John D’Agata leaves no tablet unturned in his exploration of the roots of the essay. In this soaring anthology he takes the reader from ancient Mesopotamia to classical Greece and Rome, from fifth—century Japan to nineteenth—century France, to twentieth-century Brazil, Germany, Barbados, and beyond. With brief and brilliant introductions to seminal works by Heraclitus, Sei Sho¯-nagon, Michel de Montaigne, Jonathan Swift, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Octavio Paz, and more than forty other luminaries, D’Agata reexamines the international forebears of today’s American nonfiction. This idiosyncratic collection makes a perfect historical companion to D’Agata’s
The Next American Essay, a touchstone among students and practitioners of the lyric essay.
PRAISE FOR THE NEXT AMERICAN ESSAY BY JOHN D’AGATA:
“Readers, listen up, then: Here is a book that makes some beautiful music.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review
“A genuinely exhilarating work of literary history.”
—BOOKLIST
“From the living Monopoly game (in an essay by John McPhee) to a set of unattended ghostly footnotes, from the Joan Didion elegy to the Anne Carson fantasia, this book shows what the essay is and what, with any luck, it will be. The collection is full of pleasures and surprises, the most stunning of which is the ongoing essay by D’Agata himself—he transforms a mere anthology into the living biography of an art form.”
—Michael Silverblatt, “Bookworm,” on KCRW (Los Angeles)
