{"product_id":"these-possible-lives","title":"These Possible Lives","description":"New Directions is proud to present Fleur Jaeggy's strange and mesmerizing essays about the writers Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob. A renowned stylist of hyper-brevity in fiction, Fleur Jaeggy proves herself an even more concise master of the essay form, albeit in a most peculiar and lapidary poetic vein. Of De Quincey's early nineteenth-century world we hear of the habits of writers: Charles Lamb \"spoke of 'Lilliputian rabbits' when eating frog fricassse\"; Henry Fuseli \"ate a diet of raw meat in order to obtain splendid dreams\"; \"Hazlitt was perceptive about musculature and boxers\"; and \"Wordsworth used a buttery knife to cut the pages of a first-edition Burke.\" In a book of \"blue devils\" and night visions, the Keats essay opens: \"In 1803, the guillotine was a common child's toy.\" And poor Schwob's end comes as he feels \"like a 'dog cut open alive'\" \"His face colored slightly, turning into a mask of gold. His eyes stayed open imperiously. No one could shut his eyelids. The room smoked of grief.\" Fleur Jaeggy's essays--or are they prose poems?--smoke of necessity: the pages are on fire.","brand":"New Directions Publishing Corporation","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48833661763789,"sku":"9780811226875","price":12.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0557\/1529\/9533\/files\/imageloader_5404c473-57c5-4aaa-83a3-d1919846f65b.jpg?v=1790892742","url":"https:\/\/booksatmidnight.com\/products\/these-possible-lives","provider":"Books At Midnight","version":"1.0","type":"link"}