The lost origins of the essay

Review by Booklist Review

D'Agata has been called a literary adventurer; he is also an advocate and restorer. His mission? To revitalize our appreciation for the essay. An inventive essayist himself, D'Agata created the seismic anthology The Next American Essay (2003), which collects writing from 1975 (his birth year) up until 2003. In his second gathering, a prequel if you will, he loops back to the very earliest writings and marches forward to 1974. D'Agata's enthusiasm is contagious, his commentary is larky and shrewd, and he is blithely daring, beginning with too-hip and -funny-to-be-true translations (including his own) of such antiquities as Theophrastus' They Are Them (more commonly knows as The Characters ). D'Agata is fearless because he was a classics scholar before earning his MFA in nonfiction and poetry at the University of Iowa, where he now teaches. Other plummy selections include excerpts from Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book and seminal essays by Blake, Baudelaire, Woolf, Borges, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Clarice Lispector. D'Agata was in search of art, and art he has found, making this a rare and invigorating assemblage.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

From Ziusudra of Sumer to Antonin Artaud and beyond, the essay in all its glory is on full display in this ingenious anthology. The title doesn't convey the volume's range-the spirit of factual expression, worked on by the imagination, transplanted into many times and in many cultures. This is a book to dip into or read through, certainly to savor for its diversity. The essay tent is wide, and under D'Agata's (Halls of Fame) editorship and astute eye it includes hybrid forms, from William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" through the prose poems of Aloysius Bertrand, Baudelaire and Mallarme to a "performative essay" on Bob Marley by Kamau Brathwaite. Readers will be familiar with the aphorisms of Francis Bacon, somewhat less familiar with the eccentric virtuosity of Sir Thomas Browne and much more so with Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal." But readers are perhaps most likely to be turned on for the first time by the prose artistry of Matsuo Basho, the avant-garde musings of Clarice Lispector on the (not-so) simple egg and the obsessive documentarylike musings of Marguerite Duras. Overall, this imaginative international collection showcases the art of short nonfiction at its best. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

In this second of a three-volume series on the genre, following The Next American Essay and preceding The Foundations of the American Essay, editor D'Agata (English, Univ. of Iowa) studies the essay as a form. Short and well-reasoned introductions accompany selected essays from the ancient world through the present that explore the international roots of contemporary nonfiction. D'Agata believes that the best of writers-over 40 luminaries are included-are willing to use significant details from anywhere and everywhere to create essays that are imaginative, memorable, and true. By returning to the original concept of the form, he encourages readers to question the ways in which the essay has or has not been encumbered by an obligation to expound facts. Verdict This should be of particular interest to English teachers and writers of creative nonfiction. Nonfiction readers will enjoy D'Agata's intellectual approach and will appreciate the varieties of the essays included.-Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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