The Details : On Love, Death and Reading - Tegan Bennett Daylight

The Details

On Love, Death and Reading

By: Tegan Bennett Daylight

Paperback | 8 July 2020

At a Glance

Paperback


RRP $26.99

$25.80

or 4 interest-free payments of $6.45 with

Aims to ship in 5 to 10 business days


A book about the connections we form with literature and each other

Tegan Bennett Daylight has led a life in books – as a writer, a teacher and a critic, but first and foremost as a reader.

In this deeply insightful and intimate work, Daylight describes how her reading has nourished her life, and how life has informed her reading. In both, she shows us that it’s the small points of connection – the details – that really matter: what we notice when someone close to us dies, when we give birth, when we make friends. In life’s disasters and delights, the details are what we can share and compare and carry with us.

Daylight writes with invigorating candour and compassion about her mother’s last days; her own experiences of childbearing and its aftermath (in her celebrated essay ‘Vagina’); her long admiration of Helen Garner and George Saunders; and her great loves and friendships. Each chapter is a revelation, and a celebration of how books offer not an escape from ‘real life’ but a richer engagement with the business of living.

The result is a work that will truly deepen your relationship with books, and with other readers. The delight is in the details.
Industry Reviews
‘Daylight is simply a superb writer. Her prose is supple, discursive, funny, restrained and loving. On finishing The Details, I felt as I do at the end of every great book: washed clean and scoured out; unmade and remade. Like all great art, The Details is about many things at once: among them birth and death, laughter and misery, mothers and children, the body and the spirit – and informing and transforming all this, of course, it is about reading and the creation of a sustaining inner life. It reminds us that in life as in writing, it’s the illuminating detail that reveals the truth of who we are. If you love reading, you’ll cherish this book for showing you why.’

More in Literary Essays

The End of the Morning - Charmian Clift

RRP $34.99

$33.25

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows - John Koenig

RRP $39.99

$32.95

18%
OFF
Griffith Review 87 : No Place Like Home - Carody Culver

RRP $27.99

$26.75

We Should All be Feminists - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Discourses and Selected Writings : Penguin Classics - Epictetus
The Republic : Penguin Classics - Plato
The White Album - Joan Didion

RRP $24.99

$23.75

Swimming Sydney : A tale of 52 swims - Chris Baker

RRP $32.99

$31.35

The Message - Ta-Nehisi Coates

Paperback

RRP $36.99

$33.25

10%
OFF
The Histories : Penguin Classics - Herodotus

RRP $24.99

$18.95

24%
OFF
The Diary of a Young Girl : 70th Anniversary Edition - Anne Frank
Upstream : Selected Essays - Mary Oliver
Against Interpretation and Other Essays : Penguin Modern Classics - Susan Sontag
My Brother's Ashes are in a Sandwich Bag - Michelle Brasier

RRP $36.99

$31.50

15%
OFF
Who Gets to Be Smart : Privilege, Power and Knowledge - Bri Lee