Reviews of Halls of Fame

“John D’Agata is one of the most significant U.S. writers to emerge in the past few years. His essays combine the innovation and candor of David Shields and William Voldmann with the perception and concinnity and sheer aesthetic weight of Annie Dillard and Lewis Hyde. In nothing else recent is the compresence of shit and light that is America so vividly felt and evoked. —David Foster Wallace

“D’Agata is an alchemist who changes trash into purest gold.” —Guy Davenport, Harper’s Magazine

“Real art matters now. . . . It matters that in Halls of Fame a young nonfiction writer named John D’Agata is experimenting with essays that reconfigure dream, fact and reflection.” —The New York Times Book Review

“John D’Agata has created a collection of essays like a stealth bomb.” —American Book Review

“An exemplar of the literary movement toward linking the genres of poetry and the essay. . . . The cutting edge of literature.” —Publishers Weekly

“Here is an essayist who fears nothing.” —Andre Codrescu, Exquisite Corpse

“D’Agata writes masterful sentences, in all forms. Adept at collage, found poetry, paragraphs long and short, lists, characterization, direct quotes, the prose poem, fragments, spoofing, and a perceptiveness that sometimes only dispassionate description can achieve, D’Agata hovers like a moth around the sparks created where the known and the unknown rub against each other.” —Ruminator Review

 “With the diligence of a manic tour guide, D’Agata exhaustively catalogues his encounters, inventing whole new ways of looking as he goes.” —Rain Taxi

 “Entertaining and revealing.” —Williamette Week

“A special form of creative nonfiction lives in the territory between poetry and essay. These alluring hybrids are meditative, musical, artful, more imagistic than informational.” —Northern California Bohemian

“John D’Agata’s beautiful and distinctive first book performs an inspiring exit from the prison of genre: he has liberated the essay from the punishment of needing to explain or exposit, and has accorded it the freedom and the audacity of the poem. By opening up the space of “essay,” D’Agata sets forth the terms by which we may all—as readers and writers—be made free.” —Judge’s citation, PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction

“John D’Agata is redefining the modern American essay.” —Annie Dillard

“John D’Agata’s Halls of Fame is gorgeous, daring language exerted on behalf of a friendly—but very, very watchful—intelligence. He is a poet in his soul and, through his prose, on the page. He makes the essay, from start to finish, new. Here is a writer who matters.” —Frederick Busch

“John D’Agata’s journey through genres, the American landscape, the history of thought, and the history of lyric action—a journey beautifully agonized over as he struggles between sentence and line—is the beginning of a journey for us as well with a voice that is changing our conversation with the world.” —Jorie Graham

“John D’Agata is pushing the envelope of the modern American essay.” —Phillip Lopate

“What I admire about John D’Agata is the restlessness of his mind, the way he writes to the directives of some internal imperative that drives him to continually seek out new shapes in language that might meet something crucial, urgent, insatiable in him. He makes his obsession palpable and irresistible to the reader.” —Carole Maso

“‘He had a knack, which was his lure, for both the mundane and fantastic’—so says John D’Agata about one of his book’s eccentric population, but he could be describing his own omnivorous self. His writing is marked by an exuberance of structural invention, by an ever-churning hurdy-gurdy lexicon of lingual play, and by citizenship in the mazes of the mind and in hallways that mimic Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. Or, to update that last comparison: Halls of Fame is to essays what the Museum of Jurassic Technology is to gallery dioramas.” —Albert Goldbarth

 “The dialectic between showing and looking, between telling and knowing, is D’Agata’s subject and his supremacy; these lyric essays result in further questions, for such a process does not “lead” to mere answers; when such prodigies of mystery as Henry Darger or Martha Graham are at issue, this turn of mind, this trope of thinking, is a revelation; that is the discursive poet’s program: to reveal, and indeed his progress through the generality of our native offerings is a triumphant one; not since Butor’s Mobile have I learned so much about America’s creases and crannies, such learning being a complexion of pains and pleasures.” —Richard Howard