ESSAYISM - Rare Pristine Copy of The First Edition/First Printing: Signed by Brian Dillon - ONLY SIGNED COPY ONLINE

Dillon, Brian

ISBN 10: 1910695416 / ISBN 13: 9781910695418

Edité par London, England: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017, 2017

A propos de cet article

1st Printing. Signed. 145 pages. Published in 2017. The author's book-length account on subject. One of the most brilliant books on the essay form ever written in our time. The true First Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions, particularly the American Edition. Published in a small and limited first print run as a softcover original only. The First Edition is now scarce. Presents Brian Dillon's "Essayism". Elaborately re-titled in the American Edition as "Essayism: On Form, Feeling, And Nonfiction". The elegant single-word title is apparently insufficient and demands reassurances for its American readers that this is not another attempt to espouse a political ideology like Communism or Fascism. "A compelling ode to the essay form and the great essayists themselves, from Montaigne to Woolf to Sontag. A book about essays and essayists, a study of melancholy and depression, a love letter to belle-lettrists, and an account of the indispensable lifelines of reading and writing. Incorporates diverse features of the essay. His is a branching book of possibilities, seeking consolation and direction from Michel de Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Georges Perec, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Susan Sontag, to name just a few of his influences. Whether he is writing on origins, aphorisms, coherence, vulnerability, anxiety, or a number of other subjects, his command of language, his erudition, and his own personal history serve not so much to illuminate or magnify the subject as to discover it anew through a kaleidoscopic alignment of attention, thought, and feeling" (Publisher's blurb). It would surely be a shame if his neat little book were read only by a small group of cultists because it deserves to be read by every serious reader. Plus, the other great part of the book is surely its selection of titles, thoughtfully appended at the end, listing the books that Dillon was influenced by, joyfully, not anxiously. Many other literate readers may or may not know them. They will serve an important function: As a primary source of discovery and re-discovery, revelation and confirmation. An absolute "must-have" title for Brian Dillon collectors. This copy is very prominently, beautifully, and elaborately signed in blue ink-pen on the title page by Brian Dillon. It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. This title is a contemporary classic. As far as we know, this is the only such signed copy of the true First Edition/First Printing (British) available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. Please note: Precedes and should NOT be confused with the American Edition. A rare signed copy thus. One of the most brilliant essayist/writers of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER BRIAN DILLON TITLE IN OUR CATALOG) ISBN 1910695416.

N° de réf. du vendeur 22977

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: ESSAYISM - Rare Pristine Copy of The First Edition/First Printing: Signed by Brian Dillon - ONLY SIGNED COPY ONLINE
• Éditeur: London, England: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017
• Date de parution: 2017
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 1910695416
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9781910695418
• Reliure: Soft cover
• Édition: 1st Edition.
• État de l'article: As New
• État de la jaquette: None, As Issued
• Signé: Signed by Author

A propos de ce titre

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.

À propos de l?auteur

Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969. His books include Suppose a Sentence, Essayism, The Great Explosion (shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize), Objects in This Mirror: Essays, I Am Sitting in a Room, Sanctuary, Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize) and In the Dark Room, which won the Irish Book Award for non-fiction. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, London Review of Books, the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, frieze and Artforum. He has curated exhibitions for Tate and Hayward galleries. He lives in London.