Eve Ottenberg reviewed Clutter for the Washington City Paper: How and why stuff accumulates is the subject of Jennifer Howard’s new book Clutter: An Untidy History. It begins with her cleaning out her mother’s home—an experience many people of a certain age are familiar with. The book then tackles hoarding disorder, the Victorian roots of… Continue reading »
Archives for In the Press
Book Q&A with Deborah Kalb: “Discomfort can be really useful to a writer”
Q: What did you see as the right blend of personal family experiences and more general descriptions as you wrote the book? A: I’m trained as a journalist, and working with such deeply personal material scared me at first. But my family’s experiences with clutter inspired me to write the book in the first place,… Continue reading »
LitHub: “Let’s blame the Victorians”
Thanks to LitHub for running this CLUTTER excerpt in which I suggest we blame the Victorians (at least partly—don’t @ me, Victorianists!) for our contemporary problem with excess stuff. This chapter was a lot of fun to research, BTW—I loved reading about 19th-century material culture. Enjoy!
NYTBR: “New & Noteworthy” books
Some news! CLUTTER is featured in the NYTBR’s “New & Noteworthy” section this coming Sunday (Aug. 30). I am thrilled and grateful (and so happy to see David Wilson’s snazzy cover design featured too). https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/books/review/new-this-week.html
