New Directions is proud to present Fleur Jaeggy\'s strange and mesmerizing essays about the writers Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob.
Fleur Jaeggy\'s essays--or are they prose poems?--smoke of necessity: the pages are on fire..
The room smoked of grief.
No one could shut his eyelids.
His eyes stayed open imperiously.
And poor Schwob\'s end comes as he feels like a \'dog cut open alive\' His face colored slightly, turning into a mask of gold.
In a book of blue devils and night visions, the Keats essay opens: In 1803, the guillotine was a common child\'s toy.
Of De Quincey\'s early nineteenth-century world we hear of the habits of writers: Charles Lamb spoke of \'Lilliputian rabbits\' when eating frog fricassse
Henry Fuseli ate a diet of raw meat in order to obtain splendid dreams
Hazlitt was perceptive about musculature and boxers; and Wordsworth used a buttery knife to cut the pages of a first-edition Burke.
A renowned stylist of hyper-brevity in fiction, Fleur Jaeggy proves herself an even more concise master of the essay form, albeit in a most peculiar and lapidary poetic vein.
New Directions is proud to present Fleur Jaeggy\'s strange and mesmerizing essays about the writers Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob
