Suppose a Sentence

Suppose a Sentence is a critical and personal reflection on the art of the sentence in literature, widely conceived. It is both an experiment in the attentive form of the essay – asking what happens, and where one might wander, when as readers and writers we pay minute attention to the language before us – and a polemic for certain kinds of experiment in prose. In a series of essays, each taking a single sentence as its starting point, the book explores style, voice and context. But it also uses its subjects – from George Eliot to Joan Didion, John Donne to Annie Dillard – to ask what the sentence is today and what it might become next.