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 & experiment The essay wants above all to wander but also to arrive at symmetry & wholeness; it nurses competing urges to integrity & disarray perfection & fragmentation confession & invention How to write about essays & essayists while staying true to these contradictions? ESSAYISM is a personal critical & polemical book about the genre its history & contemporary possibilities It's an example of what it describes an essay that is curious & digressive exacting yet evasive a form that would instruct seduce & 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 & out of melancholia to a new sense of writing as adventure