G. Douglas Atkins is a professor of English at the University of Kansas. His books include Estranging the Familiar and Tracing the Essay, both published by Georgia.
Reading Essays is an important undertaking, a welcome and vital
addition to the current literature on the essay, rightly opening
that body of scholarship to non-specialists. There is no book like
this one, composed of a resonantly ordered series of perceptive
critical readings that, at their best, enact the elastic form they
entertain. The result is both learned and fresh, carrying forward
the project of a 'revitalized critical writing' advocated in the
author's excellent earlier book, Estranging the Familiar.--Lydia
Fakundiny "editor of The Art of the Essay"
Reading Essays: An Invitation is one that you ought to affirm and
go to. . . . It can sharpen your thinking and possibly even improve
your writing and expressing your thoughts.--Paiso Jamakar "Biz
India"
In three decades of writing and pondering essays, I have been
seeking a book that grasps the four-hundred-year history of this
adventurous form, and that does so with the wit, suppleness,
curiosity, and emotional and intellectual range one expects of the
finest essays. And now here at last is such a book. Atkins reads
individual works with a sympathetic yet rigorous imagination, all
the while elucidating a mode of writing that is also a mode of
thinking, feeling, and living. I am eager to put this book into the
hands of students, and into the hands of anyone who wonders why, in
our time, the essay is generating so much heat and light.--Scott
Russell Sanders "author of A Private History of Awe"
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