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Suppose a Sentence

Suppose a Sentence

by Brian Dillon

New York Review Books ·2020 ·232 pages
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About This Book

Suppose a Sentence is a critical and personal reflection on the art of the sentence in literature, widely conceived. It is both an experiment in the attentive form of the essay - asking what happens, and where one might wander, when as readers and writers we pay minute attention to the language before us - and a polemic for certain kinds of experiment in prose. In a series of essays, each taking a single sentence as its starting point, the book explores style, voice and context. But it also uses its subjects - from George Eliot to Joan Didion, John Donne to Annie Dillard - to ask what the sentence is today and what it might become next.


Reviews

"In this delightful literary ramble, Dillon (Essayism), a creative writing professor at Queen Mary University of London, expounds upon remarkable sentences from a variety of voices in literature, past and present."

Publishers Weekly Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"If for Orwell good prose is like a windowpane, then much in Suppose a Sentence would presumably have him reaching for a duster."

Chris Allnutt· Financial Times Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"This book is about sentences, but it is also about writers; those crafts-folk that string words together, like lanterns, across this inky, squally sea of existence."

Kerri Ni Dochartaigh· The Irish Times Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Dillon also has an eye for the strange little choices others may overlook ..."

Katie da Cunha Lewin· Los Angeles Review of Books Read review ↗ Near the Top

"Dillon scorns the advocates of "plain style" who drone on about 'the perils of 'jargon,' all the while deaf to their own obnoxious and excluding conventions.' He likes his language knotty and challenging, and being something of a metaphysical himself ..."

John Banville· The Wall Street Journal Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

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