Halls of Fame
Essays
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
"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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An exemplar of the literary movement toward linking the genres of poetry and the essay, D'Agata, a recent University of Iowa nonfiction and poetry MFA graduate, blends both to create an inviting, elliptical puzzle of American life. In seven pieces (which have appeared previously in such journals as Paris Review and Ploughshares), D'Agata examines disparate American subjects that include the revered (Hoover Dam), the unknown (outsider artist Henry Darger) and the merely spectacular (the beam of light at Las Vegas's Luxor Hotel). Most of the lyric essays are structured as journeys, in which the melancholy narrator searches for meaning through others, like the founder of the Flat Earth Society and the Luxor light guide. But he finds their offerings limited and unsatisfactory: they explain different ways the world works but provide little solace. Similarly, "an essay about the ways in which we matter" surveys America's approximately 3,000 Halls of Fame, including the Billiards Hall of Fame and the Shuffleboard Hall of Fame, revealing longing and family discord. Although D'Agata's Hoover Dam essay pays homage to Joan Didion's "At the Dam," and his "Collage History of Art, by Henry Darger" spurs thoughts of Joseph Mitchell's "Joe Gould's Secret," D'Agata eschews the structure of the traditional essay, in which meaning accrues from paragraphs of prose. Instead, he offers a work that can and should be reentered several times from various points to generate effect, whether unsettledness about the world or pleasure at D'Agata's artistry. Like poetry, all of what D'Agata offers takes a while to sink in.
