Brian Dillon

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. Its 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.

Written as a series of linked essays interwoven with a reflection on affinity itself Affinities completes a trilogy with Essayism and Suppose a Sentence about the intimate and abstract pleasures

Boldly combining the highly personal with the brilliantly scholarly, In the Dark Room explores the question of how memory works emotionally and culturally. It is narrated through the prism of the authors experience of losing both his parents, his mother when he was sixteen, his father when he was on the cusp of adulthood and of trying, after a breakdown some years later, to piece things together. Drawing on the lessons of centuries of literature, philosophy and visual art, Dillon interprets the relics of his parents and of his childhood in a singularly original and arresting piece of writing reissued for the first time since its original publication in 2005, and including a new foreword from prize-winning biographer Frances Wilson.

In Suppose a Sentence, Brian Dillon turns his attention to the oblique and complex pleasures of the sentence. A series of essays prompted by a single sentence from Shakespeare to Gertrude Stein, John Ruskin to Joan Didion the book explores style, voice, and language, along with the subjectivity of reading. Both an exercise in practical criticism and a set of experiments or challenges, Suppose a Sentence is a polemical and personal reflection on the art of the sentence in literature. Whether the sentence in question is a rigorous expression of a state of vulnerability, extremity, even madness, or a carefully calibrated arrangement, Dillon examines not only how it works and why but also, in the course of the book, what the sentence once was, what it is today, and what it might become tomorrow.

When Brian Dillon was sixteen his mother died and he simply gave up all schoolwork. While he courted exam failure, his real education was going on elsewhere: with books, music, films and television. When at last he made it to university, his head was already full of avant-garde writing, art and ideas. Could academia live up to the hopes and dreams he had invested in it? Halfway through college his father died, and the stakes of reading and writing seemed even higher. Ambivalence explores what learning meant to its author, what it enabled and denied, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six, when he left his native Dublin. Its at once a memoir of that city in the 1980s and 1990s, an uncynical portrait of the adolescent and early-adult mind, and an intimate defence of radical thinking about literature and life. In vivid present-tense fragments, Dillon describes his first encounters with writers such as Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, Samuel Beckett, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. He recalls being seduced by ambivalence, ambiguity and androgyny on the page and in the life he hoped his reading would transfigure. The era he describes seemed to demand new ways of thinking about aesthetics and politics. Today, when rights are fragile, arts and humanities attacked, and students dismissed as radicals or narcissists, Ambivalence is an argument for the poetic and revolutionary force of changing yourself and even the world by changing what you know.

Una delicatessen literaria: un ensayo sobre el arte de escribir ensayos y el placer de leerlos.Ensayismo reflexiona sobre el sentido de escribir ensayos en el mundo actual y explora los diversos enfoques y posibilidades: personal, critico, polemico, seductor, digresivo, elucubrativo, asociativo, erudito, apasionado, desapasionado, reflexivo, curioso, ironico, aforistico... Recorre la historia del genero y homenajea a sus grandes maestros: 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... Entrecruzando sus propias experiencias y sus lecturas, Brian Dillon reivindica el ensayo como aventura literaria y celebra la riqueza inagotable de este genero, que es una forma lucida de contemplar y entender la vida

Este libro parte de una propuesta muy singular. El autor reúne frases –no necesariamente las más célebres ni las más trascendentales- de veintisiete escritores –desde Shakespeare a algunos actuales–

Este libro parte de una propuesta muy singular. El autor reúne frases –no necesariamente las más celebres ni las más trascendentales- de veintisiete escritores –desde Shakespeare a algunos actuales–

Una delicatessen literaria: un ensayo sobre el arte de escribir ensayos y el placer de leerlos. Ensayismo reflexiona sobre el sentido de escribir ensayos en el mundo actual y explora los diversos enfoques y posibilidades: personal, critico, polemico, seductor, digresivo, elucubrativo, asociativo, erudito, apasionado, desapasionado, reflexivo, curioso, ironico, aforistico... Recorre la historia del genero y homenajea a sus grandes maestros: 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... Entrecruzando sus propias experiencias y sus lecturas, Brian Dillon reivindica el ensayo como aventura literaria y celebra la riqueza inagotable de este genero, que es una forma lucida de contemplar y entender la vida