David Giffels is the author of The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches From the Rust Belt, nominated for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, the memoir All the Way Home, winner of the Ohioana Book Award, and Furnishing Eternity. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic.com, Parade, the Wall Street Journal, Esquire.com, Grantland.com, Redbook, and many other publications. He also was a writer for the MTV series Beavis and Butt-Head. He is an associate professor of English at the University of Akron, where he teaches creative nonfiction in the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Program.
"David Giffels writes straight into the heart of Akron, Ohio, the
place we both call home. It's a hard place to be from, which is why
it makes such a good story. What other place could have spawned Jim
Jarmusch, LeBron James, Lux Interior and the Goodyear blimp? So
it's no accident that this book reads like the American
soul--wicked and sincere and ingeniously weird. It is a great
story, an authentic one about the way people protect the places
they love, and The Hard Way on Purpose gets it exactly
right."--Patrick Carney, The Black Keys (celebrated indie rock band
from Akron, Ohio)
"Occasionally, an essayist so perfectly chronicles a specific place
that he or she becomes synonymous with it. Joseph Mitchell and New
York; Joan Didion and California; Adam Gopnik and Paris; John
Jeremiah Sullivan and the American South. With The Hard Way on
Purpose, David Giffels has pulled a chair up to this lofty literary
table, and in so doing, provided the hardscrabble industrial
Midwest with its own lyrical, learned, and very large-hearted
champion."--David Goodwillie, author of American Subversive
"They still build souls in Akron. The Hard Way on Purpose is proof.
David Giffels is a Rust Belt prophet, laughing--sometimes through
his tears--in Doom's face. You want to hear America singing? Buy
this book."--Scott Raab, author of The Whore of Akron: One Man's
Search for the Soul of LeBron James
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