Halls of Fame: Essays - Hardcover

"John D’Agata is pushing the envelope of the modern American essay. A maximalist’s intellectual curiosity collides with a minimalist’s austere lyricism to produce results that are novel, intriguing, and haunting." -- Phillip Lopate

"John D’Agata’s journey through genres, the American landscape, the history of thought, and the history of lyric action – a journey beautifully agonized over as he struggles between sentence and line – is the beginning of a journey for us as well with a voice that is changing our conversation with the world." -- Jorie Graham

"‘He had a knack, which was his lure, for both the mundane and fantastic’ – so says John D’Agata about one of his book’s eccentric population, but he could be describing his own omnivorous self. His writing is marked by an exuberance of structural invention, by an ever-churning hurdy-gurdy lexicon of lingual play, and by citizenship in the mazes of the mind and in hallways that mimic Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. Or, to update that last comparison: Halls of Fame is to essays what the Museum of Jurassic Technology is to gallery dioramas." -- Albert Goldbarth

John D'Agata is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop with MFA degrees in both nonfiction and poetry. He is currently editor of lyric essays for Seneca Review.