Essayism Trilogy
Brian Dillon
We send all orders via Royal Mail: within the UK, choose from 1st Class, 2nd Class or Special Delivery; for the rest of the world, International Standard or International Tracked. Delivery and packaging charges are calculated automatically at the checkout.
To collect orders in person from the Bookshop, choose Click and Collect at the checkout.
From the publisher
Essayism Trilogy appears as a limited edition clothbound hardback as part of Fitzcarraldo Editions’ First Decade Collection, featuring a new preface by the author, marbled endpapers and signed and numbered bookplates.
Essayism Trilogy brings together for the first time Brian Dillon’s loose trilogy on the intimate and abstract pleasures of reading and looking. In Essayism, Dillon offers a personal, critical and polemical book about the genre, its history and contemporary possibilities.
Suppose a Sentence is a series of essays, each prompted by a single sentence, that explores style, voice, language and the subjectivity of reading. Completing the triptych, Affinities is a critical and personal study of a sensation that is not exactly taste, desire, or allyship, but has aspects of all, explored through images that have stayed with the author over many years. Brilliantly written, engaging and exhilarating, Essayism Trilogy is a major work by one of the great essayists of our time.
‘[W]ritten in lucid, exacting and unsentimental prose, Essayism is a vital book for people who turn to art – and especially writing – for consolation.’ Lauren Elkin, Guardian (praise for Essayism)
‘Each chapter focuses on a sentence chosen not for its historical importance, nor for its connection to the book’s other essays, but simply out of love. As Dillon puts it, his chief criterion is a sense of “affinity.” What emerges is a record of appreciation, a rare treasure in an age that rewards bashing.’ Becca Rothfeld, New York Times (praise for Suppose a Sentence)
‘Brian Dillon is always invigoratingly brilliant. His sentences, his stylistic innovations, the range and potency of his intellectual adventures; he is a true master of the literary arts and a writer I would never hesitate to read, whatever his subject.’ Max Porter, author of Shy (praise for Affinities)
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.