Gathering Noise from My Life: A Camouflaged Memoir by Donald Anderson will be available Sept. 1 from the University of Iowa Press.

The noise gathered from a lifetime of engaging with war, race, religion, memory, illness, and family echoes through the vignettes, quotations, graffiti, and poetry that Anderson collects—fragments of the humor and horror of life, the absurdities that mock reason and the despair that yields laughter.

“We are where we’ve been and what we’ve read,” he says, and gives us his youth in Montana; the family tradition of boxing; careers in writing and fighting; the words of Mike Tyson, Frederick the Great, Fran Lebowitz, and Shakespeare. Anderson cobbles together the sources of the vision of life he has accrued as a consequence of his six decades of living and reading.

Siobhan Fallon, the author of You Know When the Men Are Gone, wrote, “Donald Anderson’s Gathering Noise from My Life functions as a brilliant kaleidoscope, the author’s life refracted and reflected through the mirrors of his memory. Composed of vivid moments from Anderson’s life, as well as snapshots of American history and incisive quotes from literature, the book is an innovative memoir that continually asks the reader the question: ‘Is memory what happened or how you felt about what happened?’”

Anderson is a professor of English and writer in residence at the U.S. Air Force Academy. The editor of the journal War, Literature, and the Arts, he has published several books, including Fire Road, which won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award from the UI Press, and the edited collections When War Becomes Personal: Soldiers’ Accounts from the Civil War to Iraq, Andre Dubus: Tributes, and aftermath: an anthology of post-vietnam fiction.

At the invitation of the National Endowment for the Arts, he served on the panel that selected the contributions to Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families.

The book will be available at bookstores or from the UI Press, 800-621-2736 or www.uiowapress.org. Customers in Europe, the Middle East, or Africa may order from Eurospan Group at www.eurospanbookstore.com.