Winner of River Teeth Book Prize
Named one of LitHub’s Favorite Books of 2018
Longlisted for the 2019 Pen/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award
Silver Winner in 2018 Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award
PUBLISHER’S DESCRIPTION
“This is a book about ownership. It begins with an essay about being given a man’s furniture while he’s on trial for murder and follows this study of the material with essays that consider corporeal, familial, and intellectual ownership as well. What does it mean to believe that a hand, or a child, or a country, or a story belongs to you? What happens if you realize you’re wrong? Mining her own life and those of others, Sarah Viren considers the contingencies of ownership alongside the realities of loss in this debut essay collection.”
PRAISE FOR MINE
“Sarah Viren is a writer of extraordinary wisdom and grace. Viren approaches her subjects–from beheadings to motherhood to the acquisition of Spanish mediated through a Spanish-language-Dr.-Phil-clone–with unsparing anti-sentimentality. She’s allergic to comforting illusions, attracted to uncomfortable truths. There’s a steadfast intelligence at work, a rationality almost scary in its unwillingness to bend toward bromide. And so I am always taken aback, in the end, when her essays–cunningly, imperceptibly–gather within themselves such stunning emotional power.” 
-Kerry Howley, author of Thrown
“In so many of the moments detailed in Sarah Viren’s insightful and inspiring essays, she walks across an ordinary day and stumbles into an extraordinary one. A dead (and disappearing) opossum, a bloody paper dove, the cast-off furniture of an accused murderer, and so on—all stuff that this writer suddenly somehow possesses or is possessed by. Ultimately a book about belonging, this nimble, beautiful collection helps us better understand ‘what we call ours but is never really ours to begin with.'” – Ryan Van Meter, author of If You Knew Then What I Know Now
“These essays are full of humanity, a reminder to try and understand others, and a call to recognize our impermanence and honor our connections with each other.” – Brevity magazine
“Viren’s ability to explore feeling so deeply without evincing upset is one of the things that makes the collection so unique. There is no polemic, even against an interview subject who professes the virtues of gay conversion therapy, or against the state of Texas where her Iowa marriage to her wife was “outright banned.” There is no panic in the prose, no recoil, and yet the reader instinctively feels both.” – the Iowa Review
“Sarah Viren’s debut collection is a wonder. Her essays, in their investigations of life and belonging, are lyric and surprising—and above all else, deeply moving.” –LitHub
“At turns funny, brash, heartbreaking, Viren is always, it seems to me, honest as she crafts essays that reveal to herself, and to us, that one of life’s main lessons is that nothing we so badly desire truly belongs to us.” –Jessie van Eerden, author of The Long Weeping
INTERVIEWS ABOUT MINE
With Mesha Maren in The Rumpus, December 2018
With Clinton Crocket Peters in the Oxford American, August 2018
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Cielos de córdoba (Córdoba Skies) by Federico Falco, a translation by Sarah Viren of Falco’s novella, was published by Ploughshares Solos in the spring of 2016. The book, set in the Córdoba region of Argentina, tells the coming-of-age story of a little boy named Tino, whose parents own a UFO museum. Ploughshares describes the novella this way:
“When 11-year-old Tino isn’t sitting quietly in school, he’s either visiting his dying mother in the hospital or making sure his UFO-obsessed father eats dinner. A loner among his peers, Tino is surprised when Omar, the strongest boy in school, befriends him out of the blue. Will Tino’s intrigue outweigh his self-imposed isolation? Written by Federico Falco and translated from Spanish by Sarah Viren, “Córdoba Skies” is coming of age story similar to the river Tino likes to play in: inviting and winding, yet not without the occasional burst of rapids.”
Federico Falco is an Argentine poet and fiction writer. His book Lahora de los monos was chosen as one of the best Argentine books of 2010 by the magazine Revista Ñ. His stories have been widely published and anthologized, including in Granta magazine’s anthology of The Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists and in Open Letter’s 2012 book The Future is Not Ours: New Latin American Fiction. Falco is a graduate of the Spanish-language creative writing MFA program at New York University and, in 2012, he was a visiting writer with the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. His translated stories have appeared invarious U.S.-based literary magazines including the Massachusetts Review and Kenyon Review Online.
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