These Possible Lives, Paperback/Fleur Jaeggy

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.