Gene Smith’s Sink: A Wide-Angle Viewby: Sam Stephenson“Gene Smith's Sink is a strange and compelling book. Sam Stephenson drops matters large and small (bombs, sometimes) at the reader’s feet and then moves on. The fact that he clearly had material for a 1200-page doorstop and whittled it down to 200 is jaw-dropping, and weirdly appropriate. The result is like assembling an idea of a personality from an array of miscellaneous objects in a suitcase, and that may be the only way to access Smith.”
-Lucy SanteMore
"Stephenson's book is the result of, and an artifact of, lyric research: It's a sort of wandering and associative research, and in this way has as much to do with poetry as it does “documentary” or “nonfiction.” "
– Ross Gay, poet, 2015 winner National Book Critics Circle Award.
Sam Stephenson is a writer who grew up in Washington, North Carolina. He was 2010 and 2015 ASCAP Deems Taylor / Virgil Thomson Prize winner and a 2019-2020 Guggenheim Fellow in General Nonfiction. His books have been published by W.W. Norton, Alfred A. Knopf, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
