Books by John D'Agata
About a Mountain
by John D'Agata
From “one of the most significant U.S. writers” (David Foster Wallace), an investigation of Yucca Mountain and human destruction in Las Vegas. When John D’Agata helps his mother move to Las Vegas one summer, he begins to follow a story about the federal government’s plan to store high-level nuclear waste at a place called Yucca Mountain, a desert range near the city of Las Vegas. Bearing witness to the parade of scientific, cultural, and political facts that give shape to Yucca’s story, D’Agata keeps the six tenets of reporting in mind―Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How―arranging his own investigation around each vital question.
Yet as the contradictions inherent in Yucca’s story are revealed, D’Agata’s investigation turns inevitably personal. He finds himself investigating the death of a teenager who jumps off the tower of the Stratosphere Hotel, a boy whom D’Agata believes he spoke with before his suicide.
Here is the work of a penetrating thinker whose startling portrait of a mountain in the desert compels a reexamination of the future of human life.
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About a Mountain
by John D'Agata
Named One of the 100 Best Nonfiction Books Written by the New York Times Magazine, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, and a New York Times Editors' Choice.
When John D'Agata helps his mother move to Las Vegas one summer, he begins to follow a story about the federal government's plan to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain; the result is a startling portrait that compels a reexamination of the future of human life.
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Lifespan of a Fact
Now a Broadway Play.
An innovative essayist and his fact-checker do battle about the use of truth and the definition of nonfiction.
How negotiable is a fact? In 2003, after publishing his book of experimental essays, Halls of Fame, John D’Agata was approached by Harper’s magazine to write an essay for them, one that was eventually rejected due to disagreements related to its fact checking. That essay which eventually became the foundation of D’Agata’s critically acclaimed About a Mountain was accepted by another magazine, the Believer, but not before they handed it to their own fact-checker, Jim Fingal. What resulted from that assignment, and beyond the essay’s eventual publication in the magazine, was seven years of arguments, negotiations, and revisions as D’Agata and Fingal struggled to navigate the boundaries of literary nonfiction.
This book includes an early draft of D’Agata’s essay, along with D’Agata and Fingal’s extensive discussion around the text. What emerges is a brilliant and eye-opening meditation on the relationship between “truth” and “accuracy” and a penetrating conversation about whether it is appropriate for a writer to substitute one for the other. Two-color throughout
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Halls of Fame Essays
by John D'Agata
"John D'Agata is an alchemist who changes trash into purest gold." —Guy Davenport, Harper's
John D'Agata journeys the endless corridors of America's myriad halls of fame and faithfully reports on what he finds there. In a voice all his own, he brilliantly maps his terrain in lists, collage, and ludic narratives. With topics ranging from Martha Graham to the Flat Earth Society, from the brightest light in Vegas to the artist Henry Darger, who died in obscurity, Halls of Fame hovers on the brink between prose and poetry, deep seriousness and high comedy, the subject and the self.
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The Next American Essay (A New History of the Essay)
by John D'Agata
In The Next American Essay, John D'Agata takes a literary tour of lyric essays written by the masters of the craft. Beginning with 1975 and John McPhee's ingenious piece, "The Search for Marvin Gardens," D'Agata selects an example of creative nonfiction for each subsequent year. These essays are unrestrained, elusive, explosive, mysterious―a personal lingual playground. They encompass and illuminate culture, myth, history, romance, and sex. Each essay is a world of its own, a world so distinctive it resists definition.
Contributors include:
Sherman Alexie
David Antin
Jenny Boully
Anne Carson
Guy Davenport
Lydia Davis
Joan Didion
Annie Dillard
Thalia Field
Albert Goldbarth
Susan Griffin
Theresa Hak Kung Cha
Jamaica Kincaid
Wayne Koestenbaum
Barry Lopez
John McPhee
Carole Maso
Harry Mathews
Susan Mitchell
Fabio Morabito
Mary Ruefle
David Shields
Dennis Silk
Susan Sontag
Alexander Theroux
George W. S. Trow
David Foster Wallace
Eliot Weinberger
Joe Wenderoth
James Wright
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The Lost Origins of the Essay (A New History of the Essay)
by John D'Agata
An expansive and exhilarating world tour of innovative nonfiction writing
I think the reason we've never pinpointed the real beginning to this genre is because we've never agreed on what the genre even is. Do we read nonfiction in order to receive information, or do we read it to experience art? It's not very clear sometimes. This, then, is a book that tries to offer a clear objective: I am here in search of art. I am here to track the origins of an alternative to commerce.
John D'Agata leaves no tablet unturned in his exploration of the roots of the essay. The Lost Origins of the Essay takes the reader from ancient Mesopotamia to classical Greece and Rome, from fifth-century Japan to nineteenth-century France, to modern Brazil, Germany, Barbados, and beyond. With brief and brilliant introductions to seminal works by Heraclitus, Sei Sho-nagon, Michel de Montaigne, Jonathan Swift, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Octavio Paz, and more than forty other luminaries, D'Agata reexamines the international forebears of today's American nonfiction. This idiosyncratic collection makes a perfect historical companion to D'Agata's The Next American Essay, a touchstone among students and practitioners of the lyric essay.
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The Making of the American Essay (A New History of the Essay)
by John D'Agata
For two decades, essayist John D'Agata has been exploring the contours of the essay through a series of innovative, informative, and expansive anthologies that have become foundational texts in the study of the genre. The breakthrough first volume, The Next American Essay, highlighted major work from 1974 to 2003, while the second, The Lost Origins of the Essay, showcased the essay's ancient and international forebears. Now, with The Making of the American Essay, D'Agata concludes his monumental tour of this inexhaustible form, with selections ranging from Anne Bradstreet's secular prayers to Washington Irving's satires, Emily Dickinson's love letters to Kenneth Goldsmith's catalogues, Gertrude Stein's portraits to James Baldwin's and Norman Mailer's meditations on boxing.
Across the anthologies, D'Agata's introductions to each selection-intimate and brilliantly provocative throughout-serve as an extended treatise, collectively forming the backbone of the trilogy. He uncovers new stories in the American essay's past, and shows us that some of the most fiercely daring writers in the American literary canon have turned to the essay in order to produce our culture's most exhilarating art.
The Making of the American Essay offers the essay at its most varied, unique, and imaginative best, proving that the impulse to make essays in America is as old and as original as the nation itself.
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One
by Teju Cole, John D'Agata, David Campany, Michael Fried, Christie Davis, Darius Himes, Leah Ollman, Laura Steward
Photography is omnipresent; everyone is photographing everything. How do artists and writers reconcile this voracious urge to photograph with a photographic aesthetic and methodology that has tended to value “less is more”?
One pairs artists and writers to think about this question. Eight photographers―Marco Breuer, Thomas Joshua Cooper, John Gossage, Trevor Paglen, Alison Rossiter, Victoria Sambunaris, Rebecca Norris Webb and James Welling―were asked to submit one image on the theme of minimalism. Eight writers―David Campany, Teju Cole, Christie Davis, John D’Agata, Michael Fried, Darius Himes, Leah Ollman and Laura Steward―were enlisted to respond to those submissions, each paired with a specific image. The results offer a probing assessment of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s maxim: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
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