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Ambivalence: An Education
Paperback
Biographies GeneralLiterary FiguresLiterary Criticism
Publisher Price: $18.95
PREORDER - Expected ship date September 8, 2026
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ISBN13: 9798896231103
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: Sep 8 2026
Pages: 192
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.90 Depth: 8.60
Language: English
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: Sep 8 2026
Pages: 192
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.90 Depth: 8.60
Language: English
A coming-of-age memoir set in late-twentieth-century Dublin, recounting writer and critic Brian Dillon's first encounters with pivotal writers in his life--Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, and others--and in the process arguing for the transformative power of art, literature, and learning. When Brian Dillon was sixteen his mother died, and he stopped caring about school. While he courted failure, his real education was going on elsewhere: with books, music, films, and television. When against all odds he made it to college, his head was already full of avant-garde writing, art, and ideas. Could he live up to the hopes and dreams he attached to culture? Halfway through college his father died, and the stakes of Dillon's education seemed even higher.
Ambivalence is a memoir of the author's native city of Dublin in the 1980s and '90s, a portrait of the author as a young man, and an intimate defense of radical thinking about literature and life. In vivid, present-tense passages, Dillon describes his first encounters with writers such as Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida. He recalls being seduced by androgyny, ambiguity, and ambivalence on the page and in the life he hoped his reading would transfigure.
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