Rating: 
Summary: The Educated Gentleman
Review: There would be, it seems to me, a different subtitle on this book if it weren't for the tenacity of its author in portraying the thing called nowadays 'non-fiction' (or better yet, 'creative non-fiction') as something slightly higherbrow than that which is passing as the same.In the slush of memoirs about the average emotional self-discovery tedium of American 20-somethings' lives, _Halls of Fame: Essays_ is an extraordinary achievement and about as exasperating an enjoyment as a reviewing and reading experience can be for both reader and reviewer. I should know; I tried reviewing it twice but stopped midway during both attempts. As tedious as those trendy memoirs are, it's even more tedious to try to talk about what this book is: Personal essay? Surely not. D'Agata is unusually coy about his personal life as he gives only tantalizing details about experiences that would be fleshed out into whole books in the hands of lesser writers. Travelogue? He travels, certainly, but more likely this is a series of journeys and discoveries and even dead ends, which together in one offering are far different from travel writing. Biography? There's some of that, yes. But more specifically, D'Aata's been credited with 'inventing' lyric essays, which is a useful term and one often applied to his work. It could in fact be the most appropriate one therefore for this collections of oddball researches into oddball Americans and American ideas: World's Tallest things; presidents of crackpot organizations; demented artists of painting and dance; etc. But what seems to be the defining characteristic of these essays isn't the weirdness of their subjects (after all, we've seen that before), but instead the odd mix of beauty and ugliness in the style of the prose itself. I was personally at first a little put off by the prose because of it's airy look on the page. D'Agata comes from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, home to his generation's most popular running aesthtic trend, 'the soft avant garde,' as it's been called. Worse yet, he comes to us from there with two MFA's, which suggests his suceptibility to that program's wiles might have been even greater than ususal. But that is the interesting hitch. D'Agata's not soft in his experimentalism at all. The texts he references suggest a deep-rooted appeal in his young writer's taste for the truly avant garde--the kind of art that involves the reader, viewer, listener, etc., in the very making of the art. Which is where the term 'lyric' probably comes from in his work. For while not only seeking to engage his readership with difficult prose, he also pays out that engagement with an ear for the ancient music of prose that is very likely unparalleled in young writers. I think here is an essayist--for let us call him what he likes--intent of reviving a dead art, and doing it in the most spectacular of ways.
Rating: 
Summary: the spunwork of a boring artform enwebbed his very fans
Review: i think the reviews here are either written by d'agata's own family and friends or the writers are all delusional. perhaps they dodn't realize that the previous working titles to d'agata's "masterpiece" were PLAINWATER, THE AGE OF WIRE AND STRING, and A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS. oh wait, those weren't the previous titles to his book, those are the books d'agata plagarized while writing this arrogant collection of nonsense.
Rating:
Summary: Essaying without the Cobwebs, a Reluctant Review
Review: I am not a John D'Agata fan. I think there are better young writers like Dave Eggers or Jonathan Safran Foer who can make experimentalismmuch more palatable and easier to graspwhile not betraying the spirit of such "experimentaing". With that said, I just finished a course in which we were forced to read this book and after discussing it for two weeks there are some things about it which seem good and even re-markable. First of all, the essay form is an ignored form of creative writing thatD'Agata has smartly pounced on. Really, if he were writing in any other genre what he's doing here in this book wouldn't be as highly praised. But the essay is still a dodgey form. It's got cobwebs and lace all over it still and has had trouble shaking off the shackles of memoir. What D'Agata has found therefore is a way of "essaying" (a term we used in class) that is neither old fashioned nor annoyingly stream of conscious-y. Particularly good are the first and last essays, in which he steps lighly into the pools of the avant garde without getting himself drenched and silly-looking. The essays still resemble essays when he is done. But that is about as kind as I can be in a review of the book. Personally, I've heard things about the kid that would make your head spin and make you vomit, as he is said to be arrogant according to our instructor. Why do all artists have to be that way? I have advice for Mr. d'Agata: wait until your actually famous to don the attitude, bud!
Rating:
Summary: Unclassifiable
Review: Usually essays are supposed to be in books about the Civil War, or how to get into college, or score on a first date. They're not supposed to be in poetry books, and yet here is a book that makes it very clear upfront that it's trying to be considered as a bunch of essays. The problem is that it's nothing like essays. These are little and long prose pieces, like prose poems, that combine to make a larger picture than they themselves culd provide alone. It's probably best left unclassified. I usually feel that when I encounter something that turns me on like this I like to not put it into a category, not because it's cooler that way but because it's less prone to the damages of genre. This is now at the top of my list as books I want to protect from that damage. The Flat Earth essay is the greatest 25 pages of thinking--difficult no less--I've read recently by ANY writer, let alone a writer as green (in years I mean) as this. His Martha Graham biography is touching and soaring at once, and the Deep Springs piece (which is where our son went to school) is the perfect small encapsulation of a place unclassifiable too. What a treasure, what a find.
Rating:
Summary: The best essayist of this generation
Review: This is closer to perfection than any 27 year old should logically be able to get in talent and intelligence and sheer clarity of thought and emotion. Please come out with another soon!
Rating:
Summary: A Blessing on this Lowly Genre
Review: He makes the genre proud of itself. What more do you want?
Rating:
Summary: essays poems and the stuff in between
Review: he'll totally rock your little memoir-lovin' world! i came across the book in a poetry class--goes to show you how much this webstore knows. altho he actually calls the things essays himself on the cover, still i don't think there's anything essayistsic about this stuff. we had to choose something from the semester to recite in class this spring, and two of us chose some of these 'essays'. it was then that i finally heard the stuff out loud and could tell he was using some of the same rules we have in poetry. but i guess it's interesting too that while these work as poems and look like them and sound like them too, they can also pass for well researched journalism. or something like that.well, it's good stuff anyway. i think only one clunker got through in this book. the long 'sentence' about a college the writer went to. that one just feels like a joke to me--to much like dave eggers, ben marcus and david foster wallace. it's a prestigious crowd to be in, but this guy really belongs in his own league, his own genre. with finger's crossed for his next...!
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Summary: The Lyric Essay Kid
Review: I didn't really know what that word 'LYRIC ESSAY' was supposed to mean until I picked up this book. Seems pretty clear by now. Wow...this kid rocks!
Rating:
Summary: The Boy Who Loved Essays
Review: I don't want to call him a freak, because I don't actually mean this in a mean way, I just am kinda baffled by this book that seemed to come out of nowhere. When I read it the guy at Politics and Prose who recommended it told me no one had ever heard of it, but here lo and behold are a tons of reviews. Something's up with this book...and I just don't know what. I don't know if this is journalism or poetry or something else altogether, but the fact that after reading it I could still think I could easily classify it as either is both weird and also really neat. You have to give it some time to work some magic on you, I warn you. Because it's not the easiest book to read. But unlike some other recent hipster literature from generation X, this one will stay with you a long time. I read in an interview that he the author calls these essays. They don't look a thing like essays! Someone's gotta get this boy out more often!!
Rating:
Summary: America's Finest Hybrid
Review: I checked out this writer several weeks ago in the U.S. and noticed immediately the similarities between him and the other American sweetheart hybrid poet, Anne Carson. I haven't finished all of the book yet but have so far decided that it will be the first book of its kind (including the famous Carson's) that I don't put down promising to return to later only to find that I have lost the book completely, or perhaps even forgotten about it. The formal ballyhoo employed but most young and "hip" American prose stylists these days can get aggravating to say the least. All style and no substance is the usual line used in their reference. But here, in a series of essays that stretch the very foundations upon which the old masters of the essay form wrought out their careful and exact arguments over millenia since Seneca, D'Agata's experiments never seem unprofound or superfluous to the matter at hand. And they vary greatly, his forms, which suggests to me an intelligence of and a sympathy with his subjects that is very rare indeed. A discussion of phallocentrism at a bizzare all male school at which the author apparently once was astudent is told in one enormously long and impeccably grammatical sentence. A meditation on the wonders of the world is fittingly a kind of list that never ends, metaphorically speaking at least. A heartfelt and earnest struggle to try to understand the philosophy of a man who calls himself the president of the flat earth society is arranged as akind of map arund which this reader at least found himself at many times lost, but never unhappily so. It is a thrilling work, and one which has been virtually unheard of here at home. In the United States there is tradition--or at least a "fad" for--this kind of coy experimentalism. D'Agata shies away from what's been done. He eschews the easy gimmicks and presents a thoroughly challenging and rewarding experience for the reader that pays off time and again. I think it one of the finest hybrids I have ever read.
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