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The Shortlist

Essays

Credit...Illustration by John Gall

ONGOINGNESS

The End of a Diary

By Sarah Manguso

97 pp. Graywolf, $20.

The title of Manguso’s sixth book was inspired by a quotation from the critic George W. S. Trow, who complained of his own life that “the ongoingness of it is, frankly, a real problem.” Manguso, a poet and essayist, shares with Trow an affinity for the fragment — shards of lyric and observational prose balanced with white space, to less narrative than cumulative effect — that feels bound to a struggle with time, its erasures and assertions of continuity. “Ongoingness” is Manguso’s reflection on that struggle, as it manifested in her compulsive diary writing. “I started keeping a diary 25 years ago,” she writes, out of a desire to capture life in its entirety, and to give an authentic, comprehensive account of her existence. “From the beginning, I knew the diary wasn’t working, but I couldn’t stop writing. I couldn’t think of any other way to avoid getting lost in time.” If journaling seems tame, as compulsions go, Manguso draws from her ballooning subject (800,000 words and counting, none of which appear here) an urgent portrait of an artist’s dilemma: how to extract from life some persuasive hedge against death, “that great and ongoing blank.”

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MORAL AGENTS

Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers

By Edward Mendelson

203 pp. New York Review, $21.95.

Diaries and private letters form the basis of this collection’s sensitive reconsideration of eight well-considered subjects including Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald and Norman Mailer. “Moral Agents” offers a companion to “The Things That Matter,” Mendelson’s essays on the work of five female writers, including George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Where that book explored individuality as a form of rebellion, “Moral Agents” studies “the effect of power on both private and public experience,” within a “literary culture in which power was available only to men.” Mendelson finds in his subjects’ private writings evidence of “the double life” of the American public intellectual. Trilling’s critical persona of passionately engaged moralism formed “a tutelary mask,” behind which lay “nihilistic despair.” Mailer’s commitment to mythmaking is shown to be at once diffuse and concentrated: “I, who am timid, cowardly, and wish only friendship and security,” Mailer wrote in a journal, “am the one who must take on the whole world.”

ESSAYS AFTER EIGHTY

By Donald Hall

134 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $22.

Hall, the former poet laureate, finds modern medicine more useful to his literary persona than masks or self-mythology: “When I turned 80 and rubbed testosterone onto my chest,” he writes in “Essays After Eighty,” “my beard roared like a lion and lengthened four inches.” If its attraction to him only grows, death stands among the things that no longer interest Hall in this brief, pleasingly ruminative collection. “It’s almost relaxing to know I’ll die fairly soon, as it’s a comfort not to obsess about my next orgasm.” Hall writes of a narrowed life (“I try not to break my neck. I write letters, I take naps, I write essays”) inflected but not burdened by memories of the past, and leavened always with humor. Whether describing the charm of his wife (the poet Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995), the aging face of Mick Jagger (“something retrieved from a bog”) or a history of his facial hair (see above), Hall evokes the poet he no longer claims to be. “For a male poet, imagination and tongue-sweetness require a blast of hormones. When testosterone diminishes . . . ” Whatever Hall believes the essayist requires — he’s still got it.

DISCONTENT AND ITS CIVILIZATIONS

Dispatches From Lahore, New York and London

By Mohsin Hamid

226 pp. Riverhead, $27.95.

Born in Lahore, raised and educated largely in the United States, and a British resident before a return to Pakistan, Hamid has developed a perspective uniquely suited to contemporary cultural and political analysis. Informed by that perspective, his novels, including “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” and “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia,” offer fictionalized dispatches from modern Pakistan and post-9/11 America. “Discontent and Its Civilizations” collects Hamid’s essays published over the last 15 years, most in various magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times. These are short, editorial reflections, too few of which reward a second look. Hamid’s writing on the birth of his first child and his 2009 return to Pakistan has a clipped, effective lyricism; occasionally his mediating geopolitical stance yields genuine insight. Less persuasive are these essays’ traces of their op-ed origins, evidenced by repeated prescriptions for what “we ought” and “we must” do, and resolution via mild, equally schematic expressions of hope.

LETTER TO A FUTURE LOVER

Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries

By Ander Monson

165 pp. Graywolf, $22.

Odd, obsessive and wildly romantic, Monson’s “Letter to a Future Lover” conjures words rarely used to describe a trip to the library. But Monson is on his own trip, and his essays in particular ride against scheme, the strictures of genre and the assumptions of form. “Letter to a Future Lover” assembles in book form what began as a kind of art project: Inspired, per the subtitle, by the “marginalia, errata, secrets, inscriptions and other ephemera” found in books pulled from various library stacks, Monson reshelved each volume with one of his loose-jointed, querying essays tucked inside. “Dear Defacer” addresses the defacer of a volume of gay and lesbian biography; “Dear Future Yooper” greets whoever next checks out Monson’s first book of poetry from a library in the author’s native Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Each entry asserts a future for old-fashioned reading, one Monson inscribes with sensual as well as metaphysical reward: “Let us spend an hour, then longer, in contemplation,” he writes in one essay. “If you open, open all the way, or as much as you can bear, or else there’s nothing here at all.”

Michelle Orange is the author of the essay collection “This Is Running for Your Life.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 30 of the Sunday Book Review. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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