Essay On The Beautiful

“In Syzygy, Beauty, T Fleischmann re-imagines the essay, creating a spare little book that reads like a collection of prose poems.” (David Ulin, Los Angeles Times) In Syzygy, Beauty, T Fleischmann builds an essay of prose blocks, weaving together observations on art, the narrator’s construction of a house, and a direct address to a lover. Playing with scale and repetition, we are kept off-center, and therefore always looking, as the speaker leads us through an intimate relationship that is complicated and deepened by multiple partners, gender transitions, and itinerancy. “A complex, tightly wound (and wounded) cri de coeur that is simultaneously accessible and intensely, cryptically personal.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune “T Fleischmann’s Syzygy, Beauty shimmers with confidence as it tours the surreal chaos of gender, art, and desire . . . I hail its weirdness, its ‘armpit frankess,’ its indelible portrait of occulted relation, and above all, its impeccable music.” —Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts “This distinctive debut traces ‘the past made alight by impact’ through a diverse set of sources: film and carpentry analogies; interior monologues; references to artists Méret Oppenheim, Man Ray, Grayson Perry, and Louise Bourgeois; gnostic texts; and personal, yet ambiguous, disclosures.” —ForeWord Reviews “At its most basic, this unusual and engaging book describes the ins-and-outs of an unorthodox love affair, but it also functions as a sustained exploration of the ambiguities of love, gender, intimacy, and aesthetic possibilities.” —Publishers Weekly

"Now, with "The making of the American essay' the editor includes selections ranging from Anne Bradstreet's secular prayers to Washington Irving's satires, Emily Dickinson's love letters to Kenneth Goldsmith's catalog's, Gertrude Stein's portraits to James Baldwin's and Norman Mailer's mediations on boxing. In this volume the editor 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 some of our culture's most exhilarating art."-- book jacket.

The 1992 presidential election campaign showed just how deep were the divisions within the Republican party. In Beautiful Losers, Samuel Francis argues that the victory of the Democratic party marks not only the end of the Reagan-Bush era, but the failure of the American conservatism.