CANCELLED

Synopsis

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. Brian Dillon. Includes Bibliographical References.