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Published Jan 2017
144 pages
Genre: Essays
Publication Information
The first collection from a Whiting Writers' Award winner whose work has become a fixture of The Paris Review and n+1
Can civilization save us from ourselves? That is the question J. D. Daniels asks in his first book, a series of six letters written during dark nights of the soul. Working from his own highly varied experience - as a janitor, a night watchman, an adjunct professor, a drunk, an exterminator, a dutiful son - he considers how far books and learning and psychoanalysis can get us, and how much we're stuck in the mud.
In prose wound as tight as a copper spring, Daniels takes us from the highways of his native Kentucky to the Balearic Islands and from the Pampas of Brazil to the rarefied precincts of Cambridge, Massachusetts. His traveling companions include psychotic kindergarten teachers, Israeli sailors, and Southern Baptists on fire for Christ. In each dispatch, Daniels takes risks - not just literary (voice, tone, form) but also more immediate, such as spending two years on a Brazilian jiu-jitsu team (he gets beaten to a pulp, repeatedly) or participating in group psychoanalysis (where he goes temporarily insane).
Daniels is that rare thing, a writer completely in earnest whose wit never deserts him, even in extremis. Inventive, intimate, restless, streetwise, and erudite, The Correspondence introduces a brave and original observer of the inner life under pressure.
"Starred Review. An uncommonly auspicious debut." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. "[A] stunning debut...With careful wit, an attention to emotional nuance that reaches down to the gut, and an astounding ear for dialogue, Daniels writes with a kind of brutal authenticity that is not easily faked, whichever side of auto-fiction's hyphen he's writing from." - Booklist
"The letters here represent a bold and daring contribution to belles lettres; Daniels is an essayist to watch." - Publishers Weekly
"Masculinity as vulnerable, smelly smackdown, personal failure as syntactic delight: In this volatile, brilliant collection, Daniels recollects in not-quite tranquility a series of synesthesiac rearrangements of the self. The riveting swerves of his sentences and of his geographic and spiritual wanderings will make you keep asking what "here" might be. These essays pay tribute to 'the world… our common property.'" - Lisa Cohen, author of All We Know
"The Correspondence gives off the unmistakeable crackle of an original writer who has found a new form. It's hard to say who or what is meant to be on the receiving end of these "letters," but if you care about modern life you need to read them." - John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead
"Daniels sees what others don't, feels what others won't, and writes what others can't. He is a blazing virtuoso of the English sentence, an oracle with a vulnerable and willing heart, and he has produced a shockingly perfect book." - Sarah Manguso, author of Ongoingness
"J. D. Daniels's The Correspondence is an epic in fragments: masterly, comic, wise, daring. It is a book for everyone, from Kentucky to Cambridge to Kathmandu, though as a reader you may feel that Daniels is trafficking in secrets, meant for you alone. It is occult. It is so strong, it will melt the books on the shelves around it. This is a book that will become a legend, introducing one of the very best writers in the country. If I could thrust it into every true reader's hands, I would." - Mark Greif, author of The Age of the Crisis of Man
"What a nutjob! Increasingly these three words constitute my highest praise for – almost my ideal of – a writer, and in this regard J. D. Daniels takes the biscuit. I love the way he throws out everything, both in the sense of throwing it all at us, and the opposite: discarding everything that might be deemed necessary to the seemly construction of narrative. So The Correspondence gives us the best of both worlds." - Geoff Dyer, author ofWhite Sands
This information about The Correspondence was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
J. D. Daniels is the recipient of a 2016 Whiting Writers' Award and The Paris Review's 2013 Terry Southern Prize. His "Letter from Majorca" was selected for The Best American Essays 2013. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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