At Large and at Small
Confessions of a Literary Hedonist
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
Butterflies, ice-cream, writing at night, playing word games...in this witty, intimate and delicious book Anne Fadiman ruminates on her passions, both literary and everyday. From mourning the demise of letter-writing to revealing a monumental crush on Charles Lamb, from Balzac's coffee addiction to making ice-cream from Liquid Nitrogen, she draws us into a world of hedonistic pleasures and literary delights. This is the perfect book for life's ardent obsessives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fadiman, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner for The Spirit Catches You and You Fall, makes a bold claim: "I believe the survival of the familiar essay is worth fighting for." The "familiar essays" that Fadiman champions and writes are in the mold of the early 19th century, rather than critical or personal works as we've come to know them. Her essays combine a personal perspective with a far-reaching curiosity about the world, resulting in pieces that are neither so objective the reader can't see the writer behind them nor too self-absorbed. And spending some time with Fadiman is a pure delight. She loves the natural world and taxonomies of all kinds, as well as ice cream and coffee. Her love of the romantic age goes beyond the stylistic, and she prefers Coleridge and Lamb over Wordsworth and Southey. The collection rolls good-naturedly through its subjects until the final piece an account of a whitewater rafting trip that went tragically awry, a harrowing reminder of the stakes on which all endeavors rest. This collection is a perfectly faceted little gem. Essayists, of both the critical and personal sort, could do worse than to follow Fadiman into the realm of the familiar.
