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The Book of (More) Delights

Essays

Audiobook (Includes supplementary content)
2 of 2 copies available
2 of 2 copies available
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.
Ross Gay's essays have been called "exquisite" (Tracy K. Smith), "imperative" (the New York Times Book Review), and "brilliant" (Ada Limón). Now, in this new collection of genre-defying pieces, again written over the course of a year, one of America's most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight.
For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the "ubiquitous, nefarious" scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren.
As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor's fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us.
For his many fans eagerly awaiting this new volume and for readers who have enjoyed the works of Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Zadie Smith, and Rebecca Solnit, Gay once again offers us "literature that feels as fluent and familiar as a chat with a close friend" (the New York Review of Books). The Book of (More) Delights is a collection to savor and share.
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  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from July 1, 2023
      In this follow-up toThe Book of Delights, the esteemed poet catalogs more quiet pleasures and causes for gratitude. Gay adheres to the same guidelines he followed in the previous volume: "write them daily, write them quickly, and write them by hand." The first piece, of 81, opens, "Well, here we are again: this time, my forty-seventh birthday," and describes a "bounty of delights" that he and his partner, Stephanie, have found in a rented Vermont cabin--e.g., the "forageable bounty" of apples. The following entry pays tribute to his friend Walt on his birthday: "I have needed to be--we need to be--believed in. Which, in a certain kind of way, is like being birthed. And just like his gummy bears and hockey sticks, I guess I'm taking Walt's birthday. Because when Walt was born, so too was I." The author offers steadfast company in his optimistic, accessible vignettes and insights about easily overlooked quotidian life. The essays are short, roughly three pages, and it's a credit to Gay's tone that he can captivate readers while writing about, for instance, "three truly beautiful spoons," the pleasure of petting his cat, his annual garlic planting ("garlic's your tiny professor of faith, your pungent don of gratitude") and, in a separate piece, garlic harvesting. His sense of wonder at watching an NPR Tiny Desk Concert featuring El DeBarge leads him to this reflection on an Aretha Franklin cover: "She lets it be known, this is for the benefit of you who don't believe." Gay closes with an essay sharing the same name as the first, "My Birthday, Again," in which the author writes, "I've completed another year of delights. Or maybe I should say another year of delights has completed me." Keenly observed and delivered with deftness, these essays are a testament to the artfulness of attention and everyday joy.

      COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Booklist

      Starred review from August 1, 2023
      Poet, essayist, and author of The Book of Delights (2019), Gay returns post-pandemic with another startling, sensuous collection of miniature essays about some "fleeting sweetnesses" that he savored over the course of a year, beginning with his birthday in August of 2021. In sinuous, stream-of-consciousness prose, he zooms in to luxuriate in an encounter with a small dog or the "reprieve from unhugging" after many socially distant months and then zooms out to place those encounters in a wider context. As before, many of the delights Gay experiences have to do with the natural world: an unexpectedly bountiful crop of sweet potatoes in the backyard or a squirrel determinedly munching a neighbor's pumpkin. Sappy, however, Gay is not. Many of these delights are tempered with sadness, as when the author attends his aunt's funeral or deals with the challenges of "being a non-white person in mostly white spaces." But again and again, joy wins out over despair as Gay pays tribute to a world of people "bumbling, flailing, hurting, failing, changing."

      COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Ross Gay's second book of "essayettes" celebrating delight is as joyful, buoyant, utterly life-affirming, and wonderfully meandering as his first one. Over a year, he writes about the delight he finds in cats, trading fruit, trees, remembering his father, a woman talking to passersby on her porch and the many other residents of Bloomington, Indiana, poetry, teachers, kissing small dogs, and a whole lot more. His narration is warm and conversational and absolutely overflowing with gratitude. These praise songs come alive in his easy poet's voice, often tinged with a smile or a laugh, full of curiosity, agile, and inviting. Gay's earnest love of the world is not merely welcome--it is vital. This short audiobook is a triumph. L.S. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from September 18, 2023
      Poet Gay once again engages in a daily “delight practice” in the enchanting encore to The Book of Delights. In 81 brief essays, Gay turns his perpetually wonder-struck eye on the people and places around him, constructing an elaborate ode to the art of close attention. For example, in “The Lady in the Tree,” he spins a trip to the laundromat into a hallucinatory romp; in “Dream Dancing,” he falls into a synergistic dance with young people in a park; and in “One Million Kisses,” he overcomes his reservations about small dogs by caring for his mother-in-law’s “pipsqueak pup.” Through it all, Gay’s lyrical, stream-of-consciousness style—which always remains on the right side of saccharine (“Before you go there,” he addresses the reader, “I’m not being optimistic. I’m just paying attention”)—lends potentially mundane subject matter, such as stopping for lunch on a road trip or observing neighborhood garden gnomes, a shimmering, near-magical quality. These unforgettable vignettes will enhance readers’ appreciation for their own surroundings. Agent: Liza Dawson, Liza Dawson Assoc.

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  • English

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