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Essays
by Elisa Gabbert
Contagiously curious essays on reading, art, and the life of the mind, from the acclaimed author of The Unreality of Memory.
Who are we when we read? When we journal? Are we more ourselves alone or with friends? Right now or in memory? How does time transform us and the art we love?
In sixteen dazzling, expansive essays, the acclaimed essayist and poet Elisa Gabbert explores a life lived alongside books of all kinds: dog-eared and destroyed, cherished and discarded, classic and clichėd, familiar and profoundly new. She turns her witty, searching mind to the writers she admires, from Plath to Proust, and the themes that bind them―chance, freedom, envy, ambition, nostalgia, and happiness. She takes us to the strange edges of art and culture, from hair metal to surf movies to party fiction. Any Person Is the Only Self is a love letter to literature and to life, inviting us to think alongside one of our most thrilling and versatile critics.
"Invigorating ... [Gabbert's] lively commentary offers fresh takes on classic literature ... [She] is an original thinker, and the literary analysis is refreshingly unstuffy. Bookworms will appreciate these intelligent essays." ―Publishers Weekly
"A work of embodied and experiential criticism, a record of its author's shifting relationships with the literature that defines her life ... Gabbert is a master of mood, not polemic ... In place of the analytic pleasures of a robustly defended thesis, we find the fresh thrills of a poet's perfected phrases and startling observations. Any Person Is the Only Self is both funny and serious, a winning melee of high and low cultural references, as packed with unexpected treasures as a crowded antique shop ... She is a fiercely democratic thinker, incapable of snobbery and brimming with curiosity." ―The Washington Post
"Any Person is the Only Self is absolutely brilliant, full of clarity and mystery and light: Gabbert effs the ineffable, describes the impossible to describe―the state of reading, what it means to remember. I'm still thinking about these essays, by which I mean still thinking about Gabbert's own thoughts; I keep bringing them up in conversation. Elisa Gabbert is one of my favorite living writers." ―Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Souvenir Museum and Bowlaway
"Elisa Gabbert is a reader's reader, smart and funny and endlessly insightful ... Any Person Is the Only Self made me want to read even more than I already do, and to do so better and more deeply; long before I reached its last page, I knew I would begin it again the second I finished." ―Matt Bell, author of Appleseed and Refuse to Be Done
This information about Any Person Is the Only Self 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.
Elisa Gabbert is the author of Normal Distance, The Unreality of Memory, and several other collections of poetry, essays,and criticism. She writes the On Poetry column for The New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic, The Believer, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, and other publications.
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