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Ambivalence: An Education
A coming-of-age memoir set in late-twentieth-century Dublin, recounting writer and critic Brian Dillon's first encounters with pivotal...
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A coming-of-age memoir set in late-twentieth-century Dublin, recounting writer and critic Brian Dillon's first encounters with pivotal writers in his life--Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, and others--and in the process arguing for the transformative power of art, literature, and learning. When Brian Dillon was sixteen his mother died, and he stopped caring about school. While he courted failure, his real education was going on elsewhere: with books, music, films, and television. When against all odds he made it to college, his head was already full of avant-garde writing, art, and ideas. Could he live up to the hopes and dreams he attached to culture? Halfway through college his father died, and the stakes of Dillon's education seemed even higher.
Ambivalence is a memoir of the author's native city of Dublin in the 1980s and '90s, a portrait of the author as a young man, and an intimate defense of radical thinking about literature and life. In vivid, present-tense passages, Dillon describes his first encounters with writers such as Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida. He recalls being seduced by androgyny, ambiguity, and ambivalence on the page and in the life he hoped his reading would transfigure.
Author: Brian Dillon
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 09/08/2026
Pages: 192
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 8.60h x 5.90w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9798896231103
Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/13/2026
Library Journal 08/01/2026 pg. 78
About the Author
Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969. His books include Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, and Essayism (all published by New York Review Books), as well as The Great Explosion (short-listed for the Ondaatje Prize), Objects in This Mirror, I Am Sitting in a Room, Sanctuary, Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (short-listed for the Wellcome Book Prize), and In the Dark Room, which won the Irish Book Award for nonfiction. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, the London Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, frieze, and Artforum. He has curated exhibitions for the Tate and Hayward galleries. He lives in London.
Ambivalence is a memoir of the author's native city of Dublin in the 1980s and '90s, a portrait of the author as a young man, and an intimate defense of radical thinking about literature and life. In vivid, present-tense passages, Dillon describes his first encounters with writers such as Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida. He recalls being seduced by androgyny, ambiguity, and ambivalence on the page and in the life he hoped his reading would transfigure.
Author: Brian Dillon
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 09/08/2026
Pages: 192
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 8.60h x 5.90w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9798896231103
Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/13/2026
Library Journal 08/01/2026 pg. 78
About the Author
Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969. His books include Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, and Essayism (all published by New York Review Books), as well as The Great Explosion (short-listed for the Ondaatje Prize), Objects in This Mirror, I Am Sitting in a Room, Sanctuary, Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (short-listed for the Wellcome Book Prize), and In the Dark Room, which won the Irish Book Award for nonfiction. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, the London Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, frieze, and Artforum. He has curated exhibitions for the Tate and Hayward galleries. He lives in London.
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