Essayism

Reviews / Votes

'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, Irish Times 'It's short, digressive, teasing, dilettantish, circular, and it reads like some delicate, wandering combination of Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida and E. M. Cioran's longer aphorisms.... As Dillon examines his examples of essayism, and steadily reveals more of himself, so his own work joins those cherished selections, enacting in sentence after fine sentence the theory it modestly abjured.'

- James Wood, New Yorker '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. ... 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, New Statesman 'Written in lucid, exacting and unsentimental prose, Essayism is a vital book for people who turn to art - and especially writing - for consolation.'

- Lauren Elkin, Guardian '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 Essayism 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 autobiographia literaria and a vital exemplar of how deeply literature and language can matter in a life.'

- Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts 'Dillon is a mournful, witty and original writer.'

-Parul Sehgal, New York Times '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, Literary Review '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 The Lonely City '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 travellers 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 Humiliation