{"id":169,"date":"2017-10-02T03:47:19","date_gmt":"2017-10-02T03:47:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lavenderink.org\/site\/?post_type=product&p=169"},"modified":"2025-03-01T06:51:37","modified_gmt":"2025-03-01T12:51:37","slug":"fractals","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/www.lavenderink.org\/site\/shop\/fractals\/","title":{"rendered":"Fractals"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fractals<\/h2>\n

William Bradley<\/a><\/h3>\n

ISBN 978-1935084-89-1
\n150 pages: $18.95
\nFebruary, 2016<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

In his seminal book\u00a0The Fractal Geometry of Nature<\/em>, Benoit Mandelbrot wrote, “A cauliflower shows how an object can be made of many parts, each of which is like a whole, but smaller. Many plants are like that. A cloud is made of billows upon billows upon billows that look like clouds. As you come closer to a cloud you don’t get something smooth, but irregularities at a smaller scale.”\u00a0 In this collection of linked essays, William Bradley presents us with small glimpses of his larger consciousness, which is somewhat irregular itself.\u00a0 Reflecting on subjects as diverse as soap opera actors, superheroes, mortality, and marriage, these essays endeavor to reveal what we have in common, the connections we share that demonstrate that we are all fractals, in a sense\u2014self-similar component parts of a larger whole.<\/p>\n

\n

In William Bradley\u2019s debut collection of essays,\u00a0Fractals,<\/em>\u00a0we circle around topics as big and heavy as love, cancer, mortality, family and faith, but we approach them through the critical analysis and appreciation of comic book heroes, soap operas, music, books and pop culture. Bradley seduces the reader with humor and honesty, with a voice that is simultaneously playful and deeply serious. The book moves and grows, accreting meaning and depth as it patterns our experience of the author\u2019s life\u2014always reaching for the heart through the mind. Bradley returns to certain subjects through different but self-similar windows, allowing the reader to experience a whole that is greater than the sum of its component parts. Smart, funny, heartbreaking, and captivating,\u00a0Fractals<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0is a must-read for lovers of essays.
\nSteven Church<\/strong><\/a>, author of\u00a0Ultrasonic: Essays<\/strong><\/a>;<\/em>\u00a0founding editor of\u00a0The Normal School<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n

William Bradley pays close attention to the world, from soap operas to David Bowie, from the intimacy of marriage to the shockwave of a cancer diagnosis. Thank goodness he does so, because the result is\u00a0Fractal<\/em>s<\/strong>, a brilliant constellation of personal essays revealing, in vivid prose and with just the perfect measure of wit, the extraordinary patterns that connect us all.
\nDinty W. Moore<\/strong>, author of\u00a0Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The outrageous mystery of\u00a0Fractals<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0is the way in which essays on suffering and doubt become so vividly and sweetly alive. William Bradley has urgent stuff to tell you about cancer but also about soap operas and love and horror movies\u2014all without melodrama or the pretense of irony. Bradley is a boy grown into a man who finds solace in the pantheon of what he calls \u2018dorkiness\u2019 as he summons the imagined children of the future and ghost children of the past. These are the essays you are looking for.
\nSonya Huber<\/strong>, author of\u00a0Opa Nobody<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In\u00a0Fractals<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0we find William Bradley facing experiences both trifling and troubling with grace and humility. He writes with equanimity and eloquence about horror movies and soap operas and chemotherapy and comic books and wavers of faith and doubt. There seems to be no limit to the oddities and profundities, nor to the insights and beauties. In\u00a0Fractals<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0we find William Bradley, yes, but here, too, we find ourselves.
\nPatrick Madden<\/strong>, author of\u00a0Quotidiana<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

William Bradley deftly balances the ache of knowing the difficult truths of life with charm, laugh-out-loud humor, and grace. In a single turn, he can move from wrestling with the uncertainties built from loss to celebrating the ways in which what we loved then and what we love now are the real and true things that sustain us. Within these varied and vast contemplations of time, memory, faith, fear, death, regret, and the knowledge that the past is forever lost to us, Bradley ultimately urges us to continue to seek the best version of ourselves and to hold on to \u201cwhat still might be.\u201d
\nJill Talbot<\/strong>, author of\u00a0The Way We Weren\u2019t: A Memoir<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Fractals<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0is an incisive, moving rumination on love and faith and identity in the face of illness, both personal and societal. William Bradley is a thrilling writer and a much-needed voice in contemporary American culture.
\nMichael Kardos<\/strong>, author of\u00a0Before He Finds Her<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

William Bradley has an unerring ability to validate all the ephemera you ever suspected was important but didn\u2019t know why.\u00a0Fractals<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0considers subjects light and heavy, grotesque and sublime, but treats all of them with a discernment that challenges our assumptions about the relationships that bind people, culture and objects. The collection is humorous, moving and honest.
\nMichael Piafsky<\/strong>, author of\u00a0All the Happiness You Deserve<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Whether addressing matters concerning family, the imperfect art of growing up, love, the ravages of cancer, or one-way trips to Mars, William Bradley\u2019s pithy, incisive essays mine small moments that result in large consequences.\u00a0Fractals<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0is a collection of keen-eyed observations that are framed by the bigger picture of mortality. We\u2019re all on a one-way trip and William Bradley is determined to make the most of his; the result is a collection of essays that should come with not a warning but a recommendation: This is a book to be read to Warren Zevon\u2019s rendition of \u201cBack in the Highlife,\u201d played on repeat mode.
\nJohn Smolens<\/strong>, author of\u00a0Quarantine<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0The Schoolmaster\u2019s Daughter<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Those of us who love the personal essay have been waiting for this book since William Bradley\u2019s wonderful essays started to appear in print about a decade ago. Now, the book is here and, like its author (upon being awakened to the joys of reading by a novelization of\u00a0Nightmare on Elm Street<\/em><\/strong>), I am here to testify that \u201cI didn\u2019t just read the book\u2014I devoured it like a Romero zombie devours brains.\u201d Trust me, Gentle Reader, so will you. Bradley\u2019s brain will fill your brain. You will romp from the joys of Superman and\u00a0Days of Our Lives<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0to the joys of Flannery O\u2019Connor, Charles Lamb and, of course, fractal founder Benoit Mandlebrot. This cultural range is fun but also necessary, for our hero must do battle with the vindictive chaplain of a Christian college, a terribly mean grandmother, and Hodgkin\u2019s lymphoma. These essays are full of enviable accomplishments but most of all they tell us a love story in which our hero finds the beloved Emily, a beautiful Renaissance scholar who is \u201cable to talk about books and art\u201d but who can also \u201cappreciate the sublime genius of Don Knotts\u2019s performance in\u00a0The Ghost<\/strong> and Mr. Chicken<\/strong><\/em>.\u201d You\u2019ll laugh, you\u2019ll cry, and you\u2019ll have spent your money well. This is a wonderful book.
\nNed Stuckey-French<\/strong>, author of\u00a0The American Essay in The American Century<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

A fierce and tender exploration of life\u2019s great paradox: that the human body can fail us, repeatedly, even in youth, but that the human heart\u2019s capacity for love and wonder at humanity is boundless. These fractal-essays, fragmented miniatures representing the whole of one man\u2019s story, shimmer like rare jewels. With keen intellect, compassion, and scalpel-sharp wit, this book succeeds where other cancer memoirs do not in illuminating the loneliness and terror of catastrophic illness while rendering unstintingly the beauty and oddness of ordinary life. A love letter to his wife, and to daytime TV, David Bowie, Don Knotts, car travel in the boonies, middle school dorkiness, Marvel comics, and the essay itself, Bradley\u2019s cumulative self-portrait illustrates Michel de Montaigne\u2019s adage that \u201cEvery man has within himself the entirety of the human condition.\u201d Funny, wise, sad, and uplifting, this collection of taut essays is a treasure-trove.
\nNatalia Rachel Singer<\/strong>, author of\u00a0Scraping by in the Big Eighties<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

William Bradley
\n9781935084891
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