{"product_id":"9781910695418","title":"Essayism - Brian Dillon","description":"\u003cp\u003eImagine 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Brian Dillon","offers":[{"title":"152 pages \/ 07\/06\/2017 \/ Literary studies: fiction, novelists \u0026 prose writers","offer_id":56971206623607,"sku":"9781910695418","price":11.69,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0682\/9454\/1624\/files\/9781910695418.jpg?v=1775168646","url":"https:\/\/gulpfictionbooks.com\/products\/9781910695418","provider":"Gulp Fiction","version":"1.0","type":"link"}