These Threads Who Lead to Bramble: Essays

Russell Persson’s These Threads Who Lead to Bramble defies the singularity of any one genre as it braids together memory and myth to challenge the limits of our collective imagination This is a book that contains multitudes—a celebration of the forgotten marginalia of Westernized thought. Persson’s collection delves into eccentric twentieth-century American photographers, the lives of his ancestors both distant and recent, and of the artist Egon Schiele in prison, teetering on the edge of sanity. He interweaves the careers of three obscure composers—Alban Berg, Erik Satie, and Anton Webern—and imagines the composer’s life based on listening to their music, rather than the other way around. And he charts the path of his own life from a long-ago teenage road trip, sleeping in the backs of friends’ cars and trying to find himself inside a vast world. As the work builds, the lines between personal memory and collective history become ever more abstract, blending inner and outer spheres to confront the unknowable expanse of universal existence. A must-read for fans of Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. This work includes black-and-white reproductions of Egon Schiele’s drawings, with permission from The ALBERTINA Museum in Vienna.