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chillcox15's review against another edition
5.0
If anything, Brian Dillon's collection of essays on essays in abstract and in specific can be a bit surface level, but it's a great little book that ties the analytical to the personal, and a great starting place for thinking about the different forms that essay-writing can take.
_tourist's review
informative
reflective
medium-paced
an excellently turned out collection with a name that drew me in but on reflection are little for. its general where i think particularity would have been more honest. truly excellent content however, tho it did cause me to have the following true, but unkind thought ⅓ of the way through:
"but it turns out i have considerably less patience than i had hoped for writers writing about writers writing about writing. name-drop drivel."
reading list most welcome.
lelandbuck's review
5.0
Reading books about writing can be a perilous activity. Writing about writing so often reduces the essential qualities of form and style to grammatical minutiae, or worse, elevates them to some mystical and impenetrable rite. We are fed promises and formulas, rules and best practices, and rarely perspective or inspiration. Into this paucity of good recent writing about writing comes Brian Dillon's book Essayism. This book manages to convey a great wealth of information about the essay as a form, it's rich history and endless variety without stooping to abstruse or doctrinaire prescriptions. It is at times richly personal offering occasional glimpses into the life of the writer, and is filled with thoughtful reflection on the masters of the form, new and old.
This book has earned a place of honor on my bookshelf, and is one I will return to time and again in the future.
This book has earned a place of honor on my bookshelf, and is one I will return to time and again in the future.
briancrandall's review
4.0
Dear essayist, do you remember that strange metaphor that William Carlos Williams deploys in his ‘Essay on Virginia' to describe the liberty of the essay to stop dead? Here it is, with a preamble that sounds conventional but really is not, and less so for 1925:
To essay is to try but not to attempt. It is to establish trial. The essay is the most human literary form in that it is always sure, it remains from the first to the last fixed. Nothing affects it. It may stop, but if it stops that is surely the end and so it remains perfect, just as with an infant which fails to continue.
Of course it is not such a curious image for the poet and family doctor to propose, but still it adds to the autonomy of the essay — which we should not confuse with unity — levels of violence and grief and retrospect that we had perhaps not expected, but which are quite in keeping with the stop-start form of 'Essay on Virginia' itself, which veers between the US state in the title and the literary genre that Williams wants not exactly to define but obliquely to outline. He is oddly, perhaps ironically, insistent on the essay's independence and integrity:
Perhaps one should say that it is only an essay when it is wholly uncoloured by that which passes through it. Every essay should be, to be human, exactly like another. But the perfect essay should have every word numbered, say as the bones in the body and the thoughts in the mind are fixed, permanent and never vary. Then there could be no confusion, no deception and the pleasure of reading would be increased.
This form which is selfsame and lucid and autonomous — it is also filled with new and disparate aspects or elements, it ranges these new possibilities in series, or better in some curious arrangement. Who could foresee, on top of Williams's peculiar image of the essay as a dead child, that he would give us this bizarre and apparently whimsical alternative:
Often there will appear some heirloom like the cut-glass jelly stand that Jefferson brought back from Paris for his daughter, a branching tree of crystal hung with glass baskets that would be filled with jelly — on occasion. This is the essence of all essays. [136–8]
e333mily's review against another edition
5.0
Every now and then I’m drawn back to the opening line of Emily Skilling’s ‘Bay’— “I feel a nessness”. That’s how I want to describe all my favourite pieces of writing—I feel a nessness while reading them. Because there’s no particular feeling or style or topic that joins them together in my heart, it’s just a certain ineffable quality that sinks in and touches something, though I’m not sure exactly what.
Which is really just to say: I loved this book! And I am so grateful to my dear friend Alexandra for lending it to me (and also: there is a nessness about the temporality of a loaned book. I have been taking pictures of my favourite passages instead of underlining, which feels like a sort of agreement between me and this copy, a promise that l will keep some part of it, some fragments, with me).
- - -
“What exactly do I mean, even, by "style"? Perhaps it is nothing but an urge, an aspiration, a clumsy access of admiration, a crush. On what? The very idea. […] "I like your style" means: I admire, dear human, what you have clawed back from sickness and pain and madness. I'm a fan, too much a fan, of your rising above.”
“I started with a list —well, here is one more, if you can bear the rhythm of one damn thing after another, for which the technical term is parataxis: […] Parataxis says: this happened, and then that happened, followed by this other. And so on, on, on.”
“As if I were packing my suitcase like Didion, I list all the things I want to put in an essay. I treat the essay as a container, because I want to smother the anxiety that comes with writing, because if I have a plan (and my plans are always lists, not diagrams) then I will not have to face the blank page or screen without a word or thought in my head. I can simply follow the entries in the list in their turn-A to Z, one to infinity. Except: the list, if it's doing its job, always leaves something to be invented or recalled, something forgotten in the moment of its making.”
“(Depression, among other things, has always felt to me like a drying up of one's reservoir of symbols and figures for a continued and perhaps even improved life.)”
“But how else to write? How else to be? And always the question, bound up with being, of who to read, what books and especially what essays might change things—change me.”
“Its a cliché, of course, the intimacy of writing and depression: writing as cause, cure or acutest expression. […] But, but, but: what if the cliché has been there all the time, what if the ruinous and rescuing affinity between depression and the essay is what got you into this predicament in the first place? What then?”

Which is really just to say: I loved this book! And I am so grateful to my dear friend Alexandra for lending it to me (and also: there is a nessness about the temporality of a loaned book. I have been taking pictures of my favourite passages instead of underlining, which feels like a sort of agreement between me and this copy, a promise that l will keep some part of it, some fragments, with me).
- - -
“What exactly do I mean, even, by "style"? Perhaps it is nothing but an urge, an aspiration, a clumsy access of admiration, a crush. On what? The very idea. […] "I like your style" means: I admire, dear human, what you have clawed back from sickness and pain and madness. I'm a fan, too much a fan, of your rising above.”
“I started with a list —well, here is one more, if you can bear the rhythm of one damn thing after another, for which the technical term is parataxis: […] Parataxis says: this happened, and then that happened, followed by this other. And so on, on, on.”
“As if I were packing my suitcase like Didion, I list all the things I want to put in an essay. I treat the essay as a container, because I want to smother the anxiety that comes with writing, because if I have a plan (and my plans are always lists, not diagrams) then I will not have to face the blank page or screen without a word or thought in my head. I can simply follow the entries in the list in their turn-A to Z, one to infinity. Except: the list, if it's doing its job, always leaves something to be invented or recalled, something forgotten in the moment of its making.”
“(Depression, among other things, has always felt to me like a drying up of one's reservoir of symbols and figures for a continued and perhaps even improved life.)”
“But how else to write? How else to be? And always the question, bound up with being, of who to read, what books and especially what essays might change things—change me.”
“Its a cliché, of course, the intimacy of writing and depression: writing as cause, cure or acutest expression. […] But, but, but: what if the cliché has been there all the time, what if the ruinous and rescuing affinity between depression and the essay is what got you into this predicament in the first place? What then?”