Sex and the River Styx For media inquiries and

author events contact:

Edward Hoagland Jenna Dimmick
Hardcover Price US $27.50 / CAN $32.95 jenna@ksepartners.com
ISBN 9781603583367 802.229.4900 ext.120

Paperback Price US $17.95 / CAN $19.95

ISBN 9781603583374

6 x 9 • 272 pages
Pub Date: April 2011

Amazon Editor’s Pick as one of the Best Books for February

Booklist Starred Review

“The best essayist of my generation.”—John Updike

Admired by a pantheon of America’s greatest writers and considered one of our most prolific essayists, Edward
Hoagland is in a class of his own. He came of age during our country’s literary heyday, learned to write the old-
fashioned way—through direct experience in love, travel, and immersion in the natural world—and then dedicated
decades of his life to prose that is not only powerful, but truly original. Now, more than fifty years after he first began
publishing, Hoagland brings his acuity to bear in this latest collection of essays.
Published over the course of thirteen years in magazines such as Harper’s, Orion, and Outside, the essays in Sex and the
River Styx explore themes of aging, love, and sex in deeply personal, often surprising ways through stories of African
matriarchs, circus aerialists, and the wonder of wild places, along with the despair of losing them. Hoagland’s prose
shines with the energy and intelligence that has characterized his work for decades and the wisdom of a man whose
curiosity about the world has given him, and us, a lifetime of stories. Sex and the River Styx is an elegy for the marvels
Hoagland has witnessed and wondered at over the course of his life—and the wildness of nature, of love, and of loss.

“ Hoagland’s prose sings...Extensive in range, intensive in passion

—Publisher’s Weekly ”
Edward Hoagland has written more than twenty books, both fiction and nonfiction, including Cat Man,
Walking the Dead Diamond River, African Calliope, and The Tugman’s Passage. He worked in the Ringling
Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus while attending Harvard in the early 1950s and later traveled around the
world writing for Harper’s, Esquire, The Nation, National Geographic, and other magazines. He received two
Guggenheim Fellowships, Brandeis and National Endowment for the Arts awards, and two awards from
the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was elected to the Academy in 1982. Hoagland edited the
thirty-volume Penguin Nature Classics Series, and has taught at The New School, Rutgers, Sarah Lawrence,
CUNY, the University of Iowa, UC Davis, Columbia University, Beloit College, Brown University, and
Bennington College. A native New Yorker, Hoagland divides his time between Martha’s Vineyard and
northern Vermont.

Digital Press Kit: http://media.chelseagreen.com/sex-and-the-river-styx/

 Praise for Edward Hoagland

“ America’s most intelligent and wide-ranging essayist-naturalist.

—Philip Roth ”
“ Hoagland’s genius is in being in touch with both the natural world and his own life.
. . . He is that rare animal, an unpedantic essayist, and like his greatest predecessors, ”
he has found a way to turn self-consciousness into a fine art.
—Paul Theroux

“ Edward Hoagland is a natural. His essays flow like running water, pure and clear.
—Studs Terkel ”
“ He is, as far as I know, the best essayist working in our perishing
republic.
—Edward Abbey
”
“ Hoagland’s writing is second to no one’s.
—Robert Stone ”
“ No contemporary essayist sifting through his own experience can match the
unadorned clarity of Hoagland’s voice.
—The Los Angeles Times
”
“ The Thoreau of our time, an essayist so intensely personal, so sharp-eyed and deep-
sighted, so tender and tough, so lyrical and elegiac as to transmute a simple stroll
into a full-blown mystical experience.
”
—The Washington Post

“ Hoagland is an involved observer, participant, and commentator, regardless of the

time, place, condition, activities, or subject matter, and like a fine novelist, he has
the skill to involve readers in whatever he describes or discusses.
”
—Publishers Weekly

“ A powerful writer with an invaluable perspective, Hoagland belongs in every

American literature collection.
—Booklist
”