The Book Prize Index

Make It Scream, Make It Burn: Essays

Leslie Jamison

From the "astounding" (Entertainment Weekly), "spectacularly evocative" (The Atlantic), and "brilliant" (Los Angeles Times) author of the New York Times bestsellers The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes a return to the essay form in this expansive new book. ONE OF THE FALL'S MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS: Time, Entertainment Weekly, O, Oprah Magazine, Boston Globe, Newsweek, Esquire, Seattle Times, Baltimore Sun, BuzzFeed, BookPage, The Millions, Marie Claire, Good Housekeeping, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Lit Hub, Women's Day, AV Club, Nylon, Bustle, Goop, Goodreads, Book Riot, Yahoo! Lifestyle, Pacific Standard, The Week, and Romper. With the virtuosic synthesis of memoir, criticism, and journalism for which Leslie Jamison has been so widely acclaimed, the fourteen essays in Make It Scream, Make It Burn explore the oceanic depths of longing and the reverberations of obsession. Among Jamison's subjects are 52 Blue, deemed "the loneliest whale in the world"; the eerie past-life memories of children; the devoted citizens of an online world called Second Life; the haunted landscape of the Sri Lankan Civil War; and an entire museum dedicated to the relics of broken relationships.

Memoir & AutobiographyMemoir & Autobiography · medium confidenceMemoir & Autobiography81 signalsLlm Classifier: Memoir & Autobiography -> Memoir & AutobiographyKeyword Classifier: American History -> American HistoryAward Category: PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay -> Arts & CriticismAmerican Civil WarEssays & Cultural CriticismGender & FeminismHousing, Cities & Urban Life

Award History

0 wins · 1 total

AwardYearResultCategory / Notes
PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay2020FinalistSecondary source
View all award history (1)
Experimental book profileGenerated by GPT-5.4 nano · may contain inaccuracies

This is an unverified interpretation of the catalog description, offered as an opt-in discovery experiment—not as bibliographic fact.

  1. 01 Central figures

    None extracted with sufficient confidence.

    These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.

    • Leslie Jamison62%

  2. 02 Central places

    None extracted with sufficient confidence.

    These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.

    • Sri Lanka52%

  3. 03 Suggested argument

    No argument inferred with sufficient confidence.

  4. 04 Reading orientation

    25 / 100 academic

    Serious trade

    An estimate of intended readership and scholarly apparatus—not quality or importance.

Confidence percentages are the model's own estimates. Profile confidence: 66%.