John D'Agata

Jim Fingal

Depicts the arguments, negotiations and revisions that took place in extensive correspondence between an essayist and his fact-checker as they tried to determine the boundaries of literary nonfiction and offers a discussion on the correlation between “truth” and “accuracy.” Original. 15,000 first printing.

The Lifespan of a Fact

In The Next American Essay, John D'Agata takes a literary tour of lyric essays written by the masters of the craft. Beginning with 1975 and John McPhee's ingenious piece, "The Search for Marvin Gardens," D'Agata selects an example of creative nonfiction for each subsequent year. These essays are unrestrained, elusive, explosive, mysterious—a personal lingual playground. They encompass and illuminate culture, myth, history, romance, and sex. Each essay is a world of its own, a world so distinctive it resists definition. Contributors include: Sherman Alexie David Antin Jenny Boully Anne Carson Guy Davenport Lydia Davis Joan Didion Annie Dillard Thalia Field Albert Goldbarth Susan Griffin Theresa Hak Kung Cha Jamaica Kincaid Wayne Koestenbaum Barry Lopez John McPhee Carole Maso Harry Mathews Susan Mitchell Fabio Morabito Mary Ruefle David Shields Dennis Silk Susan Sontag Alexander Theroux George W. S. Trow David Foster Wallace Eliot Weinberger Joe Wenderoth James Wright

The Next American Essay

The author's investigation into all facets of Yucca Mountain, a desert range near Las Vegas slated to be a federal nuclear waste storage facility, turns personal when his research unearths a report of a teenager's suicidal plunge off the roof of the Stratosphere Hotel, a boy the author believes he spoke with before his suicide.

About a Mountain

The Making of the American Essay

"John D'Agata is an alchemist who changes trash into purest gold." —Guy Davenport, Harper's John D'Agata journeys the endless corridors of America's myriad halls of fame and faithfully reports on what he finds there. In a voice all his own, he brilliantly maps his terrain in lists, collage, and ludic narratives. With topics ranging from Martha Graham to the Flat Earth Society, from the brightest light in Vegas to the artist Henry Darger, who died in obscurity, Halls of Fame hovers on the brink between prose and poetry, deep seriousness and high comedy, the subject and the self.

Essays

Halls of Fame

An expansive and exhilarating world tour of innovative nonfiction writing I think the reason we've never pinpointed the real beginning to this genre is because we've 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? It's 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 D'Agata 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, D'Agata reexamines the international forebears of today's American nonfiction. This idiosyncratic collection makes a perfect historical companion to D'Agata's The Next American Essay, a touchstone among students and practitioners of the lyric essay.

The Lost Origins of the Essay

Das kurze Leben der Fakten

Sobre una montaña

"The Hobart and William Smith Colleges literary journal, Seneca Review, recently released a special anthology, We Might As Well Call It The Lyric Essay, edited by John D'Agata '95, associate professor of English at the University of Iowa. The double issue was initially envisioned as a compilation of D'Agata's favorite essays from Seneca Review, in celebration of his 15th year as the magazine's lyric essay editor. But the project developed into a year-long course at Iowa in which D'Agata enlisted his students to help choose and edit an anthology to showcase the genre, if not define it." -- Publisher's website.

John D'Agata

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