Wyatt’s World: Essays for Idiosyncratic Exploration

Essays are a very particular and concentrated form of writing. As such, they are often a place where writers feel free to follow their own idiosyncratic explorations. Collections, therefore, often make for strange and wonderful company and are particularly useful for getting a sense of a writer. These five, a newly minted National Book Critics Circle Award (NBCC) winner and four new or soon-to-be-published works, hold great promise to delight, challenge, and surprise.

• John Barth’s Final Fridays (Counterpoint)
• Geoff Dyer’s Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, winner of the 2012 NBCC Award for criticism (Graywolf)
• Jonathan Franzen’s Farther Away (Farrar)
• William Gibson’s Distrust That Particular Flavor (Putnam)
• Marilynne Robinson’s When I Was a Child I Read Books (Farrar)