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- 138 pages
- 5 hours of reading
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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. -- Back cover
Book purchase
Essayism, Brian Dillon
- Language
- Released
- 2017
- product-detail.submit-box.info.binding
- (Paperback),
- Book condition
- Good
- Price
- €8.49
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- Title
- Essayism
- Language
- English
- Authors
- Brian Dillon
- Publisher
- Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Released
- 2017
- Format
- Paperback
- Pages
- 138
- ISBN10
- 1910695416
- ISBN13
- 9781910695418
- Series
- Tags
- Non-Fiction, Social Sciences, True Stories, Biographies, Literary Studies, Autobiographies & Memoirs, Opinion Journalism & Essays, Literary Criticism, Writing, Irish Literature
- Rating
- 4.2 out of 5
- Description
- 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. -- Back cover