Unpleasantries

"Frank Soos is a true essayist. He understands the form as a rare opportunity to grapple with maybe unresolvable questions, trusting to his conflicted consciousness and without any advanced map or GPS to guide him. For all his self-mockery, he is a serious man and a sincere one, who is unafraid to take the reader to dark, emotional places. Those who might wish to learn how to 'fail better' and 'feel better,' to quote his mentor Samuel Beckett, would do well to buy this book."—Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait Inside My Head: Essays

"Frank Soos has written a playful and profound inquiry into the incurable condition of being human. At times I fancied I was reading the great essayist Montaigne—if Montaigne had grown up in Appalachia, played basketball for Pocahontas High, moved to Alaska, and taken up cross-country skiing. These essays dazzle with wry truths as Soos invokes everyone from Cézanne to Zippy the Pinhead to sort out life's absurd mysteries. The result is a sideways memoir of a man in perpetual motion, ever keen to understand the extraordinary surprises and melancholy inevitabilities of our ordinary lives."—Sherry Simpson, author of The Way Winter Comes: Alaska Stories