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/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
38/100Critics
91/100Scholars
Author:
Brian Dillon
Publisher:
New York Review Books
Date:
September 22, 2020
A series of essays prompted by a single sentence--from Shakespeare to Janet Malcolm, John Ruskin to Joan Didion--Suppose a Sentence explores style, voice, and language, along with the subjectivity of reading. Both an exercise in practical criticism and a set of experiments or challenges, Suppose a Sentence is a polemical and personal reflection on the art of the sentence in literature.
What The Reviewers Say
Essayist and critic Brian Dillon is in thrall to sentences. For a quarter of a century, he tells us in his marvelous new book, he has been collecting them, in 'the back pages of whatever notebook I happen to be using,' the way, we might add, Vladimir Nabokov collected butterflies, with analytic passion and sustained wonderment.
Each selection is treated with a laser-like focus — and at times an overeagerness to point out rhetorics — as Dillon allows his thoughts to spiral into wider speculation. A single sentence, he argues, can evoke an entire text.
The writer, essayist, and professor Brian Dillon is a superb reader of sentences.
This book is about sentences, but it is also about writers; those crafts-folk that string words together, like lanterns, across this inky, squally sea of existence. Each chapter begins with a single sentence Brian Dillon was drawn to and copied down, in notebooks over the years – 'out of a teeming sky of inscriptions, these are the few that shine more brightly' – and now offers up to us, with his singular, remarkable exploration of it.
