National Network for Equitable Library Service

On Beauty is a provocative collection of moments, confessions, overheard conversations, and memories, both fleeting and crystalized, revolving around the small chasms and large craters of everyday life. Situated at the crossroads of prose and poetry, these 33 vignettes explore the rhythm, textures, and micro-moments of lives in motion, asking how decisions might connect and in turn affect the future. rob mclennan's brief stories play with form and language, capturing the act of record-keeping while in the process of living those records, offering a dappled, polaroid-like effect. Parenting and the intimate everyday warmth of home life figure prominently, as does the duplicity of memory and the immediacies of human grief, pain, and joy. Throughout the collection, the worlds of literature and art infuse into fragments of the everyday. mclennan's prose is rich, sensitive, and vivid, composed with a poet's eye for detail and ear for rhythm. A welcome record of human connection and belonging, On Beauty will leave readers grappling with metafictional questions of how stories are produced and passed through generations.