Brian Dillon

The essay is a venerable form that may well be the genre of the future. It has its origins in a mode of self-examination and even self-obsession - 'it is many years now that I have had only myself as object of my thoughts', writes Montaigne in his essay 'Of Practice' - but it is just as accurately defined by...

When Brian Dillon was sixteen his mother died and he simply gave up all schoolwork. While he courted exam failure, his real education was going on elsewhere: with books, music, films and television. When at last he made it to university, his head was already full of avant-garde writing, art and ideas. Could academia live up to the hopes and...

In Affinities, Brian Dillon explores images and artists he is drawn to or loves, and tries to analyse the attraction. What do we mean when we claim affinity with an object or picture, or say that affinities exist (not only formal) between such things? What do feelings of affinity imply about individual or collective experience of art, and of the...

Suppose a Sentence is a critical and personal reflection on the art of the sentence in literature. It is both an experiment in the attentive form of the essay—asking what happens, and where one might wander, when as readers and writers we pay minute attention to the language before us—and a polemic for certain kinds of experiment in prose. In...