Degas at the Gas Station: Essays

"Degas at the Gas Station is a collection of personal essays in which Thomas Beller explores his life from childhood to parenthood to mature middle age. The book is fundamentally about fatherhood-the mysteries of becoming a father as well as the mystery of the author's own father, who died when Beller was barely ten years old. Beller is ever curious about the people and phenomena he comes across, which allows him to digress from his own experiences and paint vivid sketches about the people and spaces of the New York City of his childhood and his current home in New Orleans"--