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Suppose a Sentence

Suppose a Sentence

by Brian Dillon

New York Review Books ·2020 ·232 pages
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I Index
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Maybe Someday

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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

"Explaining he has 45 notebooks filled with favorite sentences, Dillon focuses each of the book's 27 essays on a different one ..."

Publishers Weekly Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Dillon approaches language like a child outdoors before indifference has kicked in."

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

"an absorbing defence of literary originality and interpretation."

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

"For a quarter of a century, he tells us in his marvelous new book, he has been collecting them, in 'the back pages of whatever notebook I happen to be using,' the way, we might add, Vladimir Nabokov collected butterflies, with analytic passion and sustained wonderment ..."

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

"Dillon demonstrates that reading out of love, lingering over cherished sentences, can draw out an astonishing wealth of material ..."

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

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