner in an increasingly secular America where the cultural capital is retreating to both coasts? The critic and essayist Meghan O'Gieblyn was born into an evangelical family, attended the famed Moody Bible Institute in Chicago for a time before she had a crisis of belief, and still lives in the Midwest, aka "Flyover Country." She writes of her "existential dizziness, a sense that the rest of the world is moving while you remain still," and that rich sense of ambivalence and internal division inform the fifteen superbly thoughtful and ironic essays in this collection. The subjects of these essays range from the rebranding (as it were) of Hell in contemporary Christian culture ("Hell"), a theme park devoted to the concept of intelligent design ("Species of Origin"), the paradoxes of Christian Rock ("Sniffing Glue"), Henry Ford's reconstructed pioneer town of Greenfield Village and its mixed messages ("Midwest World"), and the strange convergences of Christian eschatology and the digital so-called Singularity ("Ghosts in the Cloud"). Meghan O'Gieblyn stands in relation to her native Midwest as Joan Didion stands in relation to California - which is to say a whole-hearted lover, albeit one riven with ambivalence at the same time.
© courtesy of the author
Meghan O'Gieblyn is a writer whose criticism and essays have appeared in Harper's Magazine, The New Yorker, n+1, The Point, The Baffler, Wired, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The New York Times, and other publications. She is the recipient of three Pushcart Prizes and the 2023 Benjamin H. Danks Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her essays have been included in The Best American Essays and The Contemporary American Essay. Her first book, Interior States, won the 2018 Believer Book Award for nonfiction. God, Human, Animal, Machine was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science & Technology. View titles by Meghan O'Gieblyn

About

Winner of The Believer Book Award for Nonfiction

"Meghan O'Gieblyn's deep and searching essays are written with a precise sort of skepticism and a slight ache in the heart. A first-rate and riveting collection."
--Lorrie Moore

A fresh, acute, and even profound collection that centers around two core (and related) issues of American identity: faith, in general and the specific forms Christianity takes in particular; and the challenges of living in the Midwest when culture is felt to be elsewhere.

What does it mean to be a believing Christian and a Midwesterner in an increasingly secular America where the cultural capital is retreating to both coasts? The critic and essayist Meghan O'Gieblyn was born into an evangelical family, attended the famed Moody Bible Institute in Chicago for a time before she had a crisis of belief, and still lives in the Midwest, aka "Flyover Country." She writes of her "existential dizziness, a sense that the rest of the world is moving while you remain still," and that rich sense of ambivalence and internal division inform the fifteen superbly thoughtful and ironic essays in this collection. The subjects of these essays range from the rebranding (as it were) of Hell in contemporary Christian culture ("Hell"), a theme park devoted to the concept of intelligent design ("Species of Origin"), the paradoxes of Christian Rock ("Sniffing Glue"), Henry Ford's reconstructed pioneer town of Greenfield Village and its mixed messages ("Midwest World"), and the strange convergences of Christian eschatology and the digital so-called Singularity ("Ghosts in the Cloud"). Meghan O'Gieblyn stands in relation to her native Midwest as Joan Didion stands in relation to California - which is to say a whole-hearted lover, albeit one riven with ambivalence at the same time.

Author

© courtesy of the author
Meghan O'Gieblyn is a writer whose criticism and essays have appeared in Harper's Magazine, The New Yorker, n+1, The Point, The Baffler, Wired, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The New York Times, and other publications. She is the recipient of three Pushcart Prizes and the 2023 Benjamin H. Danks Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her essays have been included in The Best American Essays and The Contemporary American Essay. Her first book, Interior States, won the 2018 Believer Book Award for nonfiction. God, Human, Animal, Machine was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science & Technology. View titles by Meghan O'Gieblyn

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