'The Correspondence gives off the unmistakable crackle of an original writer who has found a new form. It's hard to say who or what is meant to be on the receiving end of these "letters", but if you care about modern life you need to read them.' - John Jeremiah Sullivan
J. D. Daniels is the recipient of a 2016 Whiting Award and The Paris Review's 2013 Terry Southern Prize. His 'Letter from Majorca' was selected for The Best American Essays 2013.
Tightly written, often brilliant… Alive with deft asides and daring
intuitive leaps. Daniels is a very good writer, and [this is] a
very good book… The self is the well from which all these essays
are drawn; or perhaps it’s the sewer into which all these essays
drain… A complete work about a work-in-progress, the self-portrait
of a writer slowly coming into his own.
*Guardian*
What a nutjob! Increasingly these three words constitute my highest
praise for – almost my ideal of – a writer, and in this regard J.
D. Daniels takes the biscuit. I love the way he throws out
everything, both in the sense of throwing it all at us, and the
opposite: discarding everything that might be deemed necessary to
the seemly construction of narrative. So The Correspondence gives
us the best of both worlds.
*Geoff Dyer*
The Correspondence gives off the unmistakable crackle of an
original writer who has found a new form. It's hard to say who or
what is meant to be on the receiving end of these “letters”, but if
you care about modern life you need to read them.
*John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of PULPHEAD*
The Correspondence is one of the best things I’ve read in a long
time, a whole new music that changes the score of masculinity, and
a new kind of writing too, one that pushes form and sentence into
radical, contemporary shapes. The word ‘honesty’ has become
something of an irritant in contemporary literary culture: J. D.
Daniels does something more moral than be simply honest. He invokes
the grandeur and abasement of experience with a tactility of
language that makes a psychological landscape of it, rather as the
ancient Greeks did, and his notions of justice and truth are as
richly textured as theirs. I have lent this slim, meaningful book
to one person after another, and received the confirmation that it
has changed their view of the world with its economy, its potency,
its different fall of light.
*Rachel Cusk, author of TRANSIT*
Daniels sees what others don't, feels what others won't, and writes
what others can't. He is a blazing virtuoso of the English
sentence, an oracle with a vulnerable and willing heart, and he has
produced a shockingly perfect book.
*Sarah Manguso, author of ONGOINGNESS*
Questions that occurred to me as I read this brilliant, baffling
book: What the hell is this? Who the hell is this? Is this poetry?
How can that sentence be so good? Can I steal that later? In 130
pages, Daniels shows you just about everything great prose can do.
Books like this are why I read.
*Tom Bissell, author of APOSTLE*
J.D. Daniels's The Correspondence is an epic in fragments:
masterly, comic, wise, daring. It is a book for everyone, from
Kentucky to Cambridge to Kathmandu, though as a reader you may feel
that Daniels is trafficking in secrets, meant for you alone. It is
occult. It is so strong, it will melt the books on the shelves
around it. This is a book that will become a legend, introducing
one of the very best writers in the country. If I could thrust it
into every true reader's hands, I would.
*Mark Greif, author of THE AGE OF THE CRISIS OF MAN*
Through the speed and shocking cuts of his prose, Daniels shows us
what it is to be a writer now. Each of these six letters is a
modern expression of Baudelaire's tortured prayer: “O Lord God
grant me the grace to produce a few good verses, which shall prove
to myself that I am not the lowest of men, that I am not inferior
to those whom I despise.”
*Michael Clune, author of GAMELIFE*
J.D. Daniels is a scourge to an America drunk on fraudulent images
of masculinity and to a literary scene enamored of dainty
exhibitionism. A writer so rigorously on guard against complacency
that he's likely to take any compliment paid him like a slap in the
face.
*Marco Roth, author of THE SCIENTISTS*
Masculinity as vulnerable, smelly smackdown, personal failure as
syntactic delight: in this volatile, brilliant collection, Daniels
recollects in not-quite tranquility a series of synesthesiac
rearrangements of the self. The riveting swerves of his sentences
and of his geographic and spiritual wanderings will make you keep
asking what “here” might be. These essays pay tribute to “the
world… our common property”.
*Lisa Cohen, author of ALL WE KNOW*
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