Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, my guest is John Dagada.

He's the editor of a wonderful anthology, the Next American Essay, published by Gray Wolf.

It's a collection of essays, obviously, but essays of a peculiar sort.

He suggests in the course of a book-length meandering essay that introduces each piece,

that essays are the one form that are thought not to have made it into the 20th century,

that there hasn't been a modernist or postmodernist, a reinvention of the essay along stylistic

or experimental lines. This is an anthology to suggest, in fact, that that kind of

reinvention has occurred, that it has a tradition, that there are stylists of the essay.

And so what we find in this book are not essays that are there to teach us about a

particular subject. It's not the factual essay. But what is the stylistic essay? Where does it

have its origins? For me, the stylistic essay has its origins in the origin of the essay, I guess, or at least in writers

like Plutarch, I would imagine, who's best known, obviously, for his biographies, but he has

a series of essays that are, well, we would call them experimental, just downright experimental,

a series of essays in particular called sayings by Spartans, which is just a catalog,

essentially, of quotations from various Spartans that he collected during research trips, I imagine,

that aren't introduced, aren't mediated in any way, there's no exposition, there's no imposition

...