{"title":"Books by Brian Dillon","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781804270165","title":"Affinities","description":"\u003cp\u003eWhat do we mean when we claim affinity with an object or picture, or say affinities exist between such things? \u003cem\u003eAffinities\u003c\/em\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 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, \u003cem\u003eAffinities\u003c\/em\u003e is an extraordinary book about the intimate and abstract pleasures of reading and looking.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43128041242802,"sku":"9781804270165","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781804270165.jpg?v=1786026584"},{"product_id":"9781910695418","title":"Essayism","description":"\u003cp\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\u003cp\u003eHow to write about essays and essayists while staying true to these contradictions? \u003cem\u003eEssayism\u003c\/em\u003e 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":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309046182261,"sku":"9781910695418","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781910695418_824a7821-f367-426e-8b42-c603d75bb9e0.jpg?v=1786028974"},{"product_id":"9781913097011","title":"Suppose a Sentence","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eSuppose a Sentence\u003c\/i\u003e, Brian Dillon turns his attention to the oblique and complex pleasures of the sentence.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBoth an exercise in practical criticism and a set of experiments or challenges, \u003ci\u003eSuppose a Sentence\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309394178421,"sku":"9781913097011","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913097011_65618780-dd88-44c1-8e53-55e9332a1d75.jpg?v=1786030870"},{"product_id":"the-great-explosion","title":"The Great Explosion","description":"\u003cb\u003eA masterful account of a terrible disaster in a remarkable place: shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 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 Britain's strangest and most remarkable landscapes - where he has been a habitual explorer for many years. \u003ci\u003eThe Great Explosion\u003c\/i\u003e is a profound work of narrative, exploration and inquiry from one of our most brilliant writers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e'The Great Explosion\u003c\/i\u003e is \u003cb\u003eexhilarating and moving and lyrical\u003c\/b\u003e. 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. \u003cb\u003eI loved it.' Edmund de Waal,\u003c\/b\u003e author of \u003ci\u003eThe Hare with Amber Eyes\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e'\u003c\/i\u003e'What a \u003cb\u003efascinating, unclassifiable, brilliant \u003c\/b\u003ebook, confirming Brian Dillon's reputation as one of our most innovative and elegant non-fictioneers. No one else could have written it.' Robert Macfarlane, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Old Ways\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e'Forensic, fascinating, endlessly interesting' Philip Hoare\u003c\/b\u003e, Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author of \u003ci\u003eLeviathan \u003c\/i\u003eand\u003ci\u003eThe Sea Inside\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'A subtle, human history of the early twentieth century ... Explosions are a fruitful subject in Dillon's 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. \u003ci\u003eThe Great Explosion\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e deftly covers a tumultuous period of history while centring on the tiniest moments - just punctuation marks in time' \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003eFinancial Times \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'[Dillon's] account of the Faversham explosion is as bold as it is dramatic, while his descriptive passages about the marshlands of Kent are \u003cb\u003eso evocative that you can practically feel the mud sticking at your feet\u003c\/b\u003e' \u003ci\u003eEvening Standard\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'A \u003cb\u003ebrilliant\u003c\/b\u003e evocation of place grasped in its modernity' \u003ci\u003eGuardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'Dillon ... 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 England's sinister pastures green' Ian Thomson, \u003ci\u003eIrish Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e'\u003c\/i\u003eExhilarating ... utterly beguiling' \u003ci\u003eLiterary Review\u003c\/i\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57481560097141,"sku":"9780241956762","price":15.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780241956762.jpg?v=1786089831"},{"product_id":"ambivalence","title":"Ambivalence","description":"\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\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\u003e Ambivalence\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","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57487857254773,"sku":"9781804272473","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781804272473.jpg?v=1786355079"},{"product_id":"in-the-dark-room","title":"In the Dark Room","description":"Boldly combining the highly personal with the brilliantly scholarly, \u003ci\u003eIn the Dark Room\u003c\/i\u003e explores the question of how memory works emotionally and culturally. It is narrated through the prism of the author's 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.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57490133975413,"sku":"9781910695722","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781910695722.jpg?v=1786442021"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-brian-dillon.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}