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.

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. Explaining he has 45 notebooks filled with favorite sentences, Dillon focuses each of the book’s 27 essays on a different one.