By Andrew Sant
Price: £10.00
ISBN: 978-1-912524-23-5
100 pages
Essays, English
Paperback, 129x203mm
He is a writer who doesn’t want to write, a traveller who ignores the lessons of a serious earthquake, an urbanite who sees the justly vilified activity of smoking as a solution to social atomisation. Andrew Sant’s new essays are those of a contrarian with a darkly amused view about the limits of human ingenuity and, as a consequence, humanity’s eventual extinction. This is a various, oblique, upbeat collection—sixteen essays as informative as they are entertaining.
From reviews of Andrew Sant’s previous collection of essays, How to Proceed:
“There is a wonderfully digressive quality to Sant’s essays. As if walking in the countryside, his prose meanders, stopping to consider a bird or a fossil on the way, slipping into reverie or memory, before returning, reinvigorated, to the matter at hand. His syntax follows suit: sentences balloon across lines, the subject weaving in and out of focus as his mind travels around it. There are moments of sparkling poetic clarity.” – Marion Rankine, The Times Literary Supplement
“It took several pages for me to settle into the rhythm of Sant’s meanderingly clause-clustered sentences, before being hooked by his cool and inquiring intelligence … There is much to enjoy and admire here.” – Ian McFarlane, The Weekend Australian
“I was gripped from the start by the opener … Sant’s main weapon is surprise, an apparently serendipitous range of directions and indirections that end up gaining meaning from being together.” – John Forth, London Grip
“Sant here is a great observer. Geared up with five hypersensitive senses, his mind filled with minutiae of perpetual self-education, he observes the world with precision and delight … He is a novice phenomenologist. He knows how to be the observer observed.” – Philip Harvey, Australian Book Review