This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us about Creativity -- Richard Deming, Hardcover

"...Rich and sensitive." --The Wall Street Journal

"Loneliness is everywhere these days. But this book will chase some of it away, and maybe replace it with connection." --Patton Oswalt, Emmy and Grammy winning comic

A examination of the life and work of six brilliant minds of the twentieth century, intent on answering the question "What can be done not despite but because of loneliness?"

At an unprecedented rate, loneliness is moving around the globe--from self-isolating technology and political division to community decay and social fragmentation--and yet it is not a feeling to which we readily admit. It is stigmatized, freighted with shame and fear, and easy to dismiss as mere emotional neediness. But what if instead of shying away from loneliness, we embraced it as something we can learn from and as something that will draw us closer to one another?

In This Exquisite Loneliness, Richard Deming turns an eye toward that unwelcome feeling, both in his own experiences and the lives of six groundbreaking figures, to find the context of loneliness and to see what some people have done to navigate this profound sense of discomfort. Within the back stories to Melanie Klein's contributions to psychoanalysis, Zora Neale Hurston's literary and ethnographic writing, the philosophical essays of Walter Benjamin, Walker Evans's photography of urban alienation, Egon Schiele's revolutionary artwork and Rod Serling's uncanny narratives in The Twilight Zone, Deming explores how loneliness has served as fuel for an intense creative desire that has forged some of the most original and innovative art and writing of the twentieth century.

This singular meditation on loneliness reveals how we might transform the pain of emotional isolation and become more connected to others and more at home with our often unquiet selves.

Author: Richard Deming
Publisher: Viking
Published: 10/03/2023
Pages: 336
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.50w x 1.30d
ISBN: 9780593492512

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 08/01/2023 pg. 95
Kirkus Reviews 08/15/2023
Publishers Weekly 08/28/2023
Booklist 09/08/2023

About the Author
Richard Deming is a poet, art critic, and theorist whose work explores the intersections of poetry, philosophy, and visual culture. His collection of poems, Let's Not Call It Consequence, received the Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America. His most recent book of poems, Day for Night, appeared in 2016. He is also the author of Listening on All Sides, and Art of the Ordinary. He contributes to such magazines as Artforum, Sight & Sound, and The Boston Review, and his poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Field, American Letters & Commentary, and The Nation. Winner of the Berlin Prize, he was the Spring 2012 John P. Birkelund Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. He teaches at Yale University where he is the Director of Creative Writing.