{"product_id":"essayism","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\u003e  How 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":"MediaPlace","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57314704884094,"sku":"NW9781910695418","price":11.34,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1379\/1261\/files\/9781910695418.jpg?v=1778249708","url":"https:\/\/mediaplace.com\/products\/essayism","provider":"MediaPlace","version":"1.0","type":"link"}