Any Person Is the Only Self: Essays

Contagiously curious essays on reading, art, and the life of the mind, from the acclaimed author of The Unreality of Memory.

Who are we when we read? When we journal? Are we more ourselves alone or with friends? Right now or in memory? How does time transform us and the art we love?

In sixteen dazzling, expansive essays, the acclaimed essayist and poet Elisa Gabbert explores a life lived alongside books of all kinds: dog-eared and destroyed, cherished and discarded, classic and cliched, familiar and profoundly new. She turns her witty, searching mind to the writers she admires, from Plath to Proust, and the themes that bind them--chance, freedom, envy, ambition, nostalgia, and happiness. She takes us to the strange edges of art and culture, from hair metal to surf movies to party fiction. Any Person Is the Only Self is a love letter to literature and to life, inviting us to think alongside one of our most thrilling and versatile critics.

Elisa Gabbert is the author of six collections of poetry, essays, and criticism: Normal Distance, The Unreality of Memory and Other Essays, The Word Pretty, L’Heure Bleue, The Self Unstable, and The French Exit. The Unreality of Memory and The Word Pretty were each named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and The Self Unstable was chosen by The New Yorker as one of the best books of 2013. Gabbert writes the On Poetry column for The New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, The Believer, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian Long Read, London Review of Books, A Public Space, The Nation, The Paris Review Daily, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.