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Praise for A Proper Knowledge

“ Every passionate reader lives for that first page of a book that alerts her, straightaway, she’ll be sorry when the book ends. So it is with Michelle Latiolais’ astonishing, sparklingly intelligent new novel.... The work strives, with bold zest, to arrive at the marrow of things.... Latiolais triumphs, folding the work’s clinical ruminations into the story’s delicious batter. Powerfully recommended.” --Antioch Review

"In prose shimmering with intelligence and compassion, Michelle Latiolais dissects the essentials of everyday life to find the heartbeat within. A PROPER KNOWLEDGE reveals an author with that rare eye which is at once both clinical and poetic." — Alice Sebold, author of The Almost Moon and The Lovely Bones

"An elegant and engaging novel of beauty and pain, and how one will often reveal the other. Precise, insightful, lovely." — Aimee Bender, author of Willful Creatures

"The novel courts—-in elegant and sometimes elegiac prose—-the shadowy and elusive opportunities for redemption." — Ron Carlson, author of Five Skies

"Autism and grief acquire powerful and enigmatic reality as the reader turns the pages of A Proper Knowledge. To invoke one of its own metaphors, this novel is a refuge, not because it elides trauma or sorrow, but because it confronts them with gallant and unswerving clarity. A thousand things are noticed in this novel that you won't have seen in fiction before. Don't be fooled: for all the delicacy of its language this is a work of burning ferocity." — Elizabeth Tallent, author of Honey

A Proper Knowledge

By Michelle Latiolais

Price: $22.95

Hardcover
13-digit ISBN: 978-1-934137-11-6

Luke is a gifted psychiatrist who has built his reputation on innovative treatment of autistic children. Ever devoted to his patients, he follows their deeply encoded cues along the most obscure passages of the human psyche in search of a way to break through their intractable isolation. Yet even as glimmers of hope appear for certain of the children in his care, he remains trapped in the maze of his own obsessive grief over the death, many years before, of his adolescent sister Sadie.

A Proper Knowledge is a beautifully crafted, penetrating investigation into the misunderstood pathways of both the brain and the heart. It is about how death can bind a family together even as it tears its individual members apart; how guilt can lead to creative--or destructive--acts, and how the search for love carries with it the potential for a cure.

Michelle Latiolais is Associate Professor, University of California, Irvine, and co-director of the Programs in Writing at the University of California at Irvine. Her novel Even Now won the Gold Medal for Fiction, Commonwealth Club of California 1991.

Publication Date: May 2008 / Pages 192 / Trim Size: 5 x 8