Elisa Gabbert

Contagiously curious essays on reading, art, and the life of the mind, from the acclaimed author of The Unreality of Memory. Who are we when we read? When we journal? Are we more ourselves alone or with friends? Right now or in memory? How does time transform us and the art we love? In sixteen dazzling, expansive essays, the acclaimed essayist and poet Elisa Gabbert explores a life lived alongside books of all dog-eared and destroyed, cherished and discarded, classic and clichėd, familiar and profoundly new. She turns her witty, searching mind to the writers she admires, from Plath to Proust, and the themes that bind them—chance, freedom, envy, ambition, nostalgia, and happiness. She takes us to the strange edges of art and culture, from hair metal to surf movies to party fiction. Any Person Is the Only Self is a love letter to literature and to life, inviting us to think alongside one of our most thrilling and versatile critics.

Contagiously curious essays on reading, art, and the life of the mind, from the acclaimed author of The Unreality of Memory. Who are we when we read? When we journal? Are we more ourselves alone or with friends? Right now or in memory? How does time transform us and the art we love? In sixteen dazzling, expansive essays, the acclaimed essayist and poet Elisa Gabbert explores a life lived alongside books of all dog-eared and destroyed, cherished and discarded, classic and clichėd, familiar and profoundly new. She turns her witty, searching mind to the writers she admires, from Plath to Proust, and the themes that bind them―chance, freedom, envy, ambition, nostalgia, and happiness. She takes us to the strange edges of art and culture, from hair metal to surf movies to party fiction. Any Person Is the Only Self is a love letter to literature and to life, inviting us to think alongside one of our most thrilling and versatile critics.

Me encanta la palabra «bonito». Y «bonita». Una teoría: «bonito/a» ha caído en desgracia porque somos gente codiciosa y queremos que lo meramente bonito sea precioso, así que vamos por ahí diciendo que las cosas son preciosas cuando son bonitas. La fascinación por la palabra es el germen de esta colección de ensayos autobiográficos en los que Elisa Gabbert entrelaza historias personales con observaciones y hallazgos acerca de los aforismos, el arte del párrafo, el poder de los títulos, la diferencia entre poesía y prosa, el universo de la traducción, la autoimagen o la mirada. La palabra bonita es una exploración amplia de la cultura contemporánea y una invitación a la lectura por parte de una autora cuya mente descubrimos en tensión casi constante consigo misma. En no ficción, estoy obsesionada con lo que he llegado a ver como la transición invisible, en la que no hay una conexión clara y necesaria entre dos párrafos y, aun así, algo pasa. Esta yuxtaposición no es tan discordante como un non sequitur, pero podría no haber sido así. De hecho, afirmaría que lo «lírico» en los llamados ensayos líricos son en gran medida esas transiciones, esos saltos, más que cierta cualidad inherentemente «poética» del lenguaje.

A collection of funny and thought-provoking poems inspired by surprising facts that will appeal to poetry lovers and poetry haters alike from the author of the acclaimed essay collection The Unreality of Memory, “a work of sheer brilliance, beauty and bravery” (Andrew Sean Greer) Elisa Gabbert, a writer known to be both “casually brilliant” (Sandra Newman) and a “ruthless self-examiner” (Sarah Manguso) brings her “questing, restless intelligence” (Kirkus Reviews) to a new collection of poetry. By turns funny and chilling, these poems collect strange facts, interrogate language, and ask unanswerable questions that offer the pleasure of discovery on nearly every page: How does one suffer “gladly,” exactly? How bored are dogs? Which is more frightening, nothing or empty space? Was Wittgenstein sexy? With her sharp observations building to extremely quotable one-liners, the poems in this collection have an ear-wormy quality to them that’s both ultra contemporary and offers a reading experience that is at once essayistic, aphoristic, and philosophical—an invitation to eavesdrop on a mind paying attention to itself. Normal Distance is a book about thinking and feeling, meaning and experience, trees and the weather, and the boredom and pain of living through time.

Elisa Gabbert’s The Self Unstable combines elements of memoir, philosophy, and aphorism to explore and trouble our ideas of the self, memory, happiness, aesthetics, love, and sex. With a sense of humor and an ability to find glimmers of the absurd in the profound, she uses the lyric essay like a koan to provoke the reader’s reflection—unsettling the role of truth and interrogating the “I” in both literary and daily life: “The future isn’t anywhere, so we can never get there. We can only disappear.” (from the publisher's website)

"Terror, disaster, memory, selfhood, happiness . . . leave it to a poet to tackle the unthinkable so wisely and so wittily."* A literary guide to life in the pre-apocalypse, The Unreality of Memory collects profound and prophetic essays on the Internet age’s media-saturated disaster coverage and our addiction to viewing and discussing the world’s ills. We stare at our phones. We keep multiple tabs open. Our chats and conversations are full of the phrase “Did you see?” The feeling that we’re living in the worst of times seems to be intensifying, alongside a desire to know precisely how bad things have gotten—and each new catastrophe distracts us from the last. The Unreality of Memory collects provocative, searching essays on disaster culture, climate anxiety, and our mounting collective sense of doom. In this new collection, acclaimed poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert explores our obsessions with disasters past and future, from the sinking of the Titanic to Chernobyl, from witch hunts to the plague. These deeply researched, prophetic meditations question how the world will end—if indeed it will—and why we can’t stop fantasizing about it. Can we avoid repeating history? Can we understand our moment from inside the moment? With The Unreality of Memory, Gabbert offers a hauntingly perceptive analysis of our new ways of being and a means of reconciling ourselves to this unreal new world. "A work of sheer brilliance, beauty and bravery.” *—Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less

In The Word Pretty Elisa Gabbert brings together humor and observational intelligence to create a roving and curious series of lyrical essays on writing, reading, and living. Combining elements of criticism, meditation, and personal essay, this book reveals a poet’s attention turned to subjects from translation to aphorism, from unreliable memory to beauty and the male gaze.