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Description of  The Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms

Within the recent explosion of creative nonfiction, a new type of form is quietly emerging, what Brenda Miller calls hermit crab essays. The Shell Game is an anthology of these intriguing essays that borrow their structures from ordinary, everyday sources: a recipe, a crossword puzzle, a Craigs List ad. Like their zoological namesake, these essays do not simply wear their borrowed shells but inhabit them so perfectly that the borrowed structures are wholly integral rather than contrived, both shaping the work and illuminating and exemplifying its subject. Read more