Firecracker Award, Finalist
Believer Book Award, Longlisted

'In twenty-first century America, there is so much that holds or demands our attention without requiring it. Imagine the lecture as a radical opening.'

Mary Cappello's Lecture is a song for the forgotten art of the lecture. Brimming with energy and erudition, it is an attempt to restore the lecture's capacity to wander, question, and excite. Cappello draws on examples from Virginia Woolf to Mary Ruefle, Ralph Waldo Emerson to James Baldwin, blending rigorous cultural criticism with personal history to explore the lecture in its many forms―from the aphorism to the note―and give new life to knowledge’s dramatic form.

Lecture is part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books.

'I’m tempted to begin by comparing Mary Cappello to other contemporary literary nonfiction writers who meld memory and lyric impression with intellectual passion. Writers who come to mind—Rebecca Solnit, Maggie Nelson, Wayne Koestenbaum, bell hooks—certainly share borderlines and affinities, but none of their works really resemble the books that come of Cappello’s singular voice and lens. Cappello’s compositions are at once sonic memoir, embodied criticism, and narrative cultural observation, drawing the attentive reader into what we might call the queer corporeal idea…' — Los Angeles Review of Books

Mary Cappello is a writer and professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of five books of literary nonfiction, and her essays and experimental prose have been published in The Georgia Review, Salmagundi and Cabinet Magazine. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Salon, The Huffington Post, in guest author blogs for Powells Books and on six separate occasions as Notable Essay of the Year in Best American Essays.

Transit Books, 2020, 136pages.