{"title":"Brian Dillon","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eBrian Dillon\u003c\/strong\u003e explores the intricate intersections of language, art, and human experience through essays that challenge and illuminate. His work, such as \u003cem\u003eEssayism\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eSuppose a Sentence\u003c\/em\u003e, invites readers to consider how narratives are constructed and how meaning evolves over time.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eRooted in the realms of \u003cem\u003eArts \u0026amp; Culture\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eBiography \u0026amp; Memoir\u003c\/em\u003e, Dillon’s writing offers nuanced reflections that blend personal insight with cultural critique, making each essay a thoughtful journey into the complexities of creativity and memory.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"suppose-a-sentence-by-brian-dillon-9781913097011","title":"Suppose a Sentence","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eSuppose a Sentence\u003c\/em\u003e is a critical and personal reflection on the art of the sentence in literature. It is both an experiment in the attentive form of the essay—asking what happens, and where one might wander, when as readers and writers we pay minute attention to the language before us—and a polemic for certain kinds of experiment in prose.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn a series of essays, each taking a single sentence as its starting point, the book explores style, voice, and context. But it also uses its subjects—from George Eliot to Joan Didion, John Donne to Annie Dillard, Anne Carson to Rachel Cusk—to ask what the sentence is today and what it might become next.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWith this brilliant sequel of sorts to his acclaimed \u003cem\u003eEssayism\u003c\/em\u003e, Brian Dillon confirms he is one of the very best essayists at work today.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Allen \u0026 Unwin","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46552267522284,"sku":"9781913097011","price":26.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/3638603482869.jpg?v=1750029454"},{"product_id":"essayism-by-brian-dillon-9781910695418","title":"Essayism","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe essay is a venerable form that may well be the genre of the future. It has its origins in a mode of self-examination and even self-obsession - 'it is many years now that I have had only myself as object of my thoughts', writes Montaigne in his essay 'Of Practice' - but it is just as accurately defined by its vagrant and curious scope, its capacity to suborn any and every object to its elegant remit. It may not in fact be 'well made' at all, but a thing of fragments and unfinished apercus, or an omnium-gatherum like Robert Burton's capacious but recognizably essayistic \u003cem\u003eAnatomy of Melancholy\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe essay may not even be written, but instead a photo essay, film essay, radio essay or some hybrid of these and the literary archetype. It may belong to a self-conscious genre and have been written by an essayist who self-declares as such; or it might be conjured from a milieu where the labels 'essay' and 'essayist' would make no sense at all. The essay, in short, is a varied and various artefact. Its occasion might be scholarly - there are academic essays, though they tend to be essays to the extent that they wish to stop being academic - or it may be journalistic, institutional or 'creative'. The essay can be tethered to a specific (perhaps polemical) context or written with an ambition to timeless or universal import. Whatever its motivation or avowed theme, the essay possesses a style and a voice. Generic, structural and contextual definitions will vary, but the essay is at least recognizable by its having a certain texture - the essay alters or interferes to some degree with the language of non-fiction.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eEssayism\u003c\/em\u003e is a personal, critical and polemical book about the genre, its history and its contemporary possibilities, itself an example of what it describes: an essay that is curious and digressive and at the same time held together by a personal voice and a polemical point.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e'Dillon is a literary flaneur in the tradition of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin - it is its own kind of self-made masterpiece.' - John Banville, \u003cem\u003eIrish Times\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Allen \u0026 Unwin","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47430666191084,"sku":"9781910695418","price":32.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9781910695418.jpg?v=1774558839"},{"product_id":"affinities-by-brian-dillon-9781804270165","title":"Affinities","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eAffinities\u003c\/i\u003e, Brian Dillon explores images and artists he is drawn to or loves, and tries to analyse the attraction.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWhat do we mean when we claim affinity with an object or picture, or say that affinities exist (not only formal) between such things? What do feelings of affinity imply about individual or collective experience of art, and of the world? The word 'affinity' used to mean an attraction of opposites, between chemical elements. In his \u003ci\u003eEffective Affinities\u003c\/i\u003e, Goethe used the idea to think about the orbits and collisions of love. In the poetry and essays of Baudelaire, the writings of Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg, the art of Tacita Dean and Moyra Davey, a partly buried history of affinity can be found.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eAffinities\u003c\/i\u003e is a critical and personal study of a sensation that is not exactly taste, desire, or allyship, but has aspects of all. Approaching this subject via discrete examples, this book is first of all about images — mostly photographs — that have stayed with the author over many years, or grown in significance during months of pandemic isolation, when the visual field had shrunk.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSome of these are historical works by artists such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Dora Maar, Claude Cahun, Samuel Beckett and Andy Warhol. Others are more or less obscure scientific or vernacular images: sea creatures, migraine auras, astronomical illustrations derived from dreams. Also family photographs, film stills, records of atomic ruin. And contemporary art by Rink Kawauchi, Susan Hiller and John Stezaker.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWritten as a series of linked essays, interwoven with a reflection on affinity itself, \u003ci\u003eAffinities\u003c\/i\u003e completes a trilogy, with \u003ci\u003eEssayism\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eSuppose a Sentence\u003c\/i\u003e, about the intimate and abstract pleasures of reading and looking.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Allen \u0026 Unwin","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47595500372204,"sku":"9781804270165","price":36.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9781804270165-affinities.jpg?v=1777898406"},{"product_id":"ambivalence-by-brian-dillon-9781804272473","title":"Ambivalence","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen Brian Dillon was sixteen his mother died and he simply gave up all schoolwork. While he courted exam failure, his real education was going on elsewhere: with books, music, films and television. When at last he made it to university, his head was already full of avant-garde writing, art and ideas. Could academia live up to the hopes and dreams he had invested in it? Halfway through college his father died, and the stakes of reading and writing seemed even higher. \u003cem\u003eAmbivalence\u003c\/em\u003e explores what learning meant to its author, what it enabled and denied, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six, when he left his native Dublin. It's at once a memoir of that city in the 1980s and 1990s, an uncynical portrait of the adolescent and early-adult mind, and an intimate defence of radical thinking about literature and life.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn vivid present-tense fragments, Dillon describes his first encounters with writers such as Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, Samuel Beckett, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. He recalls being seduced by ambivalence, ambiguity and androgyny—on the page and in the life he hoped his reading would transfigure. The era he describes seemed to demand new ways of thinking about aesthetics and politics. Today, when rights are fragile, arts and humanities attacked, and students dismissed as radicals or narcissists, \u003cem\u003eAmbivalence\u003c\/em\u003e is an argument for the poetic and revolutionary force of changing yourself and even the world by changing what you know.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Allen \u0026 Unwin Aotearoa New Zealand","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47665478664428,"sku":"9781804272473","price":37.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9781804272473-ambivalence.jpg?v=1779745840"}],"url":"https:\/\/bookhero.pro\/collections\/brian-dillon.oembed","provider":"Book Hero","version":"1.0","type":"link"}