Halls of Fame

by John D'Agata

Book Overview

"John D'Agata is an alchemist who changes trash into purest gold." --Guy Davenport, Harper's

John D'Agata journeys the endless corridors of America's myriad halls of fame and faithfully reports on what he finds there. In a voice all his own, he brilliantly maps his terrain in lists, collage, and ludic narratives. With topics ranging from Martha Graham to the Flat Earth Society, from the brightest light in Vegas to the artist...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1555973779
• ISBN13: 9781555973773
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Length: 252 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.6" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

So the 21st century begins...

...ok, so that's a little over the top, but I'm so in awe of this book that my roommate just got me for x-mas, that I'm already reading for the second time. In a COMPLETELY new voice, D'agata presents a way of writing nonfiction that is so fresh it could be said we haven't seen the likes of it since Anne Carson first appeared in American journals--also seemingly out of nowehere like this John D'agata. He performs literary flips that make you wonder if he's even allowed to do what you're sitting there reading, and yet he pulls it off with grace and aplomb. Mesmerizering!

The cutting edge of literature

Warning: This book is not an easy read!But then again groundbreaking literature never has been...This is not for those who think that the personal essay is the only kind of essay there is or who think The Liars Club is an exemplar of great nonfiction or that last year's outrageously hyped Dave Eggers is what an experimental nonfiction writer might look like.This is for those readers who want to be challenged on every level of the reading, whether about the subjects the book treats or the styles it employs or the huge disarming issues it raises about the very nature of genre.In general, for anyone who wants a glimpse at what essayists a decade from now will be writing, you must definitely read this amazing first book!And if you get a chance to hear him in person read from this do it! I just heard this dude perform at my friend's school in Massacusetts and it was completely transportaive!Read it!

Poetic Prose at the Pinnacle of Nonfiction!

The silly label next to John D'Agata's name on the cover is dead wrong. There's not a lick of "essay" in here!But you'll be relieved to read in his biography that this extremely young author was trained as a poet at the Iowa Writers Workshop, because no average writer of "creative nonfiction" could manage what D'Agata does with subjects that range from a story about the brightest light in the world to a sperm bank (where he apparently worked as a donor) to a luscious history of how lists of the wonders of the world are made. His appetite for "stuff" seems unquenchable, and his love of language is obvious.Really this is a 250 page book of poetry. Read it and you'll change your mind about that old fart genre called the essay. Read it aloud and you'll set the next few days of your life to music!

A Young Prince of Genres

You'll spend some time scratching your head as you read this book, wondering whether it's nonfiction, poetry, journalism, memoir, fantasy or some amalgam of them all.Then, at about half way through, you'll stop caring, because at this point you'll have reached the book's title section, "Hall of Fame: An Essay About the Ways in Which We Matter," a not entirely unironic meditation on the 3000 some-odd halls of fame in the United States which acts as both investigative journalism into some particular places the author has visited (there's a hall of fame of "Suffleboard" and a "Burlesque" hall of fame, for example) and personal meditation on the author's own family discord that is never quite clearly expressed but instead lingers overhead making all of these journeys into the halls of fame of America a very desperate, lonely, heartbreaking act.I have no idea if these "halls" are poems (they look like poetry at least) nor what in the book is real and what imagined (there's an interview with the so-called president of the Flat Earth Society, for example) but I think the ambiguity of the book's forms is intentional, and meant to mask--or maybe even illustrate--an uncertainty in the world that this very mournful but simultaneously witty author feels deep in his bones. This is a tremendous book that is going to change the way essays are made from now on.Or, if these in fact aren't "essays," it will at least change something in American literature.

What the Essay Can Do

What the essay can do is this: "Halls of Fame"--a book that I think changes everything in the field that people call "nonfiction." Forget about melodramatic memoirs with fancy sequined blinders on or investigative journalism that's as formulaic as the New Yorker's past 500 issues or critical expositons on mundane intellectual trinkets, "Halls of Fame" by John D'Agata is as "fact" driven as all of those forms but as entertaining as a circus. (A bad analogy, but there in fact truly is something circus-like about the subjects D'Agata pursues and his attempts to combine them oddly, juxtaposing at times the absolutely absurd with the wonderfully sublime.) I've been waiting for a writer to turn our attention back to the disciplined sensibility of the classic American essay; this guy does it by taking tradition of the essay and spinning it anew for the 21st century. If you love nonfiction and want to know where it's likely to be heading, I recommend this book more strongly than anything else out in this genre at the moment.