Essayism

Author: Brian Dillon

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $30.00 AUD
  • : 9781910695418
  • : Fitzcarraldo Editions
  • : Fitzcarraldo
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  • : July 2017
  • : ---length:- '19.7'width:- '12.5'units:- Centimeters
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  • : April 2017
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • : Brian Dillon
  • : Paperback
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  • : English
  • : 808.4
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Barcode 9781910695418
9781910695418

Description

A compelling ode to the essay form and the great essaysists themselves, from Montaigne to Woolf to Sontag.


Essayism is 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.

Author description

Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969. His books include Suppose a SentenceEssayismThe Great Explosion (shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize), Objects in This Mirror: EssaysI Am Sitting in a RoomSanctuaryTormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize) and In the Dark Room, which won the Irish Book Award for non-fiction. His writing has appeared in the GuardianNew York TimesLondon Review of BooksTimes Literary SupplementBookforumfrieze and Artforum. He is UK editor of Cabinet magazine, and teaches Creative Writing at Queen Mary, University of London.