A literary delicatessen: an essay on the art of writing essays and the pleasure of reading them.
Essayism reflects on the meaning of writing essays in today's world and explores the various approaches and possibilities: personal, critical, polemical, seductive, digressive, elucubrative, associative, erudite, passionate, dispassionate, reflective, curious, ironic, aphoristic... It traces the history of the genre and pays tribute to its great masters: Montaigne, Sir Thomas Browne, Pascal, Charles Lamb, Emerson, Thomas de Quincey, Virginia Woolf, Cyril Connolly, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, Maurice Blanchot, Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Hardwick, Janet Malcolm, W. G. Sebald... Interweaving his own experiences and his readings, Brian Dillon claims the essay as a literary adventure and celebrates the inexhaustible richness of this genre, which is a luci...read more
