{"product_id":"essayism","title":"Essayism","description":"\u003cp\u003eFrom the blurb: \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003eHow 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":"Default Title","offer_id":47026033557658,"sku":"12884","price":350.0,"currency_code":"ZAR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0350\/5704\/1545\/files\/SKM_C55826011913380.jpg?v=1768823613","url":"https:\/\/store.a4arts.org\/en-us\/products\/essayism","provider":"A4 Arts Store","version":"1.0","type":"link"}