Essayism

Imagine 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. Its 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.