The shell game

"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 Craig's 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"--Back cover.