Up Up, Down Down, a collection of essays, is now available from Powell's, Amazon, Target, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, and other purveyors of the world's finest goods.
Advance Praise
"Few writerly consciousnesses are as fun to inhabit as the limber brain of Cheston Knapp. With an ordnance of wit, acuity, and casual erudition, these essays explode the local and everyday into huge and moving human reaches. This is the sort of book you look up from to find the dull room around you newly charged with life's important particles." -- Wells Tower
"Full of wit and disquiet, Cheston Knapp’s Up Up, Down Down is a glittering collection of essays about nostalgia, skateboarding, fathers, waterslides, and all kinds of community. The path toward whatever we mean by “maturity” is a flowering vine of fruitful discomfort in these pages, and so much grows from it: acute self-awareness, intricate curiosity, tender interrogations. This book made me laugh out loud in embarrassing places—a quiet Swedish train, a darkened redeye flight—and its insights will keep echoing in me for a long time." -- Leslie Jamison
"Wow. Offering up a steady supply of perfectly chosen words in precision-guided sentences, Cheston Knapp will either break your heart or jolt your spine, and quite possibly bring some of us back to life. Congratulations, Young Man, on becoming the person you were meant to be, and thank you for sharing some of it with the rest of us." -- Joshua Ferris
"Cheston Knapp’s Up Up, Down Down has the uncanny, welcome ability to make so-called mainstream or dominant culture—white, masculinist, Christian, frat boy, and so on—appear newly strange, and newly open to analysis. He has the eye and ear of an anthropologist, a joyously expansive vocabulary, a prose style that feels both extravagant and exact, and a big, booming heart." -- Maggie Nelson
"Up Up, Down Down is an always smart, often hilarious, and ultimately transcendent essay collection. You think you’re reading about tennis, low-rent wrestling, the death of a neighbor, or the perils of beer pong, but suddenly you’re pondering the biggest questions: What is kindness? What is self-consciousness? How does articulating an experience change it? It’s an unqualified pleasure to be in Knapp’s company." -- Anthony Doerr
"Cheston Knapp’s essays are exhilarating and funny and endlessly smart on dads, fraternities, southerners, drinking games, retribution, tennis, the anxiety of influence, guilt, authenticity, UFO’s, aptronyms, revelation, uncertainty, nostalgia, diversity, identity, skateboarding, and community, and that’s just to start. He reminds us we’re all caught up in one another’s stories, as he tracks one family’s unraveling and another’s genesis, and points our way from fussbudget to enthusiast, from detachment to compassion, and from regret to joy." -- Jim Shepard
"Under Cheston Knapp's uncommonly tender scrutiny, no absurdity goes unnoticed." -- Sarah Manguso
“Pierce the surface to get to the depths, then rise up from the depths to laugh on the surface—Knapp performs some amazing alchemy in Up Up, Down Down by letting the two planes coexist so beautifully. Here’s a voice ever so light and generous and funny and yet the essays probe and get to real substance and resonance. It’s like a great party conversation under sparkly lights with umbrella cocktails where you emerge with your mind a little better.” -- Aimee Bender