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The Book of Delights Summary & Study Guide

The Book of Delights Summary & Study Guide Description

The following version of the book was used to create this study guide: Gay, Ross. The Book of Delights: Essays. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2019.

This book is a collection of short essays on the theme of delight. Author Ross Gay's goal was to write a short essay on this topic every day for a year and this book a collection of 102 such pieces.

In Chapters 1-17, Ross is first delighted by the miracle of being born, inefficiencies, his friends, flowers that grow in unexpected places and blowing things off. He then writes about the exploitation of black bodies and his friend Walt's leukemia diagnosis. He meditates on the movements of a praying mantis before writing about solidarity among black people in America. He has chance encounters with strangers, contemplates the virtues of writing by hand, and transports fig cuttings on an airplane. Ross delights in nicknames, onomatopoeic phrases, the concept of joy, and the popularity (or alleged lack thereof) of poetry. The final chapters in this section are about the delights of hummingbirds and waking up to realize a nightmare was just a dream.

In Chapters 18-34, Ross writes about deer, plants, gestures of solidarity, and his disdain for saucers. He delights in flowers, in witnessing a shared burden, and in moments of self-forgiveness. Ross bonds with a bellhop, travels, and reflects on both his childhood and his parents' interracial marriage. He gleans pecans from a tree and contemplates the delight of the "do-over" (90). Ross writes about his favorite scarf, his mother's memories of his now-deceased father, sexist language usage, and pop musicians DeBarge and Lisa Loeb.

Chapters 35-51 begin with the following delights: favorite songs, apples, small gestures of love, terms of endearment, and roller-skates. Ross reunites a lost child with his mother, finds a bird nest among debris in his garden, and observes certain that Republicans always look like they are frowning. Ross then delights in lying in bed in the sunshine, sharing something beautiful with another person. He then notes the closure of a pawn shop run by a racist proprietor. In the next essay, Ross is mistaken for someone who reads palms instead of who reads poems. He concludes with the delights of feeding birds, kombucha, nut groves, and his newfound ability not to surrender completely to what annoys him.

In Chapters 52-68, Ross criticizes the band Toto and re-interprets a sign outside a church. He delights in sidewalk naps, a toddler on an airplane, sunshine, gesticulations, Botan Rice Candies, trees, and forest ecosystems. Ross has a brief interaction with a stranger, delights in the color purple, and imagines a crossing guard as a shepherd through the afterlife. Ross loves poetry readings and sharing delights with others. He gets an email from a high school-aged reader, licks drips of coffee off the sides of his cups, and relishes the silliness of bobblehead toys.

In Chapters 69-85, Ross delights in makeshift projects, critiques hyper-photography, and contemplates the tendency to adorn statues with flowers. He is delighted when he can pee after holding it in, is waved at by strangers, and hears regional colloquialisms. He delights in removing bindweed from his garden, childhood memories, hugging friends, bees, a tomato seedling, mulberries, and his friend's faith in common decency. Ross' book of delights, written by a black person, is an inherent subversion of the cultural tendency to equate blackness with suffering. The final delights in this section are fireflies and the scythe he uses in his garden.

In Chapters 86-102, Ross delights in pawpaw plants, loitering, witnessing others being moved, and when the serious is revealed to be silly. Ross collects his urine to feed his plants, harvests carrots from the garden, watches the movie Moonlight, and contemplates his friend's misuse of air quotes. He writes about his mother's ability to laugh at herself, basketball, carports, childhood nostalgia and the writing of Jamaica Kincaid which is good but not always delightful. He concludes the books with the delights of bumblebees, honeysuckles, being grown, being kind to one's self and body before writing about his forty-third birthday and the end of this year-long project.

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The Book of Delights: Essays

• By Ross Gay
• Algonquin Books
• Reviewed by Jennifer Bort Yacovissi
• February 14, 2019

A poet finds endless enchantment in the everyday.

Ross Gay spent a lot of time on airplanes in a recent 12-month period, which, these days — what with security lines, absent amenities, and shrinking legroom (and he being a pretty tall guy) — does not sound very delightful. Yet Gay made it his practice over the course of a year to open himself to and capture his impressions of the little pleasures of the everyday, every day.

Well, maybe not every day. There aren’t 365 essays in The Book of Delights , but we spend one year with Gay, from birthday to birthday, learning to delight with him and to be delighted by him.

Even better (or, as the author would say, “Delight!”), this is a physically small book that fits nicely in the reader’s hands. Each essay stands satisfyingly on its own, at most six or eight pages, more often two or fewer. All of which goes to say that it’s a book that begs to be carried along, offering insight and delight in whatever slice of time a reader may have. This is flash nonfiction.

If you didn’t know Gay as a poet before coming to Delights , his prose would tip you off, with its repetition and precision, its river of ideas and images flowing without pause from one into another. In several essays, he describes sitting on a curb or a step to capture an impression in the immediacy of the moment, and that sense of spontaneity remains.

The essay “Writing by Hand” underscores that writing these essays — with a Le Pen, in small notebooks, seeing the words appear, enjoying the feel, living with the scratch-outs, allowing run-on fragments to stand as he never would on a computer, all of which is absolutely part of the delight — was closer to how he writes poetry. We’re invited in to watch him thinking in real time, and the messiness of ideas as they emerge is a large part of the joy.  

A lovely example is “Tap Tap,” perhaps a page long, written in three running, discursive sentences that manage without strain to consider the reassurance of a welcome, friendly touch of a stranger as counterpoint to “the official American policy, which is a kind of de facto and terrible touching of some of us.” But then the balm of this, “tap, tap, reminding me, like that, simply, remember, tap tap, how else we might be touched.”

This sort of warm touch or incidental happy interaction with strangers is a recurring delight for Gay. After getting high-fived out of the blue by a young white girl, he says, “For I love, I delight in, unequivocally pleasant public physical interactions with strangers…when a waitress puts her hand on my shoulder. (Forget it if she calls me honey. Baby even better.) Or someone scooting by puts their hand on my back. The handshake. The hug. I love them both.”

There is a similar sort of physicality to most of these essays that embodies delight rather than merely observing it. These essays get their hands dirty.

In fact, the author is a gardener, and the delights of the garden return as a thematic touchstone. “Tomato on Board” begins:

“What you don’t know until you carry a tomato seedling through the airport and onto a plane is that carrying a tomato seedling through the airport and onto a plane will make people smile at you almost like you’re carrying a baby.”

In “Understory,” he riffs on the redbud as the Judas tree in Christian tradition, “though the way the redbud flowers cluster like an orgy of kissy-mouths might also have been a good puritanical reason enough to associate the tree with the less than divine.”

To be sure, not everything that Gay’s eye rests upon and his pen captures is a delight. “Hole in the Head” considers a documentary of the same name that tells the story of Vertus Hardiman, who, at age 5, was among a group of black children used in radiation experiments, which ended up burning “a fist-sized crevice in his skull.”

Gay muses, “I’m trying to remember the last day I haven’t been reminded of the inconceivable violence black people have endured in this country.” But, as he notes in his introduction, the discipline of noticing delights in order to write about them also “occasioned a kind of delight radar…Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”

The other main point this collection proves is that delight is infectious and demands to be shared, and, most importantly, “our delight grows as we share it.”

Jennifer Bort Yacovissi’s debut novel, Up the Hill to Home , tells the story of four generations of a family in Washington, DC, from the Civil War to the Great Depression. Jenny is a member of PEN/America and the National Book Critics’ Circle and writes a monthly column and reviews regularly for the Independent. She served as chair of the 2017 and 2018 Washington Writers Conference and for several recent years was president of the Annapolis chapter of the Maryland Writers Association.

Support the Independent by purchasing this title via our affliate links: Amazon.com Or through Bookshop.org

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The Book of Delights: Essays

The  New York Times  bestselling book of essays celebrating ordinary delights in the world around us by one of America's most original and observant writers, award-winning poet Ross Gay.

As Heard on NPR's  This American Life “Ross Gay’s eye lands upon wonder at every turn, bolstering my belief in the countless small miracles that surround us.” —Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize winner and U.S. Poet Laureate The winner of the NBCC Award for Poetry offers up a spirited collection of short lyrical essays, written daily over a tumultuous year, reminding us of the purpose and pleasure of praising, extolling, and celebrating ordinary wonders. In  The Book of Delights , one of today’s most original literary voices offers up a genre-defying volume of lyric essays written over one tumultuous year. The first nonfiction book from award-winning poet Ross Gay is a record of the small joys we often overlook in our busy lives. Among Gay’s funny, poetic, philosophical delights: a friend’s unabashed use of air quotes, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an airplane, the silent nod of acknowledgment between the only two black people in a room. But Gay never dismisses the complexities, even the terrors, of living in America as a black man or the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture or the loss of those he loves. More than anything else, though, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world–his garden, the flowers peeking out of the sidewalk, the hypnotic movements of a praying mantis. The Book of Delights  is about our shared bonds, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. These remarkable pieces serve as a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight.

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How Ross Gay Finds Joy In The Smallest of 'Delights'

Christina Cala

This summer on Code Switch, we're talking to some of our favorite authors about books that taught us about the different dimensions of freedom. In the last installment, we caught up with the romance writer Helen Hoang to talk about sex, love and autism. Today, we're sitting down with the writer Ross Gay.

Words To Set You Free

So many things delight Ross Gay: handmade infinity scarves and loitering, the joy of carrying a heavy bag between two people, paw paws and even weeds. The author and poet began writing daily essays on things that delighted him when he turned 42; those reflections became the basis of his 2019 collection The Book of Delights.

The book is filled with such joy and effusiveness that I find myself revisiting it over and over again. Over the years, it has offered me a template for how to hold the good with the bad, to be more present, and to revel in the little things. This summer, I reread it yet again and found myself meditating on a desire Gay had voiced: wanting to be softer in a world so ready to sharpen us and to make us hard.

So, in a recent interview, I talked to Gay about that desire, as well as the role of joy in daily life, the difficulty of allowing yourself to be moved, and why he thinks it's important to use the word "love." Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Can you describe a moment when you felt free?

So I'm writing about joy. The thing is, I'm not exactly sure what joy is. I'm constantly trying to wonder about it. In fact, I'd tell you, that's one little definition of freedom I enjoy: wondering about joy with other people. I am writing because I'm thinking about these moments where I have felt the immense experience of joy.

Author Interviews

Encore: ross gay writes 'the book of delights'.

For instance, I've worked for years on this project called the Bloomington Community Orchard. Within about eight months, we planted this orchard. And since then, it's been cared for by so many people. When we planted that orchard, there was the feeling of watching those trees go into the ground and thinking about all of that labor, all of that care and all of that struggle, too. But I think everyone felt that it would be something that we together could make that might care for people we do not know, and might care for people in the future who we could not imagine.

And I can just remember it plain as day, when I was leaving that day, my eyes were welled up. I was just so filled up, and I was so profoundly indebted to these people — and it's a lot of people. There were all the potlucks, all the arguments, all the going to get limestone, all the talking about what kind of trees there were going to be. I've been thinking about that as joy, but I'm also going to say I think maybe that was an experience of freedom.

When I read your book this time, I really sat with what you were saying about wanting to be softer. And I think it offers this roadmap of someone saying, it's OK to love things, and it's OK to feel joy. There is a lot of freedom in that: in finding something delightful, taking time with it and sharing that joy.

Yeah. One of the projects of the book is allowing oneself to be moved. And I think one of the studies in the book is that to be moved is to be connected. To be moved is to be alive .

I think for any number of reasons, I have wanted to participate in the brutal fantasy of not being movable. I've wanted to imagine myself as a discrete creature that is not movable. You know, I grew up playing college football, and a lot of my training was about how to be unmovable.

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The Book of (More) Delights

Contributors

By Ross Gay

Formats and Prices

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• Hardcover $28.00 $35.00 CAD
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• Audiobook Download (Unabridged) $24.99
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This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around September 19, 2023. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

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Description

**Named a Best Book of the Year by The Boston Globe , Garden & Gun , Electric Literature , and St. Louis Public Radio** The New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy is back with exactly the book we need in these unsettling times.  Margaret Roach of The   New York Times  says,  “Yes, please. I'll have another dose of delight.” In Ross Gay’s new collection of small, daily wonders, 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 “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.

The Book of (More) Delights is a volume to savor and share.

• Literary Collections
• "By popular demand, Ross Gay is back, better than ever . . . This time he swings his basket higher, slower, for a whole new bevy of brainy and witty noticings."​ Garden & Gun
• Named a Best/Most Anticipated Book of Fall/2023 by TIME.com, Kirkus Reviews,   Publishers Weekly ,  Book Riot, Christian Science Monitor , & more! “Books to Read When You Have the Seasonal Sniffles” by Boston Globe
• "Yes, please. I'll have another dose of delight." Margaret Roach, The New York Times
• “[Gay] rejoices in the fleeting pleasures of everyday life. …heartfelt… [He] calls on us to marvel at nature’s small wonders and remember that we’re all connected.” Washington Post
• "Another startling, sensuous collection of miniature essays... again and again, joy wins out over despair as Gay pays tribute to a world of people "'bumbling, flailing, hurting, failing, changing.'" Booklist
• “Keenly observed and delivered with deftness, these essays are a testament to the artfulness of attention and everyday joy.” Kirkus Reviews
• “Gay's work never sugar coats the difficulties or fragility of life, but it is still so hopeful.”  —Wild Geese Bookshop USA Today
• “Gay proves that he’s able to endlessly expand on any minute detail of life in a way that’s not only interesting, but that’s often profound, open-ended, and sometimes even revelatory. It’s clear that these 'delights' are a gift not only for the author himself but also for every one of the readers he touches.” Shondaland
• “Ross Gay, and I will praise him forever, is a beautiful writer who reminds us of the beauty in small, everyday things.” Ann Patchett, The Skimm
• "A feel-good book... [it] expertly whisks readers away to simpler times. The book’s happy, worry-free vibes make it the ultimate vacation read, no matter the time of year." Travel & Leisure
• “His delightful observations of everyday life are a reminder that joy is all around us, we just have to be willing to look for it” TIME.com
• “His delightful observations of everyday life are a reminder that joy is all around us, we just have to be willing to look for it” TheRoot.com
• “Ross Gay’s ‘delight practice’ turns out to be exactly what I need to cope with this whole being-a-human-in-2024 thing… A gloriously unpredictable compendium of observations and celebrations of a life lived with full attention.” The Guardian
• "Savor every morsel of language in this catalog of daily joys." The Presbyterian Outlook
• “Ross Gay follows up his 2019 bestseller, The Book of Delights , with another collection of charming essays as quirky, engaging, and wryly humorous as the first. These reflections on what makes life meaningful offer a provocative episodic read.” Christian Science Monitor
• “Enormously delightful. Gay is a master at amplifying the delights all around us” Literary Hub
• “Enchanting… These unforgettable vignettes will enhance readers’ appreciation for their own surroundings.”   Publishers Weekly
• "This trilogy of titles help us understand each other, the world, and our place in it." Barnes & Noble Reads
• “A refreshing reminder that joy surrounds us everywhere” Bookreporter.com
• "A lovely book continuing his celebration of the everyday delights! Staff recommended! Highly! Happily!" My Edmund News
• “Gay’s work is a reminder of all things tiny and beautiful, small but miraculous, ordinary yet magical. Read The Book of (More) Delights . It will grant you some gorgeous silence.” Brown Daily Herald
• “Heartening. Informal yet inspired, off-the-cuff yet beautifully composed… The Book of (More) Delights  provides abundant avenues to appreciate our world.” BookPage
• “Beautifully written and a balm for our times." Toronto Star
• "Short essays with wonderfully playful writing that made me feel understood while also providing a new way to see the world. ...simultaneously unique and relatable... Something to keep stashed away for when you need a quick pick-me-up." St. Louis Public Radio
• “Ross Gay’s latest collection of essays  The Book of (More) Delights  is a dose of joy, perfect for dark winter months.”​ Montclair Local
• “This tour of delights is itself a delight.” Boston Globe
• “[Gay] is wry but hopeful, which feels so necessary in our current age.” Good Times Santa Cruz
• “A magical portal into the whimsical, the profound, and the utterly delightful facets of life. Gay’s prose is like a symphony… Prepare to be enchanted, uplifted, and ultimately transformed.” Medium.com
• “In brief, rapturous notes about quotidian delights and essays on the sources and complexities of joy, he suggests an ethics of pleasure, attention, noticing, and human connection that resists the forces that seek to repress and delimit our birthright to live fully.” CBC Radio

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For Caleb Carr, Salvation Arrived on Little Cat’s Feet

As he struggled with writing and illness, the “Alienist” author found comfort in the feline companions he recalls in a new memoir, “My Beloved Monster.”

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By Alexandra Jacobs

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MY BELOVED MONSTER: Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me, by Caleb Carr

J. Alfred Prufrock measured his life out in coffee spoons . Caleb Carr has done so in cats.

Carr is best known for his 1994 best-selling novel “ The Alienist ,” about the search for a serial killer of boy prostitutes, and his work as a military historian. You have to prod the old brain folds a little more to remember that he is the middle son of Lucien Carr , the Beat Generation figure convicted of manslaughter as a 19-year-old Columbia student after stabbing his infatuated former Boy Scout leader and rolling the body into the Hudson.

This crime is only fleetingly alluded to in “My Beloved Monster,” which tracks Carr’s intimate relationship with a blond Siberian feline he names Masha — but his father haunts the book, as fathers will, more sinisterly than most.

After a short prison term, Lucien went on to become a respectable longtime editor for United Press International. He was a drunk — no surprise there, with famous dissolute-author pals like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg hanging around the house. But that he regularly beat Caleb and threw him down flights of stairs, causing not just psychological but physical injuries that persist into adult life, adds further dark shadings to this particular chapter of literary history.

In a boyhood marred by abuse, neglect and the upheaval of his parents’ divorce, cats were there to comfort and commune with Caleb. Indeed, he long believed he was one in a previous life, “ imperfectly or incompletely reincarnated ” as human, he writes.

Before you summon Shirley MacLaine to convene 2024’s weirdest author panel, consider the new ground “My Beloved Monster” breaks just by existing. Even leaving aside the countless novels about them, dogs have long been thought valid subjects for book-length treatment, from Virginia Woolf’s “ Flush ,” about Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, to John Grogan’s “ Marley and Me .” Meow-moirs are thinner on the ground.

It’s taken a younger generation of feminists, and probably the boredom and anxiety of quarantine, to destigmatize (and in some cases monetize ) being owned by a cat. Male cat fanciers, however, have long been stereotyped as epicene or eccentric, though their number has included such national pillars of machismo as Ernest Hemingway and Marlon Brando . When one male lawyer accidentally showed up to a civil forfeiture hearing behind a kitten filter on Zoom in 2021, America went wild with the incongruity.

Carr, though he’s a big one for research, doesn’t waste much time, as I just have, throat-clearing about cats’ perch in the culture. He’s suffered from one painful illness after another — neuropathy, pancreatitis, peritonitis, Covid or something Covid-like, cancer; and endured multiple treatments and surgeries, some “botched” — and his writing has the forthrightness and gravity of someone who wants to maximize his remaining time on Earth.

He capitalizes not only Earth, but the Sun, the Moon and the roles played by various important anonymous humans in his life, which gives his story a sometimes ponderous mythic tone: there’s the Mentor, the Lady Vet (a homage to Preston Sturges’ “The Lady Eve”; Carr is a classic movie buff), the Spinal Guru and so forth.

Names are reserved for a succession of cats, who have seemingly been as important to Carr as lovers or human friends, if not more so. (At least one ex felt shortchanged by comparison.) Masha is his spirit animal, a feminine counterpart better than any you could find in the old New York Review of Books personals . She eats, he notes admiringly, “like a barbarian queen”; she enjoys the music of Mahler, Sibelius, Rachmaninoff and Wagner (“nothing — and I’ll include catnip in this statement,” he writes, “made her as visibly overjoyed as the Prelude from ‘Das Rheingold’”); she has a really great set of whiskers.

Before Masha there was Suki, blond as well, but a bewitching emerald-eyed shorthair who chomped delicately around rodents’ organs and disappeared one night. Suki was preceded by Echo, a part-Abyssinian with an adorable-sounding penchant for sticking his head in Carr’s shirtfront pocket. Echo was preceded by Chimene, a tabby-splotched white tomcat the adolescent Caleb nurses miraculously through distemper. Chimene was preceded by Ching-ling, whose third litter of kittens suffer a deeply upsetting fate. And before Ching-ling there was Zorro, a white-socked “superlative mouser” who once stole an entire roast chicken from the top of the Carr family’s refrigerator.

To put it mildly, “My Beloved Monster” is no Fancy Feast commercial. All of the cats in it, city and country — Carr has lived in both, though the action is centered at his house on a foothill of Misery Mountain in Rensselaer County, N.Y— are semi-feral creatures themselves at constant risk of gruesome predation. Masha, rescued from a shelter, had also been likely abused, at the very least abandoned in a locked apartment, and Carr is immediately, keenly attuned to her need for wandering free.

This, of course, will put her at risk. The tension between keeping her safe and allowing her to roam, out there with bears, coyotes and fearsome-sounding creatures called fisher weasels, is the central vein of “My Beloved Monster,” and the foreboding is as thick as her triple-layered fur coat. More so when you learn Carr keeps a hunting rifle by one of his easy chairs.

But the book is also about Carr’s devotion to a line of work he likens to “professional gambling.” Despite his best sellers, Hollywood commissions and conscious decision not to have children to stop the “cycle of abuse,” Carr has faced money troubles. The I.R.S. comes to tape a placard to his door and he’s forced to sell vintage guitars to afford Masha’s medications, for she has begun in eerie parallel to develop ailments of her own.

“My Beloved Monster’ is a loving and lovely, lay-it-all-on-the-line explication of one man’s fierce attachment. If you love cats and feel slightly sheepish about it, it’s a sturdy defense weapon. If you hate them, well, there’s no hope for you.

MY BELOVED MONSTER : Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me | By Caleb Carr | Little, Brown | 352 pp. | $32

Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010. More about Alexandra Jacobs

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The Book of Delights

67 pages • 2 hours read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Essay 10

Essays 11-24

Essays 25-39

Essays 40-55

Essays 56-68

Essays 69-77

Essays 78-91

Essays 92-102

Key Figures

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Authorial Context: Ross Gay’s Study of Joy

On Ross Gay’s website, the first four sentences of the “about” page read as follows: “Ross Gay is interested in joy. Ross Gay wants to understand joy. Ross Gay is curious about joy. Ross Gay studies joy” ( Ross Gay ). Gay is a self-proclaimed student of joy; many of his works reflect this study. Before releasing his poetry collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude in 2015, he was already writing lyric inquiries into how humans might better love one another. His poetry books Against Which (2006), Bringing the Shovel Down (2011), and Lace & Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens (2014, co-authored with Aimee Nezhukumatathil) all explore the concepts of love, community, hope, and growth. Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude marks a shift in Gay’s writing and was the first of his works to intentionally focus on the ideas of joy, delight, and gratitude. He released The Book of Delights in 2019 and released another collection of essays, Inciting Joy, in 2022.

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The Book of Delights: Essays Hardcover – February 12, 2019

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 288 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Algonquin Books
• Publication date February 12, 2019
• Dimensions 5.5 x 1.25 x 7.33 inches
• ISBN-10 1616207922
• ISBN-13 978-1616207922
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Algonquin Books; First Edition (February 12, 2019)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1616207922
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1616207922
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.25 x 7.33 inches
• #67 in Essays (Books)
• #112 in Black & African American Biographies
• #1,109 in Memoirs (Books)

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About the author

Ross Gay is the author of The Book of Delights, a genre-defying book of essays, and three books of poetry: Against Which, Bringing the Shovel Down, and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. He is also the co-author, with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of the chapbook "Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens," in addition to being co-author, with Richard Wehrenberg, Jr., of the chapbook, "River." He is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin', in addition to being an editor with the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press. Ross is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ross teaches at Indiana University.

Author website: http://www.rossgay.net

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