Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969. His books include Essayism, The Great Explosion (shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize), Objects in This Mirror, I Am Sitting in a Room, Sanctuary, Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize), and In the Dark Room, which won the Irish Book Award for nonfiction. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Bookforum, frieze, and Artforum. He is the UK editor of Cabinet magazine and teaches creative writing at Queen Mary University of London.
“Marvelous. . . . [Dillon] is no slouch himself at crafting a
phrase. . . . The product of decades of close reading, Suppose
a Sentence is eclectic yet tightly shaped. Mr. Dillon has a
taste for the more eccentric prose stylists, and lights with
delight upon the likes of John Ruskin, who ‘insisted he knew
perfectly well if, or when, he had lost his mind.’ His essay on
Thomas De Quincey is a small masterpiece. . . . Mr. Dillon’s book
is a record of successive enrapturings.” —John Banville, The
Wall Street Journal
“[A] record of appreciation, a rare treasure in an age that rewards
bashing. . . . Dillon’s affinities prove eclectic and unexpected.
He knows some authors, among them Roland Barthes, exhaustively.
Others, like the jazz critic Whitney Balliett, he admits he has
just discovered. He admires James Baldwin, Maeve Brennan and Annie
Dillard. Best of all, he loves writers who craft sentences crooked
with clauses, like Thomas Browne and Thomas De Quincey. . . .
Dillon writes similarly digressive sentences. Suppose a
Sentence has many rewards, but its greatest gift is its
exuberant style.” —Becca Rothfield, The New York Times Book
Review
“… Dillon demonstrates that reading out of love, lingering over
cherished sentences, can draw out an astonishing wealth of
material. These sentences are like old friends, with the constant
ability to still surprise, even after many years of knowing
them.”
— Katie da Cunha Lewin, LA Review of Books
“. . . I love that Brian Dillon love things and then writes about
the things that he loves so we can love them too, . . . and maybe
that starts with filling up some notebooks with sentences that feel
special . . . . Suppose a Sentence is a masterful, meticulous book,
at the core of which is Dillon thoughtfully telling me, a
sometime-skeptic, why these sentences are very gorgeous to him.”
—Sophia Stewart, Blog LA Review of Books
"Dillon’s erudition and enthusiasm is so infectious that you want
to read everything he describes, making this the perfect book to
kick off a long lockdown winter.” —Olivia Laing, The
Guardian “Best Books of 2020”
“Suppose a Sentence is an absorbing defence of literary
originality and interpretation, inviting us not just to take words
as they first appear but to let them abstract themselves before our
very eyes.” —Chris Allnutt, Financial Times
“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. . . . The well-chosen sentences themselves are worth
the price of admission, but Dillon’s encyclopedic erudition and
infectious joy in a skillful piece of writing are what stamp this
as a treat for literary buffs.” —Publishers Weekly
“These chronologically arranged picks from the 17th century to
today are the 'few that shine more brightly and for the moment
compose a pattern.' The author plumbs biography, autobiography, and
history to add context and background, with particular attention to
each author’s literary style. . . . A learned, spirited foray into
what makes a sentence tick.” —Kirkus Reviews
“The book has a lot of what I can only call pleasure—of the kind
that I imagine athletes or dancers experience when they are doing
what they do, which is then communicated to those watching them do
it. . . . [D]elight is evident both in the sentences Dillon looks
at and in those he writes himself.” —Hasan Altaf, The Paris
Review
“Dillon’s writing plays an exquisite critical sensibility against
an exuberant celebratory impulse. He homes in on particular formal
decisions (why this comma here rather than there) and he makes it
clear why he loves the sentences he does. . . . Like his favorite
sentences, Dillon’s essays ‘keep it together,’ just barely, and
they’re all the more stylish for it.” —Anthony
Domestico, Commonweal
“Taking as his starting point a sentence that has intrigued him for
years or, in some cases, come into his ken more recently, Brian
Dillon in Suppose a Sentence ranges through the centuries
exploring the associations of what he observes and discovers about
his object of study and its writer, through biographical anecdote,
linguistic speculation, and a look at related writings. This rich
and various collection resembles a beguiling, inspiriting
conversation with a personable and wry intelligence who keeps you
happily up late by the fireside, incites you to note some follow-up
reading, and opens your eyes further to the multifarious
syntactical and emotional capacities of even a few words of
English. Enjoyable and thought-provoking reading!” —Lydia Davis
“Brian Dillon is one of the true treasures of contemporary
literature—a critic and essayist of unmatched style, sensitivity
and purpose—and Suppose a Sentence is a book only he
could have written. It’s an inspired celebration of the sentence as
a self-sufficient art form, and reading it has reinvigorated my
sense of the possibilities of writing itself.” —Mark O’Connell
“Dillon has brilliantly reinvented the commonplace book in this
witty, erudite, and addictively readable guide to the sentences
that have stayed with him over the years.” —Jenny Offill
“Brian Dillon has a way with and among ideas, rather an unusual
one. His acute noticing supposes, as he says along with Gertrude
Stein, a singular sentence in some text of these wildly differing
authors, and then expands upon that notice, moving us around within
and without the very particular wording to the everything else
around. He dives in for some detail(s) of each called upon part of
a whole, surprising us and himself by his swerves and metaswerves,
offering them delightedly up to a joint self-awareness in the
reading. Very close-up and personal, the style wrapping around
itself, like the Ouroboros, this animal waiting to be found.” —Mary
Ann Caws, author of Creative Gatherings: Meeting Places of
Modernism
“Sentences are paths. They track routes through time and place,
relating in their wake previously unrelated subjects, feelings,
questions and ideas. They open and rhythm the durational spaces
they move through and as we read them they move us: we move, too.
Reading Brian Dillon’s brilliant book, I was repeatedly
struck—because each one of the book’s short sections is a wholly
captivating demonstration of this fact—that a sentence, just a
single sentence, can hold and release an event. The practice Dillon
is engaged in here could be called ‘close reading’: as in his
previous book Essayism, what is at stake is how what is
narrowly called the English language works, how it can be set to
work and how these collaborative workings matter, especially when
what they are doing is difficult, strange, freeing or beautiful.
But, as in Essayism, there is also more to it. ‘Close
reading,’ in Dillon’s hands, starts to look like a form of ‘close
living’: a life practice that makes an everyday value out of paying
serious, open-minded attention, especially to what is hard to
understand.” —Kate Briggs
“Dillon is a mournful, witty and original writer.” —Parul
Sehgal, The New York Times
“One of our most innovative and elegant nonfictioneers.” —Robert
Macfarlane, author of Underland
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