Howard Axelrod’s work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Shambhala Sun, and the Boston Globe, among other publications. Blinded in one eye during a pick-up game of basketball, Axelrod retreated to a jerry-rigged house in the Vermont woods, where he lived without a computer or television, and largely without human contact, for two years. He recounts that experience in his debut book, The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude (Beacon Press), a gorgeous memoir of solitude in an age of superficial connection, which probes the profoundly human questions of perception, time, identity, and meaning. In its starred review, Kirkus writes, “[Axelrod’s] writing is a balm for world-weary souls. A vibrant, honest, and poetic account of how two years of solitude surrounded by nature changed a man forever.”
