Essayism Trilogy Signed & Numbered Indie Exclusive Edition

The Essayism Trilogy appears as a limited edition clothbound hard- back as part of Fitzcarraldo Editions’ First Decade Collection, featuring a new preface by the author, marbled endpapers and signed and numbered bookplates.
The First Decade Collection is a hardback limited edition series featuring ten important books from Fitzcarraldo Editions’ first decade of publishing. Designed by art director Ray O’Meara, each book is casebound in fine linen cloth with custom marbled endpapers and signed and numbered book plates, with a run of 1000 copies each.
The First Decade Collection reflects the breadth of Fitzcarraldo Editions’ contemporary publishing, which focuses on ambitious, imaginative and innovative writing, both in translation and in the English language, and marks a decade of publishing. The 2015, 2018, 2022 and 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature laureates Svetlana Alexievich, Olga Tokarczuk, Annie Ernaux and Jon Fosse are all included in the series, out on 24 October 2024.

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.

‘[W]ritten in lucid, exacting and unsentimental prose, Essayism is a vital book for people who turn to art – and especially writing – for consolation.’ - Lauren Elkin, Guardian (praise for Essayism).

‘Each chapter focuses on a sentence chosen not for its historical importance, nor for its connection to the book’s other essays, but simply out of love. As Dillon puts it, his chief criterion is a sense of “affinity.” What emerges is a...read more...