The Art Of series is a new line of books reinvigorating the practice of craft and criticism. Each book will be a brief, witty, and useful exploration of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry by a writer impassioned by a singular craft issue. The Art Of volumes will provide a series of sustained examinations of key but sometimes neglected aspects of creative writing by some of contemporary literature's finest practioners. In The Art of Time in Memoir , critic and memoirist Sven Birkerts examines the human impulse to write about the self. By examining memoirs such as Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory ; Virginia Woolf's unfinished A Sketch of the Past ; and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club , Birkerts describes the memoirist's essential art of assembling patterns of meaning, stirring to life our own sense of past and present.