On Sale: Oct 8, 2024
Page Count: 304 pages
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN-13: 9781643756356

$19.99

$25.99 CAD

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From bestselling author of The Book of Delights and award-winning poet, a book of lyrical mini-essays celebrating the everyday that will inspire readers to rediscover the joys in the world around us.

The author of the New York Times bestselling The Book of Delights is back with a new record of small wonders—and it is exactly the book we need right now.

In this second intimate collection of short, lyrical, genre-defying essays, again written daily over a year, one of America’s most original and observant voices celebrates the ordinary, helping us see our extraordinary world anew. Among Ross Gay’s funny, poetic, philosophical delights: bonding with a pipsqueak of a puppy, observing how his mother bakes eighteen kinds of cookies before her grandchildren arrive, noticing the tenderness he feels when he sees an adult wearing braces, and the recognition that for him the preamble is often more delightful than the thing itself: “Putting on your socks and tying up your shoes, and, if you’re the type, filling up your water bottle and doing some light stretching, but skipping the walk entirely.”

For Gay, practicing delight is an act of defiance in an often unjust world, as necessary as breathing. Even as he acknowledges racism, consumerism, ecological devastation, and our individual sorrows—he shows us that the un-delights make the delights even more so. As always, Gay revels in natural world—a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, the garlic that grows abundantly in his garden (along with collards and kale leaves and purple osaka mustards, pineapple sage, sweet potatoes, etc.), a field of sunflowers turning toward the sun, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us.

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Ross Gay

About the Author

In addition to The Book of Delights: Essays, Ross Gay is the author of three books of poetry, including Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Catalog was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry, the Ohioana Book Award, the Balcones Poetry Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. He is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call It Ballin’ and founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a nonprofit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. Gay has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at Indiana University.

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