Synopses & Reviews
An expansive and exhilarating world tour of innovative nonfiction writing
I think the reason weve never pinpointed the real beginning to this genre is because weve never agreed on what the genre even is. Do we read nonfiction in order to receive information, or do we read it to experience art? Its not very clear sometimes. This, then, is a book that tries to offer a clear objective: I am here in search of art. I am here to track the origins of an alternative to commerce.
John DAgata leaves no tablet unturned in his exploration of the roots of the essay. In this soaring anthology he takes the reader from ancient Mesopotamia to classical Greece and Rome, from fifth-century Japan to nineteenth-century France, to modern Brazil, Germany, Barbados, and beyond. With brief and brilliant introductions to seminal works by Heraclitus, Sei Sho-nagon, Michel de Montaigne, Jonathan Swift, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Octavio Paz, and more than forty other luminaries, DAgata reexamines the international forebears of todays American nonfiction. This idiosyncratic collection makes a perfect historical companion to DAgatas The Next American Essay, a touchstone among students and practitioners of the lyric essay.
John DAgata is the author of Halls of Fame and the editor of The Next American Essay. He teaches in the nonfiction writing program at the University of Iowa and is the editor of lyric essays for Seneca Review. John DAgata leaves no tablet unturned in his exploration of the roots of the essay. In this anthology he takes the reader from ancient Mesopotamia to classical Greece and Rome, from fifth-century Japan to nineteenth-century France, to modern Brazil, Germany, Barbados, and beyond. With brief introductions to seminal works by Heraclitus, Sei Sho-nagon, Michel de Montaigne, Jonathan Swift, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Octavio Paz, and more than forty other luminaries, DAgata reexamines the international forebears of todays American nonfiction. This idiosyncratic collection makes a perfect historical companion to DAgatas The Next American Essay, a touchstone among students and practitioners of the lyric essay. "From Ziusudra of Sumer to Antonin Artaud and beyond, the essay in all its glory is on full display in this ingenious anthology. The title doesn't convey the volume's rangethe spirit of factual expression, worked on by the imagination, transplanted into many times and in many cultures. This is a book to dip into or read through, certainly to savor for its diversity. The essay tent is wide, and under D'Agata's editorship and astute eye it includes hybrid forms, from William Blake's 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' through the prose poems of Aloysius Bertrand, Baudelaire and Mallarmé to a 'performative essay' on Bob Marley by Kamau Brathwaite. Readers will be familiar with the aphorisms of Francis Bacon, somewhat less familiar with the eccentric virtuosity of Sir Thomas Browne and much more so with Jonathan Swift's 'A Modest Proposal.' But readers are perhaps most likely to be turned on for the first time by the prose artistry of Matsuo Basho, the avant-garde musings of Clarice Lispector on the (not-so) simple egg and the obsessive documentary-like musings of Marguerite Duras. Overall, this imaginative international collection showcases the art of short nonfiction at its best."Publishers Weekly
TABLE OF CONTENTS
To the Reader
Prologue
Ziusudra of Sumer, The List of Ziusudra
1500 B.C.E.: Ennatum of Akkad, Dalogue of Pessimism
500 B.C.E.: Heraclitus of Ephesus, I Have Looked Diligently at My Own Mind
100 B.C.E.: Theophrastus of Eressos, These Are Them
46: Mestrius Plutrach, Some Information about the Spartans
315: Lucius Seneca, Sick
315: Awinaki Tshipala, Questions and Answers
427: Tao Chien, The Biography of Mr. Five-Willows
790: Li Tsung-Yuan, Is There a God?
858: Li Shang-yin, Miscellany
996: Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book
1281: Yoshida Kenko, In all things I yearn for the past
1336: Francesco Petrarch, My Journey Up the Mountain
1499: Bernardino de Sahagun, Definitions of Earthly Things
1580: Michel de Montaigne, On Some Verses of Virgil
1623: Francis Bacon, Antithesis of Things
1658: Thomas Brown, Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk
1692: Matsuo Basho, Narrow Road to the Interior
1729: Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public
1763: Christopher Smart, My Cat Jeoffry
1790: William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
1849: Thomas De Quincey, The English Mail-Coach
1860: Aloysius Bertrand, Ondine
1869: Charles Baudelaire, Be Drunk
1873: Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell
1896: Stéphane Mallarmé, A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance
1907: Velimir Khlebnikov, The I-Singer of Universong
1913: Dino Campana, The Night
1924: Saint-John Perse, Anabasis
1930: Antonin Artaud, Eighteen Seconds
1935: Fernando Pessoa, Metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity
1941: Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth
1945: Paul Celan, Conversation in the Mountains
1952: Francis Ponge, The Pebble
1955: Edmond Jabè, Dread of One Single End
1957: Ana Hatherly, Tisanes
1959: Octavio Paz, Before Sleep
1960: Marguerite Yourcenar, Fires
1962: Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Teritus
1965: Julio Cortázar, The Instruction Manual
1967: Clarice Lispector, The Egg and the Chicken
1968: Michel Butor, Egypt
1969: Natlia Ginzburg, He and I
1970: Kamau Braithwaite, Trench Town Rock
1971: Peter Handke, Suggestions for Running Amok
1972: Marguerite Duras, The Atlantic Man
1973: Samuel Beckett, Afar a Bird
1974: Lisa Robertson, Seven Walks
Epilogue
John Berger, What Reconciles Me
Review
“Not only is this an anthology of some of the best essays that have been written in the United States over the last three decades but it is also a well-planned writing textbook. The editors are astute, talented, and experienced and the essays are wonderful. This is an important book.”
Review
"I'll Tell You Mine presents some of the country’s most exciting young essayists. Though their roots are in Iowa, their reach as innovators extends far into the realm of American letters today. This collection of work from their MFA days, and after, reveals the robust health of both the essay—in all its capacious forms—and the program itself."
Review
"While these essays are uniformly absorbing and artful, there's nothing uniform about the variety of sensibilities and styles showcased in I'll Tell You Mine. From the chonological to the collaged, from the political to the personal, each contributor suceeds in creating a vital and persuasive version of the world. Many of my favorite writers appear in these pages, and many others possess voices I look forward to investigating further. A rewarding and necessary collection."
Review
"Those of us who craft stories without inventing them as fiction writers do, or who pursue elusive ideas through the labyrinths of essays, or who speak in personal voices about public issues and shared mysteries—all of us in this tribe of truth-seekers owe a debt of gratitude to the scholars, teachers, and writers in the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program. They are pioneers, and talented ones. The fruits of their endeavors are on display here, in a collection that suggests the broad range of styles and subjects of this versatile genre."
Review
"Every history is a story, a marshaling of evidence to support a particular reading of the past. Of the Silk Road or Nordic myth. Of Alexandria or pirates or the atom bomb. John D'Agata's history is of the essay, that redheaded stepchild of literature which, he laments, is often mistaken for 'a genre that is merely a dispensary of data — not a true expression of one's dreams, ideas, or fears.'" Meehan Crist, The Believer (read the entire )
Synopsis
An expansive and exhilarating world tour of innovative nonfiction writing
I think the reason weve never pinpointed the real beginning to this genre is because weve never agreed on what the genre even is. Do we read nonfiction in order to receive information, or do we read it to experience art? Its not very clear sometimes. This, then, is a book that tries to offer a clear objective: I am here in search of art. I am here to track the origins of an alternative to commerce.
John DAgata leaves no tablet unturned in his exploration of the roots of the essay. The Lost Origins of the Essay takes the reader from ancient Mesopotamia to classical Greece and Rome, from fifth-century Japan to nineteenth-century France, to modern Brazil, Germany, Barbados, and beyond. With brief and brilliant introductions to seminal works by Heraclitus, Sei Sho-nagon, Michel de Montaigne, Jonathan Swift, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Octavio Paz, and more than forty other luminaries, DAgata reexamines the international forebears of todays American nonfiction. This idiosyncratic collection makes a perfect historical companion to DAgatas The Next American Essay, a touchstone among students and practitioners of the lyric essay.
Synopsis
Over the past three decades, nonfiction writing in its many forms—memoir, travel writing, essays, narrative nonfiction—has attained increasing popularity among the reading public and growing recognition within the literary canon. In this genre as in fiction and poetry, the University of Iowa has led the way in offering developing writers a setting where they can immerse themselves in their craft for a couple of years with a community of likeminded peers. This collection of 18 pieces—all of them by graduates of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, and all begun (though often not finished) while their authors were in the program—illustrates the range and evolution of nonfiction forms during this period. Each piece is accompanied by commentary from the author on an issue of writing process or craft that proved to be a challenge in drafting or revising the piece. Their work is put into broader context by a prologue from Robert Atwan, editor of the Best American Essays series, who details the rise of nonfiction as a literary genre since the New Journalism of the 1960s.
Synopsis
The University of Iowa is a leading light in the writing world. In addition to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for poets and fiction writers, it houses the prestigious Nonfiction Writing Program (NWP), which was the first full-time masters-granting program in this genre in the United States. Over the past three decades the NWP has produced some of the most influential nonfiction writers in the country.
I’ll Tell You Mine is an extraordinary anthology, a book rooted in Iowa’s successful program that goes beyond mere celebration to present some of the best nonfiction writing of the past thirty years. Eighteen pieces produced by Iowa graduates exemplify the development of both the program and the field of nonfiction writing. Each is accompanied by commentary from the author on a challenging issue presented by the story and the writing process, including drafting, workshopping, revising, and listening to (or sometimes ignoring) advice. The essays are put into broader context by a prologue from Robert Atwan, founding editor of the Best American Essays series, who details the rise of nonfiction as a literary genre since the New Journalism of the 1960s.
Creative nonfiction is the fastest-growing writing concentration in the country, with more than one hundred and fifty programs in the United States. I’ll Tell You Mine shows why Iowa’s leads the way. Its insider’s view of the Iowa program experience and its wealth of groundbreaking nonfiction writing will entertain readers and inspire writers of all kinds.
About the Author
Hope Edelman is best known for her internationally bestselling book Motherless Daughters, which has been followed by two revised editions and two sequels, and her memoir The Possibility of Everything. She teaches nonfiction writing at Antioch University in Los Angeles and returns every summer to teach in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.Robin Hemley is writer-in-residence and director of the writing program at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. He served as director of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program from 2004 to 2013. He has won many awards for his writing, including the Guggenheim and three Pushcart Prizes, and has published eleven books of prose.