One March morning, writer Floyd Skloot was inexplicably struck by an attack of unrelenting vertigo that ended 138 days later as suddenly as it had begun. With body and world askew, everything familiar had transformed. Nothing was ever still. Revertigo is Skloot’s account of that unceasingly vertiginous period, told in an inspired and appropriately off-kilter form.
            This intimate memoir—tenuous, shifting, sometimes humorous—demonstrates Skloot’s considerable literary skill honed as an award-winning essayist, memoirist, novelist, and poet. His recollections of a strange, spinning world prompt further musings on the forces of uncertainty, change, and displacement that have shaped him from childhood to late middle age, repeatedly knocking him awry, realigning his hopes and plans, even his perceptions. From the volatile forces of his mercurial, shape-shifting early years to his obsession with reading, acting, and writing, from the attack of vertigo to a trio of postvertigo (but nevertheless dizzying) journeys to Spain and England, and even to a place known only in his mother’s unhinged fantasies, Skloot makes sense of a life’s phantasmagoric unpredictability.

Finalist, Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction, Oregon Book Awards

Floyd Skloot is a creative nonfiction writer, essayist, poet, and novelist who lives in Portland, Oregon, and Chicago, Illinois. He is the recipient of many awards, including three Pushcart Prizes and the PEN USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction. His writing has appeared in such distinguished magazines as the New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Poetry, and American Scholar, and his eighteen books include The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer’s Life. In 2010, Poets & Writers named him among “50 of the Most Inspiring Authors in the World.”