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Alexander Riley is a writer. He teaches at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
""Alexander Riley is a master of the revealing moment--the instant when we are jarred awake by inexplicable beauty or abrupt pain. Readers will recognize touches of Thoreau and Annie Dillard--sometimes both at once. His theme is the precious transitoriness of everything around us, on which his short essays somehow confer permanence."" --Peter Wood, President, National Association of Scholars ""Alexander Riley's prose is electric. This is a memoir of human experience that ranges from the horrible to the sublime, with never a false note or egotistical display. Riley has an acute feel for childhood and aging. We watch him as a high school kid after school, pausing on a mound in a vacant lot to 'meditate on the name of God, ' and we see him at middle age on an international flight having a bad landing, a near disaster, the aloof young woman beside him suddenly clutching his arm and thigh in terror, and Riley wondering five minutes later as she disembarks without a word what kind of communication had transpired in those ten seconds of frightful embrace. Deaths are strewn through the narrative, and life, too, in its most mystifying and revelatory occasions. I am glad that I read this book."" --Mark Bauerlein, Contributing Editor, First Things magazine
