Here and Gone

Turning seventy, author Thomas Farber appraises the writing life, aging, love, his own fate, and ours.

In this spare, elegant volume Thomas Farber takes the measure of both his vocation and, in several quite different ways, his troubled heart. Retracing a life’s paths—Boston, northern California, Honolulu—and marveling at the closely observed natural world, he evokes his extraordinary poet-mother, treasured books and friends, the miracle of love in late marriage, endangered monk seals in Hawai’i, how a life in art may end, and why one might choose not to “go home.” In Here and Gone, an author “unafraid of feelings, unafraid of life as it is lived in the heart” (Newsday), Thomas Farber confronts both his own fate and ours.

Over the last four decades Farber’s work has been

…quietly devastating…Rolling Stone
…stunning…Chicago Tribune
...as spare and specifying as black-and-white photography…The Nation
…possessed of wry illuminating intelligence…Houston Chronicle