Like how if (Anne Boyer). What, gone without a word? (William Shakespeare) -- Fair hopes of ending all (John Donne) -- O altitudo (Sir Thomas Browne) -- Daguerreotype, &c. (Thomas DeQuincey) -- Exaltation of Lucy Snowe (Charlotte Brontë) -- History of the lights and shadows (George Eliot) -- Traditions of air (john Ruskin) -- Suppose a sentence (Gertrude Stein) -- How how how what what what how -- when (Virginia Woolf) -- All kinds of obscure tensions (Samuel Beckett) -- (Small pictures 1915-1940) (Frank O'Hara) -- Splinters of actuality (Elizabeth Bowen) -- Obeying the form of the curve (James Baldwin) -- The grand illusion (Joan Didion) -- A tour of the monuments ( Robert Smithson) -- It is only a paper dagger (Maeve Brennan) -- To eat is not to respect a menu (Roland Barthes) -- Albeit succoured by a cult (Whitney Balliett) -- The cunning of destruction (Elizabeth Hardwick) -- Suite Vénitienne (Susan Sontag) -- A ritual feast (Annie Dillard) -- Broken Tongue (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha) -- Saving imprecision (Janet Malcolm) -- Surprised his shoes (Fleur Jaeggy) -- Before she solidified (Hilary Mantel) -- Gusto notwithstanding (Claire-Louise Bennett) -- Or some not-stupid sentences (Anne Carson) -- Like how if (Anne Boyer).
Summary:
"A captivating meditation on the power of the sentence by the author of Essayism, a 2018 New Yorker book of the year. In Suppose a Sentence, Brian Dillon, whom John Banville has called "a literary flâneur in the tradition of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin," has written a sequel of sorts to Essayism, his roaming love letter to literature. In this new book 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 Janet Malcolm, 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"-- Provided by publisher.
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