“Sarah Viren’s debut collection is a wonder. Her essays, in their investigations of life and belonging, are lyric and surprising—and above all else, deeply moving.”—Literary Hub
“Deeply inquisitive and probing, generous and judicious, Sarah Viren’s MINE is a series of meditations, memories buoyed to the surface by love and loss and wonder. She transforms and illuminates the world as she mines it.”—2020 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Creative Non-fiction
“At times it feels that Viren is offering her readers the empirical results of an experiment in human curiosity that resists all exploitation and relies wholly on generosity.”—The Iowa Review
“Viren’s essays do what the best nonfiction does: they transform the story that is hers into a story that becomes all of ours.”—River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative
“The essays in this book go down easy as a cold drink on a hot day, yet speak to complex emotional truths that might, poured out by less agile writers, be difficult to swallow. This simplification of the obtuse, this clear, clean writing, these are admirable traits shared by writers who, like Viren, cut their teeth working in newspapers before switching to books. Think Mark Twain, Isabel Allende. And, no, it is not exaggeration to consider adding Viren to that crowd.”—Weekly Alibi
“With wonderfully precise and evocative prose, Sarah Viren takes us deeply into her search for her very self. . . . MINE is not only moving, it is instructive and nourishing in a way that only art can deliver. This book is a gem.”—Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog
“Sarah Viren is a writer of extraordinary wisdom and grace. . . . I am always taken aback, in the end, when her essays—cunningly, imperceptibly—gather within themselves such stunning emotional power.”—Kerry Howley, author of Thrown
“Ultimately a book about belonging, this nimble, beautiful collection helps us better understand ‘what we call ours but is never really ours to begin with.’”—Ryan Van Meter, author of If You Knew Then What I Know Now
