Welcome to Litsy!

Brief in the way a razor�s slice is brief, remarkable essays by a peerless stylist New Directions is proud to present Fleur Jaeggy�s strange and mesmerizing essays about the writers Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob. 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. 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.� In a book of �blue devils� and night visions, the Keats essay opens: �In 1803, the guillotine was a common child�s toy.� 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. His eyes stayed open imperiously. No one could shut his eyelids. The room smoked of grief.� Fleur Jaeggy�s essays�or are they prose poems?�smoke of necessity: the pages are on fire. (less)

Brief in the way a razor�s slice is brief, remarkable essays by a peerless stylist New Directions is proud to present Fleur Jaeggy�s strange and mesmerizing essays about the writers Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob. (…more)