Brian Dillon

Written as a series of linked essays interwoven with a reflection on affinity itself Affinities completes a trilogy with Essayism and Suppose a Sentence about the intimate and abstract pleasures

Este libro parte de una propuesta muy singular. El autor reúne frases –no necesariamente las más célebres ni las más trascendentales- de veintisiete escritores –desde Shakespeare a algunos actuales–

In Suppose a Sentence, Brian Dillon turns his attention to the oblique and complex pleasures of the sentence. A series of essays prompted by a single sentence from Shakespeare to Gertrude Stein, John Ruskin to Joan Didion the book explores style, voice, and language, along with the subjectivity of reading. Both an exercise in practical criticism and a set of experiments or challenges, Suppose a Sentence is a polemical and personal reflection on the art of the sentence in literature. Whether the sentence in question is a rigorous expression of a state of vulnerability, extremity, even madness, or a carefully calibrated arrangement, Dillon examines not only how it works and why but also, in the course of the book, what the sentence once was, what it is today, and what it might become tomorrow.

Boldly combining the highly personal with the brilliantly scholarly, In the Dark Room explores the question of how memory works emotionally and culturally. It is narrated through the prism of the authors experience of losing both his parents, his mother when he was sixteen, his father when he was on the cusp of adulthood and of trying, after a breakdown some years later, to piece things together. Drawing on the lessons of centuries of literature, philosophy and visual art, Dillon interprets the relics of his parents and of his childhood in a singularly original and arresting piece of writing reissued for the first time since its original publication in 2005, and including a new foreword from prize-winning biographer Frances Wilson.

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.

What do we mean when we claim affinity with an object or picture, or say affinities exist between such things? Affinities 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 that have stayed with the author over many years, or grown in significance during months of pandemic isolation, when the visual field had shrunk. Some are historical works by artists such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Dora Maar, Claude Cahun, Samuel Beckett and Andy Warhol. Others are 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 Rinko Kawauchi, Susan Hiller and John Stezaker. Written as a series of linked essays, interwoven with a reflection on affinity itself, Affinities is an extraordinary book about the intimate and abstract pleasures of reading and looking.

Una delicatessen literaria: un ensayo sobre el arte de escribir ensayos y el placer de leerlos.Ensayismo reflexiona sobre el sentido de escribir ensayos en el mundo actual y explora los diversos enfoques y posibilidades: personal, critico, polemico, seductor, digresivo, elucubrativo, asociativo, erudito, apasionado, desapasionado, reflexivo, curioso, ironico, aforistico... Recorre la historia del genero y homenajea a sus grandes maestros: Montaigne, Sir Thomas Browne, Pascal, Charles Lamb, Emerson, Thomas de Quincey, Virginia Woolf, Cyril Connolly, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, Maurice Blanchot, Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Hardwick, Janet Malcolm, W. G. Sebald... Entrecruzando sus propias experiencias y sus lecturas, Brian Dillon reivindica el ensayo como aventura literaria y celebra la riqueza inagotable de este genero, que es una forma lucida de contemplar y entender la vida

The Great Explosion by Brian Dillon: a masterful account of a terrible disaster in a remarkable placeIn April 1916, shortly before the commencement of the Battle of the Somme, a fire started in a vast munitions works located in the Kentish marshes. The resulting series of explosions killed 108 people and injured many more.In a brilliant piece of storytelling, Brian Dillon recreates the events of that terrible day - and, in so doing, sheds a fresh and unexpected light on the British home front in the Great War. He offers a chilling natural history of explosives and their effects on the earth, on buildings, and on human and animal bodies. And he evokes with vivid clarity one of Britains strangest and most remarkable landscapes - where he has been a habitual explorer for many years. The Great Explosion is a profound work of narrative, exploration and inquiry from one of our most brilliant writers.The Great Explosion is exhilarating and moving and lyrical. It is a quiet evisceration of a landscape through the discovery of a lost history of destructiveness, a meditation on Englishness, an autobiography, a mapping of absences. I loved it. Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber EyesWhat a fascinating, unclassifiable, brilliant book, confirming Brian Dillons reputation as one of our most innovative and elegant non-fictioneers. No one else could have written it. Robert Macfarlane, author of The Old WaysForensic, fascinating, endlessly interesting Philip Hoare, Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author of Leviathan andThe Sea InsideA subtle, human history of the early twentieth century ... Explosions are a fruitful subject in Dillons hands, one that enables him to reflect movingly on the instant between life and death, on the frailty of human endeavour, and on the readiness of nations to tear one another apart. The Great Explosion deftly covers a tumultuous period of history while centring on the tiniest moments - just punctuation marks in timeFinancial Times [Dillons] account of the Faversham explosion is as bold as it is dramatic, while his descriptive passages about the marshlands of Kent are so evocative that you can practically feel the mud sticking at your feetEvening StandardA brilliant evocation of place grasped in its modernityGuardianDillon ... has a WG Sebald-like gift for interrogating the landscape ... a work of real elegiac seriousness that goes to the heart of a case of human loss and destruction in Englands sinister pastures green Ian Thomson, Irish TimesExhilarating ... utterly beguilingLiterary Review

Tormented Hope is a book about mind and body, fear and hope, illness and imagination. It explores, in the stories of nine individuals, the relationship between mind and body as it is mediated by the experience, or simply the terror, of being ill. And in an intimate investigation of those nine lives, it shows how the mind can make a prison of the body, by distorting our sense of ourselves as physical beings. Brian Dillon, whose brilliant debut In the Dark Room established him as an uncommonly intelligent and fluent explorer of the realm where ideas and emotions overlap, looks at nine prominent hypochondriacs - James Boswell, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Daniel Paul Schreber, Alice James, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol - and what their lives tell us about the way the mind works with, and against, the body. His findings are stimulating and surprising, and the stories he tells are often moving, sometimes hilarious, and always gripping.

When 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. Ambivalence 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. Its 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. In 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, Ambivalence is an argument for the poetic and revolutionary force of changing yourself and even the world by changing what you know.

Una delicatessen literaria: un ensayo sobre el arte de escribir ensayos y el placer de leerlos. Ensayismo reflexiona sobre el sentido de escribir ensayos en el mundo actual y explora los diversos enfoques y posibilidades: personal, critico, polemico, seductor, digresivo, elucubrativo, asociativo, erudito, apasionado, desapasionado, reflexivo, curioso, ironico, aforistico... Recorre la historia del genero y homenajea a sus grandes maestros: Montaigne, Sir Thomas Browne, Pascal, Charles Lamb, Emerson, Thomas de Quincey, Virginia Woolf, Cyril Connolly, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, Maurice Blanchot, Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Hardwick, Janet Malcolm, W. G. Sebald... Entrecruzando sus propias experiencias y sus lecturas, Brian Dillon reivindica el ensayo como aventura literaria y celebra la riqueza inagotable de este genero, que es una forma lucida de contemplar y entender la vida

Este libro parte de una propuesta muy singular. El autor reúne frases –no necesariamente las más celebres ni las más trascendentales- de veintisiete escritores –desde Shakespeare a algunos actuales–