{"product_id":"essayism-isbn-9781681372822","title":"Essayism","description":"\u003cb\u003eA compelling ode to the essay form and the great essaysists themselves, from Montaigne to Woolf to Sontag.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eEssayism \u003c\/i\u003eis a book about essays and essayists, a study of melancholy and depression, a love letter to belle-lettrists, and an account of the indispensable lifelines of reading and writing. Brian Dillon’s style incorporates diverse features of the essay. By turns agglomerative, associative, digressive, curious, passionate, and dispassionate, his is a branching book of possibilities, seeking consolation and direction from Michel de Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Georges Perec, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Susan Sontag, to name just a few of his influences. Whether he is writing on origins, aphorisms, coherence, vulnerability, anxiety, or a number of other subjects, his command of language, his erudition, and his own personal history serve not so much to illuminate or magnify the subject as to discover it anew through a kaleidoscopic alignment of attention, thought, and feeling, a dazzling and momentary suspension of disparate elements, again and again.“This year, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the essay, and rereading Montaigne and James Baldwin, so Brian Dillon’s superb study,\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003eEssayism\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003efell into receptive hands. It’s short, digressive, teasing, dilettantish, circular, and it reads like some delicate, wandering combination of Roland Barthes’s \u003ci\u003eCamera Lucida\u003c\/i\u003e and E. M. Cioran’s longer aphorisms.”  —James Wood, \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e \"Dillon is a mournful, witty and original writer.\" —Parul Sehgal, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A wonderful, subtle and deceptively fragmentary little book ...  enjoyably roundabout and light-fingered ... To borrow from one of  Barthes’s titles, this is a lover’s discourse, the love object being  writing, not only in the essay but in all its forms. It is also a  testament to the consolatory, even the healing, powers of art. And at  the last, in its consciously diffident fashion – Dillon is a literary  flaneur in the tradition of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin – it is its  own kind of self-made masterpiece.\" —John Banville, \u003ci\u003eThe Irish Times\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e \"Written in lucid, exacting and unsentimental prose, \u003ci\u003eEssayism\u003c\/i\u003e is a vital book for people who turn to art—and especially writing—for consolation.\" —Lauren Elkin, \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"It is somewhat unseemly for a critic to confess that their immediate  reaction to a book is one of unremitting envy. But Brian Dillon’s study  of the essay is so careful and precise in its reading of a constellation  of authors – Derrida and Barthes, Didion and Sontag, Browne and Burton,  Woolf and Carlos Williams, Cioran and Perec – that my overall feeling  was jealousy. ... A remarkable meditation on memory ... above all he  claims to admire style, and he is exceptionally good at defining the  styles he likes. ... His account of depression is reflected in thinking  about the essay. Is it something composed of fragments and shards? Is it  a coolly organised progression? Is it about confession? Is it about  concealment? The book’s excellence lies in the way these paradoxes are  held suspended. ... The book, ultimately, is about how literature can  make a difference. It is a beautiful and elegiac volume. I can give no  greater compliment than to say that having read it, I re-read it.\" —Stuart Kelly, \u003ci\u003eNew Statesman\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Brian Dillon could easily have written another book about the  essay—its hallmarks, history, current role in literary turf wars, etc.  What a relief, then, to find his \u003ci\u003eEssayism\u003c\/i\u003e navigating away, in  its opening pages, from such a project, and turning instead toward this  surprising, probing, edifying, itinerant, and eventually quite moving  book, which serves as both an\u003ci\u003eautobiographia literaria\u003c\/i\u003e and a vital exemplar of how deeply literature and language can matter in a life.\" —Maggie Nelson, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Argonauts\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Erudite and elegiac ... \u003ci\u003eEssayism\u003c\/i\u003e is a constellation of close  readings, its arguments coming to the fore through the repetition and  rhyme between its sections. Dillon can locate the single comma or dash  whose placement somehow sums up a writer’s aesthetic commitments (he  does especially graceful work with Hardwick’s sentences).\" —Will Rees, \u003ci\u003eTimes Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[A] beautiful and original book about “essayism” … Partly memoir,  partly disquisition on mortal peril and how to read your way through  (some of) it, this is a brilliantly adventurous, clever and moving book.\" —Joanna Kavenna, \u003ci\u003eLiterary Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Dillon’s brilliantly roaming, roving set of essays on essays is a  recursive treasure, winkling out charm, sadness, and strangeness;  stimulating, rapturous, and provocative in its own right.\" —Olivia Laing, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Lonely City\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Brian Dillon has written a moving and vulnerable love letter to the  essay as a genre—a region wherein fragmentation provides secret  consolation. Depression and essayism, he brilliantly demonstrates, are  twins. His own language has never been so sharp, suggestive,  coiled—deliciously given over to idiosyncrasy. Interpretive treats  abound: Dillon’s appreciations of Hardwick, Barthes, Sebald, and other  fellow travelers are beautiful acts of critical generosity and acumen.  All these wonders occur within a shattering account of literature’s  power not to alleviate gloom but to justify (by illuminating) the fits  and starts of consciousness.\" —Wayne Koestenbaum, author of \u003ci\u003eHumiliation\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"One of our most innovative and elegant nonfictioneers.\" —Robert Macfarlane, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Old Ways\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"This book may hover (inter alia) around Montaigne’s famous tumble  from his horse; only, in Dillon’s hands, it’s the essay itself that’s  tumbling, crashing through the strata of its history, all its previous  landscapes (those of Woolf, Hardwick, Blanchot, Cioran...) fragmenting  and spinning in delirious recombinations.\" —Tom McCarthy, author of \u003ci\u003eSatin Island\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Brian Dillon’s gymnastic brain here embodies the long shadows and  descriptive delicacies of many essayist masters: it is a searing and  addictive voice, ambitious to probe all corners of this condition called  writing.\" —Helen Marten, winner of 2016 Turner Prize\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Essayism\u003c\/i\u003e is a quiet and forceful triumph, an attractive,  smart defence of stylistic subjectivity and aestheticism, and its direct  bearing on life, themes too often ignored or slighted in the wake of  anaesthetizing theoretical framework.\" —Nicolas Liney, \u003ci\u003eOxonian Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[A] wise, humane and stylish book.\" —Joe Humphreys, \u003ci\u003eIrish Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[\u003ci\u003eEssayism\u003c\/i\u003e is] profoundly thoughtful about the relationship between text and mood. . . Dillon slowly unspools paragraphs, sentences, and phrases until he is left with the thread of emotion, a personal story of depression that interweaves it all. The relationship between writing and depression is a long-standing and famous one, but Dillon adds new shades and colors, transforming a familiar palette into one both strange and thought-provoking.” —Rhian Sasseen, \u003ci\u003eThe Paris Review Daily\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eBrian Dillon \u003c\/b\u003ewas born in Dublin in 1969. His books include \u003ci\u003eThe Great Explosion \u003c\/i\u003e(short-listed for the Ondaatje Prize), \u003ci\u003eObjects in This Mirror: Essays\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eI Am Sitting in a Room\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eSanctuary\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eTormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eIn the Dark Room\u003c\/i\u003e. His writing has appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e, the \u003ci\u003eLondon Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Times Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBookforum\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eFrieze\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eArtforum\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003e4Columns\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Yale Review\u003c\/i\u003e. He is the UK editor of \u003ci\u003eCabinet\u003c\/i\u003e magazine and teaches creative writing at Queen Mary University of London.","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302937645285,"sku":"NP9781681372822","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781681372822.jpg?v=1767726368","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/essayism-isbn-9781681372822","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}