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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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FOLLOW BOOKRAGS:

The Book of Delights: Poet and Gardener Ross Gay’s Yearlong Experiment in Willful Gladness

By maria popova.

“The high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy,” Hermann Hesse wrote at the dawn of the twentieth century in trying to course-correct the budding consumerist conscience toward the small triumphs of attentive presence that make life worth living , adding: “My advice to the person suffering from lack of time and from apathy is this: Seek out each day as many as possible of the small joys.” Delights, we may call them. And that is what poet Ross Gay does call them as he picks up, a century and a civilizational failure later, where Hesse left off with The Book of Delights ( public library ) — his yearlong experiment in learning to notice, amid a world that so readily gives us reasons to despair, the daily wellsprings of delight, or what Wendell Berry, in his gorgeous case for delight as a countercultural force of resistance , called the elemental pleasures “to which a man had to be acutely and intricately attentive, or he could not have them at all.”

Each day, beginning on his forty-second birthday and ending on his forty-third, Gay composed one miniature essay — “essayettes,” he calls them, in that lovely poet’s way of leavening meaning with makeshift language — about a particular delight encountered that day, swirled around his consciousness to extract its maximum sweetness. ( Delight , he tells us, means “out from light,” sharing etymological roots with delicious and delectable .) 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 — the living-gladness counterpart to Tolstoy’s kindred-spirited but wholly cerebral Calendar of Wisdom .

Page after page, small joy after small joy, one is reminded — almost with the shock of having forgotten — that delights are strewn about this world like quiet, inappreciable dew-drops, waiting for the sunshine of our attention to turn them into gold.

Patterns and themes and concerns show up… My mother is often on my mind. Racism is often on my mind. Kindness is often on my mind. Politics. Pop music. Books. Dreams. Public space. My garden is often on my mind.

In a passage evocative of those delicious lines from Mary Oliver’s serenade to life — “there is so much to admire, to weep over / and to write music or poems about” — he adds:

It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study… I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight. I also learned this year that my delight grows — much like love and joy — when I share it.

And so we learn, as passengers on Gay’s delightcraft, that it is not just a matter of paying attention, but of taking attention, of deliberately shifting it, of diverting the glycogen that pumps our despair muscle and clenches the fist scanning for danger, for that selfsame glycogen is needed to pump our delight muscle and open the palm to hold joy.

When I began this gathering of essays, which, yes, comes from the French essai , meaning to try, or to attempt, I planned on writing one of these things — these attempts — every day for a year. When I decided this I was walking back to my lodging in a castle (delight) from two very strong espressos at a café in Umbertide (delight), having just accidentally pilfered a handful of loquats from what I thought was a public tree (but upon just a touch more scrutiny was obviously not — delight!), and sucking on the ripe little fruit, turning the smooth gems of their seeds around in my mouth as wild fennel fronds wisped in the breeze on the roadside, a field of sunflowers stretched to the horizon, casting their seedy grins to the sun above, the honeybees in the linden trees thick enough for me not only to hear but to feel in my body, the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything.

To be sure, this capacity for drinking in the glorious everythingness of the world is rooted in recognizing the immense and improbable elemental delight of one’s own existence — the consequence of what Gay calls “the many thousand — million! — accidents — no, impossibilities! — leading to our births,” that miracle of chance he had contemplated a decade earlier in a wondrous poem . He marvels at the improbable origin of his own delight:

For god’s sake, my white mother had never even met a black guy! My father failed out of Central State (too busy looking good and having fun, so they say), got drafted, and was counseled by his old man to enlist in the navy that day so as not to go where the black and brown and poor kids go in the wars of America. And they both ended up, I kid you not, in Guam. Black man, white woman, the year of Loving v. Virginia , on a stolen island in the Pacific, a staging ground for American expansion and domination. Comes some babies, one of them me.

One of the readiest sources of daily delight comes — predictably, given the well documented physiological and psychological consolations of nature — from his beloved community garden. (Gay is as much a poet as he is a devoted gardener, though perhaps as Emily Dickinson well knew , the two are but a single occupation.) In an early-August essayette titled “Inefficiency,” he writes:

I don’t know if it’s the time I’ve spent in the garden ( spent an interesting word), which is somehow an exercise in supreme attentiveness — staring into the oregano blooms wending through the lowest branches of the goumi bush and the big vascular leaves of the rhubarb—and also an exercise in supreme inattention, or distraction, I should say, or fleeting intense attentions, I should say, or intense fleeting attentions — did I mention the hummingbird hovering there with its green-gold breast shimmering, slipping its needle nose in the zinnia, and zoom! Mention the pokeweed berries dangling like jewelry from a flapper mid-step. Mention the little black jewels of deer scat and the deer-shaped depressions in the grass and red clover. Uh oh.

Perhaps the most charming category of delights Gay encounters throughout the year are what he terms “unequivocally pleasant public physical interactions with strangers.” One September day, wandering through a small town in Indiana where he had just given a poetry reading at the local college and where “Make America Great Again” signs glare from an auto-shop selling foreign cars, he records this:

While I was working, headphones on, swaying to the new De La Soul record (delight, which deserves its own entry), I noticed a white girl — she looked fifteen, but could’ve been, I suppose, a college student — standing next to me with her hand raised. I looked up, confused, pulled my headphones back, and she said, like a coach or something, “Working on your paper?! Good job to you! High five!” And you better believe I high-fived that child in her preripped Def Leppard shirt and her itty-bitty Doc Martens. For I love, I delight in, unequivocally pleasant public physical interactions with strangers. What constitutes pleasant, it’s no secret, is informed by my large-ish, male, and cisgender body, a body that is also large-ish, male, cisgender, and not white. In other words, the pleasant, the delightful, are not universal. We all should understand this by now. A few months ago, walking down the street in Umbertide, in Italy, a trash truck pulled up beside me and the guy in the passenger’s seat yelled something I didn’t understand. I said, “Como,” the Spanish word for “come again,” which is a ridiculous thing to say because even if he had come again I wouldn’t have understood him. He knew this, and hopping out of the truck to dump in a couple cans, he flexed his muscles, pointed at me, and smacked my biceps hard. Twice! I loved him! Or 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.

And then there are his parenthetical meta-delights — parentheses applied, in proper Lewis Thomas fashion , as containers of delight, wherein the container itself is delightful. For instance, this:

(A delight that we can heal our loved ones, even the dead ones.) Oh broken. Oh beautiful.

Or this, nestled into his Indiana-small-town experience:

(A feature of the small-town Midwest: a city-hallish building in the center, always with some sad statue trumpeting one war or another. This one had a guy in one of those not-very-protective-looking hats they called a helmet during WWI. He’s carrying, naturally, a gun. Jena Osman’s book Public Figures alerted me to the ubiquity of the gun, the weapon, in the hands of our statues. A delight I wish to now imagine and even impose, given that beneficent dictatorship [of one’s own life, anyway] is a delight, all new statues must have in their hands flowers or shovels or babies or seedlings or chinchillas — we could go on like this for a while. But never again — never ever — guns. I decree it, and also decree the removal of the already extant guns. Let the emptiness our war heroes carry be the metaphor for a while.)

This transmutation of terror into transcendence haunts the book as a guiding spirit. In an early-autumn essayette, drawing on Zadie Smith’s elegant reflections on joy , and on Rilke, and on Edmund Burke and the Romantics, Gay offers the daring theory that joy is “not a feeling or an accomplishment: it’s an entering and a joining with the terrible.” He then tests it in the only laboratory we have for our life-theories — our own being-in-the-world:

I dreamed a few years back that I was in a supermarket checking out when I had the stark and luminous and devastating realization — in that clear way, not that oh yeah way — that my life would end. I wept in line watching people go by with their carts, watching the cashier move items over the scanner, feeling such an absolute love for this life. And the mundane fact of buying groceries with other people whom I do not know, like all the banalities, would be no more so soon, or now. Good as now. […] Among the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be: “What if we joined our wildernesses together?” Sit with that for a minute. […] It astonishes me sometimes — no, often — how every person I get to know — everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything — lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness? Is sorrow the true wild? And if it is — and if we join them — your wild to mine — what’s that? For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy?

Complement the infinitely delightful Book of Delights with poet Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie’s lovely picture-book about happiness as a daily practice of noticing and Michael McCarthy’s meditation on nature and the serious work of joy , then revisit Bill T. Jones’s spellbinding Universe in Verse performance of one of Ross Gay’s poems.

— Published December 1, 2019 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/12/01/ross-gay-book-of-delights/ —

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The Book of Delights: Essays

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 other subject, 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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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

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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

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Important Quotes

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Essays 56-68 Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Essay 56 summary: “my life, my life, my life, my life in the sunshine”.

Gay hears the lyrics to “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” by Roy Ayers Ubiquity from a passing car. He loves the song for its simplicity and thinks the song is elevated to almost metaphysical holiness by the lyrics, “Just bees and things and flowers” (133).

Essay 57 Summary: “Incorporation”

Gay starts this essay by describing his enthusiastic hand gestures during a conversation. He frequently smacks himself or the people around him while laughing, especially hitting his own chest, near his heart. He is delighted when he realizes he incorporates gestures he learned from his friend Walton, and he reflects on how much people borrow from those around them.

Essay 58 Summary: “Botan Rice Candy”

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The Book of Delights: Essays

274 pages, Hardcover

First published February 12, 2019

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I have no illusions, by which I mean to tell you it is a fact, that one of the objectives of popular culture, popular media, is to make blackness appear to be inextricable from suffering, and suffering from blackness. ...Clever as hell if your goal is to make appear natural what is, in fact, by design. And the delight? You have been reading a book of delights written by a black person. A book of black delight. Daily as air.

Goddamn. How often do you get to see someone slow dancing with a pigeon! And not thirty seconds later, walking toward Eighth, giggling at my good fortune, a tufted titmouse swooped by my head, landing on a wrought-iron gate, upon which a pedestrian walking past me immediately pulled from her snazzy jacket pocket a baggie of crumbs, and the bird hopped directly into her hand, nuzzling the goodies intermittent with tweeting toward its new pal, the bird and woman both nodding at me gawking at them, smiling at my bafflement, as though to say, We’re everywhere.

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Q&A with Ross Gay: ‘The Book of Delights’ and an Essay a Day for a Year

ZYZZYVA: Some essays in The Book of Delights feel incredibly personal, almost more like journal entries than essays. When you wrote these, what audience did you imagine you were writing to?

Ross Gay: That’s such a good question. I mean, there’s a handful of things in terms of audience that I’ve realized over the years. One is that I’m writing to myself. I’m my first audience, and I’m writing to figure these things out and deepen my relationship to these things, and I’m writing to delight and surprise and confuse myself, too, so that’s the first thing. And then, I’m writing very much to the people whose work and lives I feel intertwined with or inseparable from. My dear friends, like Patrick Rosal, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Curtis Bauer, and all these people who I’m in a kind of writing community with…and my neighbors, too! The Book of Delights especially is so rooted in where I live. I’m writing for my neighbors and for other people who are reading the books I’m reading, and for people who are interested in art criticism, because in some ways I think this book is criticism. And I’ve realized I’m also really writing to my brother.

Z: Could you talk a bit about what it’s like for you to move from poetry to prose—or perhaps between poetry and prose? How is your process different for each?

RG : Well, with these essays—because I did give myself the task of writing them every day for a year—I knew I’d write them quickly and daily, so I probably knew pretty early on they would not do the work the way a fifteen- or twenty- or fifty-page essay would.

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Someone asked me, “Why’d you write essays instead of poems?” and I said, because I just couldn’t write a poem every day! There’s some relationship to unknowing that poems have to me. For this task of writing each day for a year about something, the poem as a form wouldn’t even occur to me, and I just can’t explain it more than that. It’s just something about it.

Z: I left a few of the essays in The Book of Delights feeling kind of un-delighted. For example, “Hole in the Head” is one that was almost completely absent of the delight and lightness many of the essays bring. I’m curious about how concepts like death and violence collide and overlap with delight in this collection.

RG : I think what’s interesting about The Book of Delights is there’s a pretty regular tension where the practice of attending to delight feels like a kind of labor. And the essay you mention tries to begin this one way [with delight], but the gravity of this ongoing brutality we live with takes the essay. So, I think that tension is what’s interesting to me about the book because it’s true to the way I experience life. Which is to say, I am witness to and beneficiary of profound kindness and tenderness and sweetness, and I am also living amid great sorrows, and that sorrow includes and means violence and brutality and the whole thing.

There’s that longish essay, “Joy is Such Human Madness,” where I do that little false etymology of “delight” meaning “of light” and “without light,” and that maybe joy is both at the same time. That’s a long and wandery way of saying that that’s how I think and understand the world and my own life.

Z: Is that the same tension that’s carried through your poetry as well, when you discuss joy and beauty alongside death and violence?

RG : I think so. I recently was looking at that first book [ Against Which ] and had occasion to look at some of the poems I really had forgotten about, and it was like, oh, this is something I’ve been thinking about hard for a long time, that things reside right next to each other or on top of each other. And in a certain kind of way, I’m interested in it, because I feel like that’s life. But I also feel like there’s a way that understanding brings us closer together, the understanding that the beautiful and the brutal exist. And one of the brutalities of [our way of life now] is that it makes us forget our dying. That’s one of our first commonnesses.

You and I, we’re both going to die. And there are all sorts of apparatuses we could use to avoid or deny that, but I suspect that if we were to just sit with that fact, I think there’s some kind of understanding or knowledge between us that would be allowed to happen.

Z: The Book of Delights seems like a midpoint between your poetry and your other nonfiction. Was writing this latest book of essays then an entirely different process from other essays you’ve written, like “Loitering Is Delightful” in The Paris Review ?

RG : I think the essays in The Book of Delights have some of the spirit and the sound of some of my poems, for sure. It’s also the case that I drafted them all in 30 minutes. That loitering piece, though, it took a long time. And it took conversations with people and asking people to read a paragraph or certain parts that were really sticky for me and saying, “I have this wrong, don’t I? How do I get this right?”

There’s a moment in that loitering essay where I say something like, “laughter is kissing cousin to loitering,” and it was my friend Pat who said that laughter is like loitering. He was like, you can’t consume while you laugh because you’ll choke, and that’s where that line came from. Which is to say, I do not write these things on my own. And the ones [in The Book of Delights] that I just really love in a different kind of way are the ones I just couldn’t figure out on my own. And they probably took longer to write, and in that way they were probably more like my relationship to poems.

Z: I love that you’re expressing that you are helped by friends and fellow writers to craft these pieces, because so often writers—young writers, especially—are afraid to harness and wield other people’s language or ideas.

RG : There is this fabrication—it’s a lie—that we need to write these things entirely on our own, and it’s a violence against the truth of our lives, which is that we live in communities.

And that’s what I want to study: radical collaboration—which is constantly happening! It’s all the ways we have the capacity to [share with each other and] love each other, but there is such a profound interference to that capacity. That’s why we need to study the ways we do have those capacities, and that we do it despite these intense institutional and structural pressures that try to impede us from simply being together.

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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, the book of delights: essays.

• About the Book

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.

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 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.

The Book of Delights: Essays by Ross Gay

• Publication Date: August 16, 2022
• Genres: Essays , Nonfiction
• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• ISBN-10: 1643753282
• ISBN-13: 9781643753287

How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay Step by Step

So, you’ve been assigned a literary analysis essay. Don’t panic! It’s not a big deal, for sure. Here’s a simple step-by-step guide to help you ace it:

1. Understand the Prompt

Recognizing that identifying the main topic and simply reading through the given instructions is the essential first step to writing an outstanding essay. You should first carefully read the given sentences which include verbs like “analyze,” “discuss,” or “explore.”

It points out that your professor is specifically interested in a particular element of the text, maybe a theme, character or some kind of literary device. Thus, this approach will spare any misinterpretation through highlighting the most critical points of the job and how it is to be executed.

If you struggle with understanding the prompt, ask for help today at the quick essay writing service FastEssay . You may ask academic writers to explain to you how to write such papers quickly and easily.

2. Select the Literary Work

Everything begins with the right story, absolutely! Pick a work that is not just a part of your arsenal of knowledge but also something that you like. The second essay is a genre(e.g., novel, short story, poetry or drama) that can be focused on. The fact that you will apply the ingredients: it will not only increase the interest in the students but also create curiosity and will turn this process into a more interesting and challenging one.

3. Read and Re-read

Decision having been made, you must plunge yourself into the text. Close your eyes, and imagine the reality of the novel, where you are one of the characters yourself, or the place they are in, or the events that have happened, or the language they use. Consider doing things slowly instead of in fast mode.Study the text carefully. The probability is, you are going to get the deeper meaning and the linkages that you might have missed in the first reading when you read the text several times.

4. Identify the Thesis

Your thesis is the heart of your literary analysis essay—it is the core argument you will advance based on the text. Spend some time to come up with a thesis statement, after which you can begin your brainstorming. It should be relevant, concise, and specific either by defining the purpose of the whole analysis or stating the central idea to be examined. Your thesis will be the guiding principle of the essay and it should be obvious to the reader from the time of the first sentence.

5. Gather Evidence

Having the thesis sub-part done, you will now need to present the text evidence from which you will be able to support your argument. Seek out quotations, sections, or instances that validate the stated argument. These instances can be a symbol, an image, a speech by a character, or plot developments. Evidence the things that support your argument and are factual for your analysis in order to reduce the impact of the interfering factors.

6. Analyze the Text

Hence, now you will have to make use of your evidence to do the analysis. Now, separate the text into smaller parts and analyze how literary devices used in the text make it more meaningful. Take into account why the craftsman takes certain decisions and what effect these decisions have on the audience. Examine how devices like symbolism, imagery, irony, and foreshadowing strengthen the message and main ideas of the text.

7. Outline Your Essay

To start your work, you might want to outline your thinking and evidence to be able to organize them. Structure your literary analysis essay by dividing it into sections: Introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion. Every paragraph will be devoted to a single sub-topic of your analysis and should begin with a clear sentence that indicates its purpose followed by appropriate evidence to back it up.

8. Write the Introduction

The opening part of the literary analysis essay is a place where you demonstrate your approach to your writing and where the reader should feel interested from the beginning. The best way to start is with a hook—an interesting one liner, a question, or an incident—that will make the reader want to read on and at the same time establish the importance of your analysis. Starting off, give the readers some information about the text, its author and the point your essay will drive home, which should be a clear statement of your thesis.

9. Develop Body Paragraphs

Body paragraphs is a place where you analyze in depth your viewpoint using supporting evidence. Ensure that each of your paragraphs starts with a topic sentence which identifies the main point or argument that you are going to explain in that paragraph. Next, you are required to provide support from a text that is giving a basis to a claim, being sure that you have analyzed each sentence and explained its meaning in relation to the thesis. Include examples, quotes, and citations to bolster your argument and have the reader accept the deconstruction you made.

10. Transition Smoothly

As you shift to the next paragraph in your literary analysis essay, be sure that the logical flow is not disrupted. Make use of transition words and phrases like “nevertheless”, “additionally”, “furthermore” and “beyond this” to link up your ideas together in a coherent manner. This assists the reader to follow your thought and make the logical flow of your thinking more obvious.

11. Write the Conclusion

A conclusion is like a period to an essay where you re-echo your points and state your thesis using different words. Try not to make a conclusion that is different from the one you have made or that is not related to the topic of analysis—the conclusion you make should be aimed at leaving the reader with a lasting impression. Finish by making a thought-provoking remark or an invitation to action that would leave a mark on your readers’ minds when they are thinking about the text.

12. Revise and Edit

The first draft is over, so sit down and respire for a while to reevaluate what you’ve written. Be careful about grammar, punctuation, and sentence architecture and check if your piece is not confusing and full of grammatical errors. First, see whether possible weakening or clarification of your analysis would be needed and edit the text accordingly.

13. Seek Feedback

So, don’t be afraid to ask your peers, mates or instructor for assessment when needed. Seeing the world through a different lens brings a lot of fresh perspectives that you haven’t thought of yet. Balance their feedback in your essay to adjust and revise the text with care in order to make it smarter.

So, don’t forget that in the beginning it may seem a bit difficult but with time and practice you will be a real pro in writing a literary analysis essay . The more you read literature and refine your analytical skills, you will recognize that the dissecting and interpreting of the text will get easier. Thus, my message to you is: do not be afraid to fully engage yourself in literary criticism and discover what lies at the core of your favorite novels. Happy writing!

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The Book of Delights: Essays

• Staff Reviews

"A collection of over a hundred short intertwined essays that weave together a complexly awestruck and pensive portrait of daily life and the swirling thoughts that come with it. By the end of the fifth essay, I was sobbing."

See all my recommendations »

“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 lyric essays, written daily over a tumultuous year, reminding us of the purpose and pleasure of praising, extolling, and celebrating ordinary wonders. Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a genre-defying book of essays—some as short as a paragraph; some as long as five pages—that record the small joys that occurred in one year, from birthday to birthday, and that we often overlook in our busy lives. His is a meditation on delight that takes a clear-eyed view of the complexities, even the terrors, in his life, including living in America as a black man; the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture; the loss of those he loves. Among Gay’s funny, poetic, philosophical delights: the way Botan Rice Candy wrappers melt in your mouth, the volunteer crossing guard with a pronounced tremor whom he imagines as a kind of boat-woman escorting pedestrians across the River Styx, a friend’s unabashed use of air quotes, pickup basketball games, the silent nod of acknowledgment between black people. And more than any other subject, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world—his garden, the flowers in the sidewalk, the birds, the bees, the mushrooms, the trees. This is not a book of how-to or inspiration, though it could be read that way. Fans of Roxane Gay, Maggie Nelson, and Kiese Laymon will revel in Gay’s voice, and his insights. The Book of Delights is about our connection to the world, to each other, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. Gay’s 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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From Dua Lipa’s book club to George Saunders’ Substack: a guide to the online books world

From BookTube to podcasts, newsletters and tweets, literature is finding ever-more new homes. Here are some you should definitely be browsing

B etween BookTube, Bookstagram, book podcasts and book newsletters, the online world of literary fandom is ever-expanding. Avid readers as well as authors, critics, journalists and celebrities are pushing the norms of literary criticism, finding new, less formal ways to talk about the latest books.

To help navigate the sea of content, here is our guide to some of the best sources of reading recommendations, author chats, writing advice and literary hot takes. And, if you haven’t already, do sign up to our own new-look books newsletter , Bookmarks.

If you want authors unfiltered

Sweater Weather , a Substack newsletter by American author Brandon Taylor, collects his thoughts on an eclectic range of topics related to craft and literature, from annotation-friendly gel pens to campus novels to marriage plots . Meanwhile, American writer George Saunders, who won the Booker prize in 2017, runs Story Club , where he shares writing tips.

If you like your book recommendations served with a side of comedy

If you’ve been wanting to join a book club but don’t like “wine, or nibbles, or being around other people,” try Sara & Cariad’s Weirdos Book Club , hosted by comedians Sara Pascoe and Cariad Lloyd. Their tastes are among the broadest on this list, spanning romance, thriller, science fiction, poetry, literary fiction and memoir. Guests are usually comedians – Tim Key, Andi Osho and Nish Kumar have featured – bringing a welcome lightness to discussions of serious literary themes.

If you want the critic’s take

New Yorker critic Merve Emre puts fellow critics in the hot seat on her new podcast, The Critic and Her Publics . Her guests perform criticism in real time on an object they’re unfamiliar with, letting listeners into the mind of a critic at work. In the first episode, Andrea Long Chu is tasked with analysing Zoe Leonard ’s 1992 poem I Want a President, which opens “I want a dyke for president. I want a person with Aids for president and I want a fag for vice-president and I want someone with no health insurance”. They discuss the poem’s manifesto-like style, political content, and its virality on social media.

If you want to eavesdrop on intimate author chats

The Books and Boba podcast invites Asian and Asian American authors on to discuss their careers and novels. In a recent episode, Tan Twan Eng talks through his journey from being an intellectual property lawyer in Kuala Lumpur to publishing three books, all of which have been longlisted for the Booker prize (his second novel, The Garden of Evening Mists, made the shortlist, too). Another interview-style podcast, Reading the Room , has featured the likes of Sheila Heti, Mona Awad, Ottessa Moshfegh and Tom Crewe. The host, Jaylen Lopez, focuses closely on the themes and style of the guests’ work, posing precise, illuminating questions that authors readily engage with.

If you’re looking for the bookfluencers who have stood the test of time

Content creator Jack Edwards bridges the gap between the traditional UK literary scene and younger, online readers: last year, he hosted the Booker prize livestream; in May, he’s interviewing Elizabeth Day at Hay festival. On YouTube, his pun-packed videos include a long-running series reviewing books that celebrities – Pedro Pascal, Kendall Jenner, Zendaya, Harry Styles – have recommended. YouTuber Leena Norms also injects fun into literary chat, with videos such as “tortured poet writes poems based on Taylor Swift’s track list” tied in with the singer’s poetry-themed album. Her content often has an anti-capitalist and climate-focused angle.

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If you want to know what the cool girls are reading

Last year, pop singer Dua Lipa launched a book club; her monthly picks have since included Crying In H Mart by Michelle Zauner, Trust by Hernan Diaz and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. Selected authors are interviewed by Lipa and curate reading lists and playlists of tracks they listen to while writing. Model Kaia Gerber’s book club started as a weekly Instagram Live in 2020 but has recently been revamped into the more formal Library Science . Her recommended reads include Sex and Rage by Eve Babitz, In Memoriam by Alice Winn and Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar.

If you want short but sweet reviews

Katie James shares thoughtful reflections on literary fiction and essays on YouTube and Instagram ; two of her favourite reads last year were Sula by Toni Morrison and Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz. For poetry, visit Ebony Kenae’s YouTube channel to find recommendations for beginner-friendly poems and tips on writing poetry . And if you’re a literary prize nerd, don’t miss Eric Karl Anderson’s bite-size reviews of nominated books, his predictions for shortlists and winners, and his endearing reactions .

If you want wisdom from the archive

Franz Kafka isn’t known for being cheery, but there’s an X account dedicated to showing the “ sunny side ” of the writer through daily quotes. The Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin bots are decidedly less jolly. And going more niche: Sylvia Plath’s Food Diary is committed to posting everything the poet ate, recorded in her journals, letters and work.

If you want writing advice from the pros

The Always Take Notes podcast offers writing tips straight from the horse’s mouth. The hosts go into the nitty-gritty of writing books – from planning, to publishing, to payment (they always ask about a guest’s financial circumstances) – with authors including Ian McEwan, Orlando Figes and Monica Ali. Another podcast, Longform , has a similar remit but a greater focus on American authors; recent guests include Sloane Crosley, Hua Hsu and Hanif Abdurraqib.

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