The Essayism Trilogy

The Essayism Trilogy appears as a limited edition clothbound hardback as part of Fitzcarraldo Editions’ First Decade Collection, featuring a new preface by the author, marbled endpapers and signed and numbered bookplates.

Published in one volume for the first time, The Essayism Trilogy brings together Brian Dillon’s loose trilogy on the intimate and abstract pleasures of reading and looking. Essayism is a personal, critical and polemical book about the genre, its history and contemporary possibilities. In Suppose a Sentence, 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. 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.