Book
The book of delights / Ross Gay.
Record details
- ISBN: 9781616207922
- Physical Description: xii, 274 pages ; 19 cm
- Publisher: Chapel Hill, North Carolina : Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2019.
- Copyright: ©2019
Search for related items by subject
| Subject: | Gay, Ross, 1974- Life. Joy. |
| Genre: | Essays. |
Available copies
- 1 of 1 copy available at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Holds
- 0 current holds with 1 total copy.
| Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Circulation Modifier | Holdable? | Status | Due Date | Courses |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Emily Carr University of Art + Design | PS3607 .A9857 Z66 2019 (Text) | 30240990 | Book | Volume hold | Available | - |
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2018 December #2
On his forty-second birthday, poet Gay (Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, 2015) began a yearlong project to write, every day, about something that delighted him. The 100 of these essayettes shared here in chronological orderâand which are most delightfully read that wayâconsider things as contained as a high five from a stranger and concepts as vast as existence itself. The longhand in which Gay first wrote these (one of the project's rules) seems to uncurl on the typed page, in winding meanders and meaningful digressions that share a life-spanning spectrum of emotions and experiences. Gay discovers that his delights begin to compound and embed in one another. Stacking delights, saving up several to write about another day, is technically against the rules, but he does it anyway; and occasionally blowing off the project is its own delight. While Gay's delights embrace the darkness of racism and death, en masse they share a profound capacity for joy and belief in humankind. This stunning self-portrait of a gardener, a teacher, and a keen observer of life is sure to inspire. Copyright 2018 Booklist Reviews. - ForeWord Magazine Reviews : ForeWord Magazine Reviews 2019 - January/February
Ross Gay is known for his poetry, but The Book of Delights proves that he's also an adept essayist. In composing the book, Gay operated under a simple principle: keep a diary of entries over the course of one year, with each entry concerning something joyful. From this conceit he spins out a variety of reflections that are sometimes whimsical, sometimes touching, and always thoughtful.
Certain topics run throughout The Book of Delights, including Gay's love of gardening, the emotional impact of his favorite songs, and his appreciation for being in the moment. Seemingly small incidents are the springboard for little epiphanies. A mother and child sharing the burden of carrying a shopping bag across the street leads to a moving paean to mutual support. A shared high-five with a stranger becomes a tribute to human connection. A Lisa Loeb song leads to a memory about a childhood friend who invaded Gay's house to rearrange his furniture in an elaborate prank. Another friend's overuse of air quotes prompts a reverie on linguistics. The Book of Delights finds most of its joys in simple pleasures such as these.
Lest one think that Gay is merely a collector of droll sentiments, it should be noted that The Book of Delights doesn't shy away from the heavier side of life. Gay includes ruminations on weighty subjects such as loved ones who have passed on, the cold realities of racism, and America's president. Just as one can only truly enjoy sweetness after experiencing bitterness, he accommodates the full range of human experience. Documenting his travels and encounters over the course of his year with a wry, deft touch, his book stays true to its title and demonstrates his estimable talents as a prose stylist as well as poet.
© 2018 Foreword Magazine, Inc. All Rights Reserved. - Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2019 February #1
A collection of affirmations, noncloying and often provocative, about the things that make justice worth fighting for and life worth living.Gayâa poet whose last book, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, bears the semantically aligned title Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015)âis fully aware that all is not well in the world: "Racism is often on my mind," he writes by way of example. But then, he adds, so are pop music, books, gardening, and simple acts of kindness, all of which simple pleasures he chronicles in the "essayettes" that make up this engaging book. There is much to take delight in, beginning with the miraculous accident of birth, his parents, he writes, a "black man, white woman, the year of Loving v. Virginia, on a stolen island in the Pacific, a staging ground for American expansion and domination." As that brief passage makes clear, this is not a saccharine kind of delight-making but instead an exercise in extracting the good fro m the difficult and ugly. Sometimes this is a touch obvious: There's delight of a kind to be found in the odd beauty of a praying mantis, but perhaps not when the mantis "is holding in its spiky mitts a large dragonfly, which buzzed and sputtered, its big translucent wings gleaming as the mantis ate its head." Ah, well, the big ones sometimes eat the little ones, and sometimes we're left with holes in our heads, an idiom that Gay finds interesting if also sad: "that usage of the simile implies that a hole in the head, administered by oneself, might be a reasonable response." No, the reasonable response is, as Gay variously enumerates, to resist, enjoy such miracles as we can, revel in oddities such as the "onomatopoeicness of jenky," eat a pawpaw whenever the chance to do so arises, water our gardens, and even throw up an enthusiastic clawed-finger air quote from time to time, just because we can. An altogether charming and, yes, delightful book. Copyright Kirkus 2019 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved. - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2018 December #3
Poet Gay (
Copyright 2018 Publishers Weekly.Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude ) forays into prose with this collection of stirring, thought-provoking "essayettes" on the ways and means of delight. Spanning a year between Gay's 42nd and 43rd birthdays, the 102 piecesâeach one datedâcover widely varied subject matter, including high-fiving strangers, nicknames, the movieGhost , trains, and much more. "I am ultimately interested in joy," Gay declares, adding, "I am curious about the relationship between pleasure and delight." While "the pleasant, the delightful, are not universal," he also hypothesizes that "delight grows as we share it." But cataloguing delight isn't his sole motivation; from the opening entry, Gay challenges popular conceptions of masculinity, blackness, and the kinds of writing expected of black male authors, making explicit in one piece that for an African-American writer to focus on delight runs counter to a culture more accustomed to the "commodification of black suffering." Throughout, Gay presents himself as fallibly human rather than authoritative, capable of profundity and banality alike. One's reception of his work will depend on personal temperament; readers may be convinced of Gay's delight without necessarily sharing it. Nonetheless, he is a remarkable expositor of the positive, and his writings serve as reminders "of something deeply good in us."(Feb.)
