
Any Person Is the Only Self
Essays
by Elisa Gabbert
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Pub Date Jun 11 2024 | Archive Date Jul 11 2024
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | FSG Originals
Description
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.
A Note From the Publisher2>
Elisa Gabbert is the author of the poetry collections L’Heure Bleue, The Self Unstable, and The French Exit. Her debut collection of essays, The Word Pretty, was published in 2018. The Self Unstable was chosen by the New Yorker as one of the best books of 2013. Gabbert's work has appeared in The New Yorker, Boston Review, The Paris Review Daily, Pacific Standard, Guernica, The Awl, Electric Literature, The Harvard Review, and many other venues. She lives in Denver.
Advance Praise
Praise for Any Person Is the Only Self
“Gabbert is one of my favorite living writers, whether she’s deconstructing a poem or tweeting about Seinfeld. Her essays are what I love most, and her newest collection—following 2020’s The Unreality of Memory—sees Gabbert in rare form: witty and insightful, clear-eyed and candid. I adored these essays.” —Sophia M. Stewart, The Millions (Most Anticipated)
“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
Praise for The Unreality of Memory
“Gabbert draws masterly portraits of the precise, uncanny affects that govern our psychological relationship to calamity . . . bending crisp, clear language into shapes that illustrate the shifting logic of the disastrous . . . [with] expansive curiosity and encyclopedic style.” —Alexandra Kleeman, The New York Times
“A voice for our anxious, wired times, if ever there was one.” —Hephzibah Anderson, The Guardian
“One of those books that send you to your notebook every page or so . . . A work of uncanny prescience.” —Robin Jones, The Paris Review
“[Gabbert] find[s] angles readers might not otherwise see . . . Like massive buildings, her subjects are hard to fit in a single frame; she circles them, finding all the vantages she can.” —Megan Marz, The Washington Post
“The kind of essays that don’t only teach you things, they leave you thinking harder and deeper about what it means to live in this world.” —Lincoln Michel, BOMB
Available Editions
EDITION | Other Format |
ISBN | 9780374605896 |
PRICE | $18.00 (USD) |
PAGES | 240 |
Available on NetGalley
Average rating from 72 members
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