Kent Russell’s essays have appeared in The New Republic, Harper’s, GQ, n+1, the Believer, and Grantland. His collection of essays, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (Knopf) records Russell’s quest to understand, through his journalistic subjects, his own appetites and urges, his persistent alienation, and, above all, his knotty, volatile, vital relationship with his father. Locked in battle with both his adult appetites and his most private childhood demons, Russell hungers for immersive experience and revelation, and his essays take us to society’s ragged edges, the junctures between savagery and civilization. In a narrative that can be read as both a magnificent act of literary mythmaking and a howl of filial despair, Russell gives us a haunting and unforgettable portrait of an America—and a paradigm of American malehood—we have never before seen.
