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The Book of Delights: Essays

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The Book of Delights: Essays

By Ross Gay

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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, the book of delights: essays.

From “Scat”

The first time I saw The Exorcist I was nine years old. My mom, flipping through the TV Guide , saw that it was coming on HBO, and she wanted to see it because my dad, a very reasonable man, asked her to hold off when it first came out. She was pregnant with my brother and people watching the movie were having miscarriages and heart attacks in the theater, both of which used to be evidence of a good movie. In twenty minutes or so, when little Linda Blair disrupts the socialite party by peeing on the rug in her white nightgown, I was very frightened, and I asked my mother if we might watch Falcon Crest instead. It’s a rerun , she said. Just go to bed if you don’t want to watch it.

(Friends, I am here going to leap a boundary I shouldn’t, like some of your childless ex-friends before me, to tell you how to raise your children. My brother’s and my bedroom was, maybe, twenty feet from this television. It was maybe three or four seconds by foot away. But my imagination was vast. By which I mean to tell you not to watch The Exorcist with your children. Or The Shining . Or Rosemary’s Fucking Baby .)

Of course I was already too scared to do anything by myself, and when little Linda Blair was stabbing herself with a crucifix and vomiting in the faces of priests I was doomed. I sat on the couch pretending to read the Bucks County Courier Times as I heard the girl, about my age, panting and growling. I peeked beneath the business section to see little Linda Blair write, from inside of her Lucifer-ravaged tummy, H E L P. Of course, my dad, the one person in the world who could for sure beat up Evil, was down at Roy Rogers on Cottman, slinging burgers.

When I did finally go to bed, I sobbed, certain I, too, would be possessed by Satan, which my brother didn’t go the extra mile to discourage me from thinking.

Me: Matt, am I going to be possessed?

Matt: I don’t know.

Me: Am I possessed?

Matt (pulling the covers over his head): I don’t know. Maybe.

For the record, my mother now knows this was an instance of heroically poor parenting, in part because I rub her face in it often. She puts her forehead in her hand and shakes her head, while I bask in her shame.

When I mustered up the courage to see The Exorcist again, the redux, I was about twenty-six. I went with my friend Joanna to the theater between Eighteenth and Nineteenth on Chestnut in Philadelphia. When Linda Blair peed on the rug this time someone said to the screen, “Oh no she didn’t!” And when her head spun around, someone yelled, “That girl is trippin’!” At which point I realized this movie, which had occupied for years a grave space in my imagination, was actually silly. I was freed from the grave. Or rather, I was offered another version of the grave—laughter in its midst. (June 25)

“Tomato on Board”

What you don't know until you carry a tomato seedling through the airport and onto a plane, is that carrying a tomato seedling through the airport and onto a plane will make people smile at you almost like you're carrying a baby. A quiet baby. I did not know this until today, carrying my little tomato, about three or four inches high in its four-inch plastic starter pot, which my friend Michael gave to me, smirking about how I was going to get it home. Something about this, at first, felt naughty—not comparing a tomato to a baby, but carrying the tomato onto the plane—and so I slid the thing into my bag while going through security, which made them pull the bag for inspection. When the security guy saw it was a tomato he smiled and said, "I don't know how to check that. Have a good day." But I quickly realized that one of its stems (which I almost wrote as "arms") was broken from the jostling, and it only had four of them, so I decided I better just carry it out in the open. And the shower of love began. . .

Before boarding the final leg of my flight, one of the workers said, "Nice tomato," which I don't think was a come on. And the flight attendant asked about the tomato at least five times, not an exaggeration, every time calling it "my tomato," —Where's my tomato? How's my tomato? You didn't lose my tomato, did you? She even directed me to an open seat in the exit row—Why don't you guys go sit there and stretch out? I gathered my things and set the lil guy in the window seat so he could look out. When I got my water I poured some into the lil guy's soil. When we got bumpy I put my hand on the lil guy's container, careful not to snap another arm off. And when we landed, and the pilot put the brakes on hard, my arm reflexively went across the seat, holding the lil guy in place, the way my dad's arm would when he had to brake hard in that car without seatbelts to speak of, in one of my very favorite gestures in the encyclopedia of human gestures. (June 9)

“The Marfa Lights”

My buddy Pat and I went to shoot around at the courts here in Marfa today. We were warming up, shooting twelve-footers or doing slow spin moves and crossovers, when a young guy from the other side of the court (where the rim had a net) swaggered toward us, holding a ball on his hip, the light gleaming in his earrings, and challenged us to a two on two, pointing his thumb to himself and back to his buddy draining threes from the corner. We agreed, and went on to kick the shit out of them, 21-0. That is a horrible figure of speech, and I leave it in only to expose the violence we easily speak. We got more baskets than they did. That they were only twelve years old is irrelevant, given as this was their home court, and they even had a crowd watching, another little girl who, when one of the kids shouted to the gods, "They're kicking our butts!" said, "I hope so. They're grown men." (July 16)

The Book of Delights: Essays by by Ross Gay

• Genres: Essays , Nonfiction
• paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• ISBN-10: 1643753282
• ISBN-13: 9781643753287
• About the Book

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The Book of Delights: Essays

Description.

As Heard on NPR's This American Life: The New York Times bestselling book that celebrates ordinary delights in the world around us by one of America's most original and observant writers and the author of Inciting Joy, award-winning poet Ross Gay. Pre-order The Book of (More) Delights now, too! “Ross Gay’s eye lands upon wonder at every turn, bolstering my belief in the countless small miracles that surround us.” —Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize winner and U.S. Poet Laureate The winner of the National Book Critics Award for Poetry offers up a spirited collection of short lyrical essays, written daily over a tumultuous year, reminding us of the purpose and pleasure of praising, extolling, and celebrating ordinary wonders. In The Book of Delights, one of today’s most original literary voices offers up a genre-defying volume of lyric essays written over one tumultuous year. The first nonfiction book from award-winning poet Ross Gay is a record of the small joys we often overlook in our busy lives. Among Gay’s funny, poetic, philosophical delights: a friend’s unabashed use of air quotes, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an airplane, the silent nod of acknowledgment between the only two black people in a room. But Gay never dismisses the complexities, even the terrors, of living in America as a black man or the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture or the loss of those he loves. More than anything else, though, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world–his garden, the flowers peeking out of the sidewalk, the hypnotic movements of a praying mantis. The Book of Delights is about our shared bonds, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. These remarkable pieces serve as a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight.

About the Author

In addition to The Book of Delights: Essays, Ross Gay is the author of three books of poetry, including Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Catalog was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry, the Ohioana Book Award, the Balcones Poetry Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. He is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call It Ballin’ and founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a nonprofit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. Gay has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at Indiana University.

Praise for The Book of Delights: Essays

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER As Heard on NPR's This American Life “The delights he extols here (music, laughter, generosity, poetry, lots of nature) are bulwarks against casual cruelties. As such they feel purposeful and imperative as well as contagious in their joy.” —The New York Times Book Review “These charming, digressive ‘essayettes,’ in the manner of Montaigne, surprise and challenge . . . Gay, an award-winning poet, knows the value of formal constraint: his experiences of ‘delight,’ recorded daily for a year, vary widely but yield revealing patterns through insights about everything from nature and the body to race and masculinity. The fruits of this experiment—for which gardens and gardening provide a frequent, apt metaphor—attest to an imagination cultivated in hostile conditions. Gay’s optimism is as easy as it is improbable, his ‘heart cooing like a pigeon nestled on a windowsill where the spikes rusted off.’” —The New Yorker "What emerges is not a ledger of delights passively logged but a radiant lens actively searching for and magnifying them, not just with the mind but with the body as an instrument of wonder-stricken presence.” —Brain Pickings, Favorite Books of 2019 “Ross Gay’s poems are little celebrations of joy, and this book of mini-essays—each centering around a particular 'delight,’ from sleeping in your clothes to planting tomato seedlings to the nod of greeting between the only two black people in a room—is a pure balm for your soul. Savor one at a time every morning, this summer, or wolf them all down en masse on a gorgeous sunny day.” —Celeste Ng for GoodMorningAmerica.com "Delightfully snackable . . . Pick it up, read for ten minutes (start anywhere, really), put it down, and you’ll find that the delights of Gay’s world illuminate the delights of yours, that his wonder is contagious and has caused you to deepen your own." —GQ “Funny, moving, and eye-opening. And, more importantly, these mini essays remind us that looking around and paying close attention can add delight and joy to our everyday lives.” —New York Times / Wirecutter, "The 27 Best High School Graduation Gifts” “The shock of Gay’s writing . . . is his seamless shift from breezy, affable observation to sober (and admittedly still affable) profundity . . .  I want to say that Gay’s writing is magical because that’s the way it feels when I read it. But . . . calling it magic undercuts Gay’s craft, the effort that goes into producing literature that feels as fluent and familiar as a chat with a close friend. His voice has integrity, in both senses of the word: a completeness or consistency, true to itself; and an honesty and compassion so frankly subjective that it produces an incorruptible vision. Gay’s loose-limbed sentences diagram his delight, partaking in numerous asides—some as paragraph-long parentheticals—and equally numerous asides within asides, as well as nested subordinate clauses that are the purview of intimate conversation, not written prose. They are clauses and asides in which, as Gay writes them, you feel his hand on your arm, you feel him lean in toward you, conspiratorially or simply to emphasize his meaning.” —The New York Review of Books “Everyone could use a bit more delight in their days . . . Gay, who is the winner of the NBCC Award for Poetry, is here to provide just that, with essays celebrating everything from air quotes to candy wrappers to pickup basketball games.” —New York Post “The Book of Delights is both practice and perfection in an unassuming package . . . These pieces reflect and examine the natural world, masculinity, racism, and other topics with vibrancy. Most essays are a few paragraphs, a page or two at maximum, but it’s not the width or length of the pieces that ultimately grabbed my attention. It was the heart and intelligence found within his daily introspections.” —The Rumpus "A reminder of what the personal essay is best at: finding the profound in the mundane . . . his delight is infectious. It’s hard to read Gay and not to be won over.” —Seattle Times “This collection proves is that delight is infectious and demands to be shared, and, most importantly, ‘our delight grows as we share it.’ —Washington Independent Review of Books “It's the perfect read to inspire observing your corner of the world with a little more care and delight.”  —NPR.org “Sweet, powerful, funny, honest, moving. Gay has a new book on the way, too; I can’t wait for it.” —Orange County Register

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The Book of Delights: Essays

• By Ross Gay
• Algonquin Books
• Reviewed by Jennifer Bort Yacovissi
• February 14, 2019

A poet finds endless enchantment in the everyday.

Ross Gay spent a lot of time on airplanes in a recent 12-month period, which, these days — what with security lines, absent amenities, and shrinking legroom (and he being a pretty tall guy) — does not sound very delightful. Yet Gay made it his practice over the course of a year to open himself to and capture his impressions of the little pleasures of the everyday, every day.

Well, maybe not every day. There aren’t 365 essays in The Book of Delights , but we spend one year with Gay, from birthday to birthday, learning to delight with him and to be delighted by him.

Even better (or, as the author would say, “Delight!”), this is a physically small book that fits nicely in the reader’s hands. Each essay stands satisfyingly on its own, at most six or eight pages, more often two or fewer. All of which goes to say that it’s a book that begs to be carried along, offering insight and delight in whatever slice of time a reader may have. This is flash nonfiction.

If you didn’t know Gay as a poet before coming to Delights , his prose would tip you off, with its repetition and precision, its river of ideas and images flowing without pause from one into another. In several essays, he describes sitting on a curb or a step to capture an impression in the immediacy of the moment, and that sense of spontaneity remains.

The essay “Writing by Hand” underscores that writing these essays — with a Le Pen, in small notebooks, seeing the words appear, enjoying the feel, living with the scratch-outs, allowing run-on fragments to stand as he never would on a computer, all of which is absolutely part of the delight — was closer to how he writes poetry. We’re invited in to watch him thinking in real time, and the messiness of ideas as they emerge is a large part of the joy.  

A lovely example is “Tap Tap,” perhaps a page long, written in three running, discursive sentences that manage without strain to consider the reassurance of a welcome, friendly touch of a stranger as counterpoint to “the official American policy, which is a kind of de facto and terrible touching of some of us.” But then the balm of this, “tap, tap, reminding me, like that, simply, remember, tap tap, how else we might be touched.”

This sort of warm touch or incidental happy interaction with strangers is a recurring delight for Gay. After getting high-fived out of the blue by a young white girl, he says, “For I love, I delight in, unequivocally pleasant public physical interactions with strangers…when a waitress puts her hand on my shoulder. (Forget it if she calls me honey. Baby even better.) Or someone scooting by puts their hand on my back. The handshake. The hug. I love them both.”

There is a similar sort of physicality to most of these essays that embodies delight rather than merely observing it. These essays get their hands dirty.

In fact, the author is a gardener, and the delights of the garden return as a thematic touchstone. “Tomato on Board” begins:

“What you don’t know until you carry a tomato seedling through the airport and onto a plane is that carrying a tomato seedling through the airport and onto a plane will make people smile at you almost like you’re carrying a baby.”

In “Understory,” he riffs on the redbud as the Judas tree in Christian tradition, “though the way the redbud flowers cluster like an orgy of kissy-mouths might also have been a good puritanical reason enough to associate the tree with the less than divine.”

To be sure, not everything that Gay’s eye rests upon and his pen captures is a delight. “Hole in the Head” considers a documentary of the same name that tells the story of Vertus Hardiman, who, at age 5, was among a group of black children used in radiation experiments, which ended up burning “a fist-sized crevice in his skull.”

Gay muses, “I’m trying to remember the last day I haven’t been reminded of the inconceivable violence black people have endured in this country.” But, as he notes in his introduction, the discipline of noticing delights in order to write about them also “occasioned a kind of delight radar…Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”

The other main point this collection proves is that delight is infectious and demands to be shared, and, most importantly, “our delight grows as we share it.”

Jennifer Bort Yacovissi’s debut novel, Up the Hill to Home , tells the story of four generations of a family in Washington, DC, from the Civil War to the Great Depression. Jenny is a member of PEN/America and the National Book Critics’ Circle and writes a monthly column and reviews regularly for the Independent. She served as chair of the 2017 and 2018 Washington Writers Conference and for several recent years was president of the Annapolis chapter of the Maryland Writers Association.

Support the Independent by purchasing this title via our affliate links: Amazon.com Or through Bookshop.org

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The Book of Delights: Essays

• Staff Reviews

"A collection of over a hundred short intertwined essays that weave together a complexly awestruck and pensive portrait of daily life and the swirling thoughts that come with it. By the end of the fifth essay, I was sobbing."

See all my recommendations »

“Ross Gay’s eye lands upon wonder at every turn, bolstering my belief in the countless small miracles that surround us.” —Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize winner and U.S. Poet Laureate The winner of the NBCC Award for Poetry offers up a spirited collection of short lyric essays, written daily over a tumultuous year, reminding us of the purpose and pleasure of praising, extolling, and celebrating ordinary wonders. Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a genre-defying book of essays—some as short as a paragraph; some as long as five pages—that record the small joys that occurred in one year, from birthday to birthday, and that we often overlook in our busy lives. His is a meditation on delight that takes a clear-eyed view of the complexities, even the terrors, in his life, including living in America as a black man; the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture; the loss of those he loves. Among Gay’s funny, poetic, philosophical delights: the way Botan Rice Candy wrappers melt in your mouth, the volunteer crossing guard with a pronounced tremor whom he imagines as a kind of boat-woman escorting pedestrians across the River Styx, a friend’s unabashed use of air quotes, pickup basketball games, the silent nod of acknowledgment between black people. And more than any other subject, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world—his garden, the flowers in the sidewalk, the birds, the bees, the mushrooms, the trees. This is not a book of how-to or inspiration, though it could be read that way. Fans of Roxane Gay, Maggie Nelson, and Kiese Laymon will revel in Gay’s voice, and his insights. The Book of Delights is about our connection to the world, to each other, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. Gay’s pieces serve as a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight. 

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The Book of Delights

67 pages • 2 hours read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Essay 10

Essays 11-24

Essays 25-39

Essays 40-55

Essays 56-68

Essays 69-77

Essays 78-91

Essays 92-102

Key Figures

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

The Symbiotic Relationship Between Grief and Joy

In the preface for The Book of Delights, Gay writes that after a year of recording delights, he found his life “not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight” (7). Throughout the project, Gay does not ignore grief but uses it to highlight how wonderful delight really is. In “Joy is Such a Human Madness,” Gay explores how “the intolerable makes life worthwhile” (45). This becomes a theme throughout the essays as he records his honest thoughts and experiences, not withholding negative emotions like anxiety and paranoia, while consistently finding things to delight in. The symbiotic relationship between grief and joy is evident in a few topics Gay returns to throughout his essays. The first of these topics is physical touch between strangers, the second is death, and the third is his poverty-stricken childhood.

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The Book of (More) Delights: Essays

304 pages, Hardcover

First published September 19, 2023

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There are other vehicular vernaculars I love - mind you, I love the vernacular, period: speechm architecture, clothing, cooking, dancing - for instance, that stop sign everyone rolls through, it's really a slow-down sign, you know the one, it is in your neighborhood too. Or if not that, a yield sign that really means stop. Parallel parking on the "wrong" side of the street, I love it.

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The Book of (More) Delights: Essays Hardcover – September 19, 2023

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**Named a Best Book of the Year by The Boston Globe , Garden & Gun , Electric Literature , and St. Louis Public Radio** The New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy is back with exactly the book we need in these unsettling times.  Margaret Roach of The   New York Times  says,  “Yes, please. I'll have another dose of delight.” In Ross Gay’s new collection of small, daily wonders, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight.

For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us.

The Book of (More) Delights is a volume to savor and share.

• Print length 304 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Algonquin Books
• Publication date September 19, 2023
• Dimensions 5.25 x 1 x 7.25 inches
• ISBN-10 1643753096
• ISBN-13 978-1643753096
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Algonquin Books (September 19, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1643753096
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1643753096
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.6 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 1 x 7.25 inches
• #830 in Essays (Books)
• #918 in Black & African American Biographies
• #8,163 in Memoirs (Books)

About the author

Ross Gay is the author of The Book of Delights, a genre-defying book of essays, and three books of poetry: Against Which, Bringing the Shovel Down, and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. He is also the co-author, with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of the chapbook "Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens," in addition to being co-author, with Richard Wehrenberg, Jr., of the chapbook, "River." He is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin', in addition to being an editor with the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press. Ross is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ross teaches at Indiana University.

Author website: http://www.rossgay.net

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