In addition to The Book of Delights: Essays, Ross Gay is the author of three books of poetry, including Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Catalog was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry, the Ohioana Book Award, the Balcones Poetry Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. He is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call It Ballin' and founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a nonprofit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. Gay has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at Indiana University.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER As Heard on NPR's This
American Life "The delights he extols here (music, laughter,
generosity, poetry, lots of nature) are bulwarks against casual
cruelties. As such they feel purposeful and imperative as well as
contagious in their joy."
--The New York Times Book Review "These charming, digressive
'essayettes, ' in the manner of Montaigne, surprise and challenge .
. . Gay, an award-winning poet, knows the value of formal
constraint: his experiences of 'delight, ' recorded daily for a
year, vary widely but yield revealing patterns through insights
about everything from nature and the body to race and masculinity.
The fruits of this experiment--for which gardens and gardening
provide a frequent, apt metaphor--attest to an imagination
cultivated in hostile conditions. Gay's optimism is as easy as it
is improbable, his 'heart cooing like a pigeon nestled on a
windowsill where the spikes rusted off.'"
--The New Yorker "What emerges is not a ledger of delights
passively logged but a radiant lens actively searching for and
magnifying them, not just with the mind but with the body as an
instrument of wonder-stricken presence."
--Brain Pickings, Favorite Books of 2019 "Ross Gay's poems
are little celebrations of joy, and this book of mini-essays--each
centering around a particular 'delight, ' from sleeping in your
clothes to planting tomato seedlings to the nod of greeting between
the only two black people in a room--is a pure balm for your soul.
Savor one at a time every morning, this summer, or wolf them all
down en masse on a gorgeous sunny day."
--Celeste Ng for GoodMorningAmerica.com "Delightfully snackable . .
. Pick it up, read for ten minutes (start anywhere, really), put it
down, and you'll find that the delights of Gay's world illuminate
the delights of yours, that his wonder is contagious and has caused
you to deepen your own."
--GQ "The shock of Gay's writing . . . is his seamless shift from
breezy, affable observation to sober (and admittedly still affable)
profundity . . . I want to say that Gay's writing is magical
because that's the way it feels when I read it. But . . . calling
it magic undercuts Gay's craft, the effort that goes into producing
literature that feels as fluent and familiar as a chat with a close
friend. His voice has integrity, in both senses of the word: a
completeness or consistency, true to itself; and an honesty and
compassion so frankly subjective that it produces an incorruptible
vision. Gay's loose-limbed sentences diagram his delight, partaking
in numerous asides--some as paragraph-long parentheticals--and
equally numerous asides within asides, as well as nested
subordinate clauses that are the purview of intimate conversation,
not written prose. They are clauses and asides in which, as Gay
writes them, you feel his hand on your arm, you feel him lean in
toward you, conspiratorially or simply to emphasize his
meaning."
--The New York Review of Books "Everyone could use a bit more
delight in their days . . . Gay, who is the winner of the NBCC
Award for Poetry, is here to provide just that, with essays
celebrating everything from air quotes to candy wrappers to pickup
basketball games."
--New York Post "The Book of Delights is both practice and
perfection in an unassuming package . . . These pieces reflect and
examine the natural world, masculinity, racism, and other topics
with vibrancy. Most essays are a few paragraphs, a page or two at
maximum, but it's not the width or length of the pieces that
ultimately grabbed my attention. It was the heart and intelligence
found within his daily introspections."
--The Rumpus "A reminder of what the personal essay is best at:
finding the profound in the mundane . . . his delight is
infectious. It's hard to read Gay and not to be won over."
--Seattle Times "This collection proves is that delight is
infectious and demands to be shared, and, most importantly, 'our
delight grows as we share it.'
--Washington Independent Review of Books
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