Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs Audiobook

Quotes

• “Hold Still is one of the great portraits of the American South…a masterpiece.”

  — Pat Conroy, New York Times bestselling author

• “The book is riveting, ravishing.”

  — Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author

• “The twilit aura that makes Sally Mann’s photographs so evocative comes through just as strongly in her writing.”

  — USA Today

• “A cerebral and discursive book about the South and about family and about making art…An instant classic among Southern memoirs of the last fifty years.”

  — New York Times

• “Mann’s prose-luminous, chatty, and smart…invites readers to hold the camera still with her, and in that space, to imagine whole narratives that accompany these slices in time.”

  — Los Angeles Times

• “Intelligent, heartfelt, hilarious, disarming…It flows like wine-fueled gossip.”

  — Boston Globe

• “The voice is so clear and so crisp, so ready to admit error but also to stand up for itself…Rarely are our protagonists so gosh darned admirable.”

  — San Francisco Chronicle

• “She has produced the rarest of things, a picture so true it is breathtaking.”

  — Telegraph (London)

• “Hold Still explains not just her photographic technique but also her resolve to look head on at things most people would rather not see.”

  — Associated Press

• “A strikingly rich composition. Soaked in Southern history and heritage…[with] finely-crafted insight and honest revelation.”

  — Amazon.com

• “In this piercingly honest memoir, she…scrutinizes how our lives are revealed and not revealed through photographs and other documents.”

  — Barnes&Noble.com

• “The vivid descriptive energy and arresting images in this impressive book will leave readers breathless.”

  — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

• “This audiobook, featuring Mann’s own performance, not only confronts and challenges—it does so in a wonderfully magnetic way. Mann’s near husky voice is comfortable and honest, with wide swaths of humor and a genuine charisma that makes one wish for more time with her…This is a fresh, illuminating experience. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”

  — AudioFile

• “Raw and darkly humorous, Mann’s writing is consistently honest and poignant…[from]one of the twentieth century’s most important figures.”

  — Library Journal

• “A journey of self-discovery begins in family archives…She effectively weaves a ‘tapestry of fact, memory, and family legend’ in this candid and engrossing memoir…Mann’s memoir is testimony to photography’s power to evoke tender, lucent portraits of the past.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

• “This enthralling self-portrait…pieces together the secrets of her family’s wounded past and explores the inspirations for her groundbreaking work.”

  — BookPage

• “Hold Still is a wild ride of a memoir. Visceral and visionary. Fiercely beautiful.”

  — Patti Smith, musician

• “This spectacular modern memoir reads like a sweeping gothic novel, filled with mystery, violence, controversy, and, of course, love in all its forms. It is a literary family album…A triumph.”

  — Jamie Lee Curtis, actress

• “Hold Still deserves a fixed place in the library of American memoir.”

  — Paul Hendrickson, author of Hemingway’s Boat

• “With prodigious intellect and a telling instinct for the exact detail that will reveal character or throw it into question, Mann delves into the treacherous territory of memory.”

  — Andrew Solomon, National Book Award–winning author

• “Sally Mann’s Hold Still is just like her pictures: forthright, adventurous, loving, fearless, beautiful, intimate, and somehow uncanny. That means it’s probably just like her.”

  — Luc Sante, award-winning writer and critic

• “There has never been a book like this. At once a poetics of place, a work of deep history, a bildungsroman, and an acute inquiry into the big subjects: love, family, other animals, the nature of creativity. It is sublime. It’s also very funny. Haunting and haunted, Hold Still is the memoir of an artist that is art itself.”

  — Melissa Holbrook Pierson, author of The Place You Love Is Gone

• Hold Still is a wild ride of a memoir. Visceral and visionary. Fiercely beautiful. My kind of true adventure.

  — Patti Smith, musician and National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids

• Photographer Sally Mann's book Hold Still is one of the great portraits of the American South. Written in her pitch perfect prose style, it is a textbook of illumination and desire for anyone who hears the siren call of art beckoning to them. It's southern to the bone, hell on wheels. Hold Still is a masterpiece.

  — Pat Conroy, author of The Death of Santini and South of Broad

• In Hold Still, Sally Mann demonstrates a talent for storytelling that rivals her talent for photography. The book is riveting, ravishing -- diving deep into family history to find the origins of art. I couldn't take my eyes off of it.

  — Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto and This is the Story of a Happy Marriage

• For three decades Sally Mann has captured images that are unique, haunting, beautiful, disturbing, stark - it would take a mid-sized thesaurus to hold all the adjectives that have been used to describe both the art and the artist. In Hold Still, she wraps her prose around her pictures, revealing a fine talent for writing and a rich family history.

  — John Grisham, author of The Firm and Sycamore Row

• Sally Mann's Hold Still is just like her pictures: forthright, adventurous, loving, fearless, beautiful, intimate, and somehow uncanny. That means it's probably just like her."

• —Luc Sante, author of Low Life and Kill All Your Darlings

• What I admire most about Sally Mann's new book is not her ability to write captivating sentences--she does. It's the honesty and fearlessness, the two mixed together, compelling her to own up to her mistakes, to acknowledge her winnings, to accept her losses (and those of her family). For this quality alone, Hold Still deserves a fixed place in the library of American memoir."

• —Paul Hendrickson, author of Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost

• There has never been a book like this. At once a poetics of place, a work of deep history, a bildungsroman, and an acute inquiry into the big subjects: love, family, other animals, the nature of creativity. It is sublime. It's also very funny. Haunting and haunted, Hold Still is the memoir of an artist that is art itself.

  — Melissa Holbrook Pierson, author of The Place You Love is Gone

• This spectacular modern memoir reads like a sweeping gothic novel, filled with mystery, violence, controversy, and, of course, love in all its forms. It is a literary family album enlivened by many of the images in the stories told. A Southern work, it is also universally accessible, as all of Sally Mann's work is, for she reaches deep into her ancestral headwaters and the twisted rivers of human remembrance. A triumph.

  — Jamie Lee Curtis, actress

• Few photographers of any time or place have matched Sally Mann's steadiness of simple eyesight, her serene technical brilliance, and the clearly communicated eloquence she derives from her subjects, human and otherwise - subjects observed with an ardor that is all but indistinguishable from love.

  — Reynolds Price, Time