Halls of Fame: Essays - Tapa dura

"D'Agata writes masterful sentences, in all forms. [He is] adept at collage, found poetry, paragraphs long and short, lists, characterization, direct quotes, the prose poem, fragments, spoffing . . . D'Agata hovers like a moth around the sparks created where the known and unknown rub against each other." --Ruminator Review

"[Halls of Fame] is a succession of 'lyric essays'--a form invented by D'Agata himself--sentences strung like a spiderweb over a subject: the people who flock to Hoover Dam, the damned who wander around and work in Las Vegas, people who know we have captive space aliens in New Mexico. Somehow D'Agata manages never to condescend . . . D'Agata is an alchemist who changes trash into pure gold. Both he and [David] Markson are 'experimental' writers who defy all we know and dread about experimental writing: they are readable." --Guy Davenport, Harper's

"A daring, utterly original book by a young writer of rare intelligence and artistry . . . With wit and finesse, and writing that's as much poetry as it is prose, D'Agata is redefining the modern American essay." --Annie Dillard

"John D'Agata is pushing the envelope of the modern American essay. A maximalist's intellectual curiosity collides with a minimalist's austere lyricism to produce results that are novel, intriguing, and haunting." --Phillip Lopate

"John D'Agata's journey through genres, the American landscape, the history of thought, and the history of lyric action--his beautifully agonized struggle between sentence and line--and his resulting genuinely fresh conversation with silence--makes for stunning and original work." --Jorie Graham

In these refreshingly bold, creative, and incisive essays, John D'Agata journeys the endless corridors of American'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. From Martha Graham to the Flat Earth Society, from the brightest light in Vegas to the "outsider artist" Henry Darger, D'Agata's obsessions are as American as they are contemporary.

Contents

Round Trip

Martha Graham, Audio Description Of

Flat Earth Map: An Essay

Hall of Fame: An Essay About the Ways in Which We Matter

Notes toward the making of a whole human being . . .

Collage History of Art, by Henry Darger

And There Was Evening and There Was Morning

Notes