Imagine a type of writing so hard to define its very name means a trial, effort or attempt. An ancient form with an eye on the future, a genre poised between tradition and experiment. The essay wants above all to wander, but also to arrive at symmetry and wholeness; it nurses competing urges to integrity and disarray, perfection and fragmentation, confession and invention.
How to write about essays and essayists while staying true to these contradictions? Essayism is a personal, critical and polemical book about the genre, its history and contemporary possibilities. It's an example of what it describes: an essay that is curious and digressive, exacting yet evasive, a form that would instruct, seduce and mystify in equal measure. Among the essayists to whom he pays tribute - from Virginia Woolf to Georges Perec, Joan Didion to Sir Thomas Browne - Brian Dillon discovers a path back into his own life as a reader, and out of melancholia to a new sense of writing as adventure.
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Essayism 9781910695418 Paperback
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- Authors:
- Dillon, Brian
- Year Published:
- 2017
- Country of Publication:
- United Kingdom
- Format:
- Paperback
- ISBN:
- 9781910695418
- Number of Pages:
- 152
- Publication Date:
- 07/06/2017
- Publisher:
- Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Place of Publication:
- London
- SKU:
- 9781910695418