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Summary: he's america's anne carson!
Review: he's poetry's most diehard journalist...nonfiction's little rebel lyricist... he's somebody to watch definitely... and someone please convince him to put out a cd!
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Summary: Here's a Star To Watch Being Born
Review: Keep your eye on this guy. Like David Foster Wallace, John D'Agata is bound to burst into the popular mainsteam while keeping his allegiance to the alternative experimental world that reared him. It's because of all the mixes his writings combine--poetry and prose, deep seriousness and high comedy, facts and imagination--that he is sure to find an audience larger than the high brow literary world he's stuck in right now.
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Summary: After Postmodernism Comes...?
Review: How does a young writer, trained under the big circus tents of postmodernism--but only AFTER postmodernism was already declared dead and buried--find a form and style and voice in the mushy contemporary American world of post postmodernism? HALLS OF FAME is one example. If one tendency of postmodern texts is that they promise coherence but then, in the end, intentionally fail to deliver on that promise, what John D'Agata does is not promise anything in his essays, but deliver anyway everything we could have hoped for in an essay. If you love essays and want to know what's happening right now in the form, this is a wonderful mix of the traditional and alternative in nonfiction.
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Summary: Trust Me: LA READS!! And Reads WELL!
Review: America, please beleive me. We're not all as dumb-sounding as the person who posted the one bad review on here from LA. Hey buddy, a hint: If yours is the only bad personal attack review out of the 40+ who have offered otherwise glowing reviews of the same book, do you really think the problem is everyone else's? Obviously you're missing something--and I don't mean intelligence or "academic elite standing". I mean patience and creativity. That's right, creativity. I am a stay-at-home mom, haven't been in a classroom in 17 years, and spend more time with my five and two year olds than I do with the "intellectual elite." Nevertheless, I ADORE this book. Know why? Because there is such a thing as reading with your head turned on, taking part in the story as the story's being told. What sets this book apart and what makes it so much fun for me to read is the author's ability and his willingness to not TELL stories, but to SHOW them. He presents scenes instead of theses; images instead of arguments. Everyone on here is probably right that you don't often see that in the essay world. Kudos to him for stretching the form. And shame on Mr. LA for not letting him.
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Summary: Is America this smart?
Review: A book this weird? Actually getting read? Cheers to us all! Bravo to this publisher! Encore to the writer of this extraordinary act of imagination, daring, and even courage--given the climate of American "literature" in this day and age....
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Summary: I have to do this...
Review: Ok. One confession: I know John D'Agata. Or I just met him, at least. So I figure it's slightly distasteful to be adding a review of his book. However I've just returned from a reading of his on campus (I'm writing from Missoula, Montana, home of the University of Montana) and have all of a sudden come to love the book in a whole new way that I just feel compelled to say something. This guy is doing something that no one else is doing now, that no one else has ever attempted in fact. I talked to him. He's shy as heck. He said the work he's doing isn't all that different from the work that a bunch of ancient Japanese and Roman writers I've never heard of were doing 2-3 thousand years ago. But I think he's the only guy on the planet who would count them. If you consider him a poet: the work is more far-reaching, better researched, and more subtly felt than most of what his generation is producing (in throngs) now. If you consider him an essayist: well, if you consider him an essayist you're just unlikely to find anything at all to compare it to. (Memoir can't hold a candle to him. The critical work being done in nonfiction has reached a point of critical fatigue. And the personal and cultural essays being written by whiny gen-xers are so blandly put together for the enjoyment of masses upon masses of people, that they simply fall flat, emotionless.) I guess in short, I recommend this book more strongly than anything else I've read in the past 2 or so years. And if this means anything to you I'll add it: last night I cried at John's reading. He wasn't reading anything about himself necessarily. He wasn't being sensational. He was simply writing and reading about a subject so intimately and with such obvious passion that when he began to tear up in the course of the reading, faces in the entire audience swelled. I simply haven't experienced a reading, nor a book, quite like this ever. Enjoy it. I swear you'll enjoy it.
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Summary: I KNOW A ONE-WORD REVIEW IS BAD BUT
Review: thisbookissimplyscrumptous!
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Summary: a review of john d'agata by robin nagle
Review: try to pin him down and he swerves out from under you. try to call him a poet and he flips over to become an essayist. try to find another example of a more elusive, entertaining and simultaneoulsy earnest writer and you'll spend your life frustrated. whether anyone else right now is reading this new book by john d'agata i don't know, but i know for sure that his is a name and a style that we're all likely to know very well in years to come. it's just going to take a while for us to catch up with him.
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Summary: dear memorist: how to understand this very hybrid writer
Review: ...think of john d'agata as nonfiction's ambassador to the literary world...
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Summary: Gosh, I Guess it's "A Whole New Genre"
Review: I guess that says a lot that two people descibed this book in the exact same way. My initial response to that however would be that it seems creepy, as if the guy's girlfriends were on here writing reviews or something. But then I noticed that two other authors, Phillip Lopate and Annie Dillard (pretty good authorities in the field I suppose!), both described the effect this book has had on the nonfiction community in exactly the same way: that he's "redefining the modern essay." I was given this book by a friend, and then taken to a reading of his in New York earlier in the year. It IS pretty phenomenal, I must say. Everything about him is phenomenal: his age, his grasp of the work of his literary forebears, his absolute almost wacky passion for the essay, and his obvious ear for everyday poetic speech--all of it comes through in the work. And so to use the cliche term surrounding this guy, I guess I'd have to say that it really does seem like a whole new genre. I've at least never heard anything like it. I wanted to go up to this guy after the reading and ask him to read the whole thing to me! Most surprising and most exciting for me was the discovery while reading (yes, I finally did read it, chickening out of asking him to read more to me in private at the reading) was that he is so gentle in the way he deals with his subjects. I think the prose looks a little offputting on the page, all scambled around and messy and stuff, but once you get int there, meet his characters, feel his passion, you're putty, pure putty in his hands. Probably we won't read anything like his "Essay About the Ways in Which We Matter" for a very long time, not at least until the whole nonfiction world starts copying him, which, it seems, could very well happen, given the utter and startling originality he's bringing to his form--this "whole new genre"!
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