Bøger af Brian Dillon

Ny Jord – Tidsskrift for naturkritik er et multidisciplinært tidsskrift, der orienterer sig på tværs af århundreder og landegrænser og bringer videnskab, litteratur og kunst side om side i ønsket om at bidrage til en kvalificeret samtale om naturen i en tid, hvor vores forestillinger og idéer om den ændres markant.

SUPPOSE A SENTENCE is a critical and personal reflection on the art of the sentence in literature.

Boldly combining the highly personal with the brilliantly scholarly, In the Dark Room explores the question of how memory works emotionally and culturally. It is narrated through the prism of the author's experience of losing both his parents, his mother when he was sixteen, his father when he was on the cusp of adulthood and of trying, after a breakdown some years later, to piece things together. Drawing on the lessons of centuries of literature, philosophy and visual art, Dillon interprets the relics of his parents and of his childhood in a singularly original and arresting piece of writing reissued for the first time since its original publication in 2005, and including a new foreword from prize-winning biographer Frances Wilson. 'In the Dark Room is a wonderfully controlled yet passionate meditation on memory and the things of the past, those that are lost and those, fewer, that remain: on what, in a late work, Beckett beautifully reduced to "e;time and grief and self, so-called"e;. Retracing his steps through his own life and the lives of the family in the midst of which he grew up, Brian Dillon takes for guides some of the great connoisseurs of melancholy, from St Augustine to W. G. Sebald, by way of Sir Thomas Browne and Marcel Proust and Walter Benjamin. The result is a deeply moving testament, free of sentimentality and evasion, to life's intricacies and the pleasures and the inevitable pains they entail. In defiance of so much that is ephemeral, this is a book that will live.' - John Banville, winner of the Booker Prize for The Sea in 2005.

ESSAYISM is a personal, critical and polemical book about the genre, its history and its contemporary possibilities, itself an example of what it describes: an essay that is curious and digressive and at the same time held together by a personal voice and a polemical point.

Written as a series of linked essays, interwoven with a reflection on affinity itself, Affinities completes a trilogy, with Essayism and Suppose a Sentence, about the intimate and abstract pleasures of reading and looking.

"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"--

"This is a New York Review book"--Copyright page.

Polish painter and filmmaker Wilhelm Sasnal has emerged over the last two decades as one of Europe's preeminent contemporary artists. This major monograph offers a comprehensive assessment of his practice.

Tormented Hope is a book about mind and body, fear and hope, illness and imagination. It explores, in the stories of nine individuals, the relationship between mind and body as it is mediated by the experience, or simply the terror, of being ill. And in an intimate investigation of those nine lives, it shows how the mind can make a prison of the body, by distorting our sense of ourselves as physical beings. Brian Dillon, whose brilliant debut In the Dark Room established him as an uncommonly intelligent and fluent explorer of the realm where ideas and emotions overlap, looks at nine prominent hypochondriacs - James Boswell, Charlotte Bront , Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Daniel Paul Schreber, Alice James, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol - and what their lives tell us about the way the mind works with, and against, the body. His findings are stimulating and surprising, and the stories he tells are often moving, sometimes hilarious, and always gripping.

A Dark and Quiet Place accompanies a new moving image work of the same name by Australian artist David Noonan (born 1969). Both the film and the book present a meditation on performance, its associated apparatus and the physical and imaginary domains they inhabit. That this is Noonan's first film work in over a decade is significant, as his practice since has frequently referenced both the material qualities of film and projection, and an ongoing interest in the slippages between figuration and pure abstraction. For the book, the artist has worked closely with award-winning design studio A Practice for Everyday Life to disassemble the film work back into a rhythmic sequence of still images, employing both the language of design and Noonan's characteristic strategies of layering and manipulation. In his response to the work, celebrated author Brian Dillon presents a piece of fiction at once speculative and rigorously rational, in which geometric shapes become performers, diagrammatic grids become complex stage sets, and the supremacy of the body is thrown into doubt.

The prolific art critic and writer Brian Dillon is back with his fifth book in as many

The photographs of Sarah Jones address established pictorial genres and our associated expectations by paring back space, subject and gesture. This book--the first major monograph on this young British artist--brings together work from an 18-year period, including many photographs never previously published, and looks at the themes and concerns that have remained constants in her work. The sequence of images chosen and arranged by the artist specifically for this publication is informed by Jones' interest in how we see and represent her chosen subjects, using tropes from the stereograph, the double, the still life and portraiture. Jones first gained notice in the late 1990s for her photographs taken in psychoanalysts' consulting rooms. These provocative sites have been explored through her practice over the years, in particular the couches that, in Jones's images, show visible signs of the imprint of the patients who had reclined upon them during consultation. Her well-known later studies of adolescent girls uncomfortably caught in the flash of the camera in domestic settings draw attention to the staged relationship between model, photographer and location. Recent diptychs of horses and rose bushes refer to the viewing of early stereographic prints and explore the potential for photography to reveal uncanny perspectives on a subject. In The Rose Gardens series, Jones photographs the front and back of rose bushes in public gardens so that viewers can contemplate both viewpoints simultaneously. Jones' overarching imperative is to look at subjects stripped back to an emotional truth. The imprints on the couches, the view of the roses that are beginning to wilt and the glazed look in the eyes of her models all investigate ideas of beauty and ritualized everyday gesture.

The Great Explosion by Brian Dillon: a masterful account of a terrible disaster in a remarkable placeIn April 1916, shortly before the commencement of the Battle of the Somme, a fire started in a vast munitions works located in the Kentish marshes. The resulting series of explosions killed 108 people and injured many more.In a brilliant piece of storytelling, Brian Dillon recreates the events of that terrible day - and, in so doing, sheds a fresh and unexpected light on the British home front in the Great War. He offers a chilling natural history of explosives and their effects on the earth, on buildings, and on human and animal bodies. And he evokes with vivid clarity one of Britain's strangest and most remarkable landscapes - where he has been a habitual explorer for many years. The Great Explosion is a profound work of narrative, exploration and inquiry from one of our most brilliant writers.'The Great Explosion is exhilarating and moving and lyrical. It is a quiet evisceration of a landscape through the discovery of a lost history of destructiveness, a meditation on Englishness, an autobiography, a mapping of absences. I loved it.' Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes''What a fascinating, unclassifiable, brilliant book, confirming Brian Dillon's reputation as one of our most innovative and elegant non-fictioneers. No one else could have written it.' Robert Macfarlane, author of The Old Ways'Forensic, fascinating, endlessly interesting' Philip Hoare, Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author of Leviathan andThe Sea Inside 'A subtle, human history of the early twentieth century ... Explosions are a fruitful subject in Dillon's hands, one that enables him to reflect movingly on the instant between life and death, on the frailty of human endeavour, and on the readiness of nations to tear one another apart. The Great Explosion deftly covers a tumultuous period of history while centring on the tiniest moments - just punctuation marks in time' Financial Times '[Dillon's] account of the Faversham explosion is as bold as it is dramatic, while his descriptive passages about the marshlands of Kent are so evocative that you can practically feel the mud sticking at your feet' Evening Standard'A brilliant evocation of place grasped in its modernity' Guardian'Dillon ... has a WG Sebald-like gift for interrogating the landscape ... a work of real elegiac seriousness that goes to the heart of a case of human loss and destruction in England's sinister pastures green' Ian Thomson, Irish Times'Exhilarating ... utterly beguiling' Literary Review

First monographic book on the work of London-based Swiss photographer Bianca Brunner. This book presents mostly previously unpublished material.