Description:
Editorial Reviews
Review
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
“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
“The Book of Delights is a great gift for a new graduate, because it is a wise lesson on what happens when you pay attention to the world around you. The Book of Delights reminds you not to miss your life.”
—Elle.com / Shelf Life
“I didn't read The Book of Delights for ages because I thought it would be sentimental. I was wrong. Each essay is a delicious little controlled explosion of joy, which is activism in a broken world.”
—The Week (UK)
About the Author
Reviews:
5.0 out of 5 stars To have eyes like this!
Now that I have read this book, I am trying to recall how or where I came to know about it and what prompted me to read it in the first place. I care only because I would like to thank them. I love this book.Gay's style here is not what you might expect. So many of his "essayettes" read like he was stream-of-conscious, journaling his delight of the day and doing very little revision. But, just listening to his voice and seeing the pictures he paints about the delights he wants to share is captivating.Before I read anything about the author, it was apparent he was a poet. His words and thoughts sometimes seem to ebb and flow across the page. But they always get tied up in a beautiful bow at the end. In addition to how he writes, another clue to his poetic leaning is his power of observation. I suppose that if you are looking for a different delight every day, life being what it is and what it has been for all of us these past few years, some days you REALLY have to look hard. But he makes it seem effortless, and as you read, you realize that he appears to be surrounded by delight. I would love to cultivate vision and sensitivity like that.Some reviewers seem to have been put off by the author's oversharing. I just feel he is being as honest about how he puts on coconut oil as he is about pulling weeds in his garden. To me, this makes him more believable and makes the act of finding delight more attainable for the rest of us.The more I read, the more I loved Ross Gay and this book. I was less than halfway through before I bought copies of the book and sent them to my 3 kids and a friend. I also bought one for myself. I try and check books out at the library and only purchase what I know I will want to read again. This one will be on my reading table for a long time.
5.0 out of 5 stars a true gift! funny, profane, gut-punching; inspired us to speak our delights out loud daily
Reads like free form poetry, which might take getting used to, but well worth it. The writing is like a bee looping around a garden--wiggling down into the pollen, then zooming someplace new, then returning to a particularly enchanting flower. Once I started reading these mini essays out loud to my husband, the syntax and flow immediately made perfect sense. They are each an intimate journey through the author's own brain. The meandering journal-like quality is the whole point--to observe, meditate, see. I like that sorrow, grief, and injustice are not separate from delight but intertwined. If you are expecting a book only of happy snapshots, this is much deeper. For me it was about noticing the glimmers of humor and wonder hidden in the mundane moments of daily life, and the beauty too. We now declare "Delight!" regularly in our house--soap bubbles doing dishes, watching a hen run at full speed, the dog's teeth showing when she sleeps, the intertwined legs of a family in the packed waiting room of the emergency room, the woman using her hands to make a pillow for her elderly mom's head, the construction guy dancing... Some days these little delights are life rafts. Many thanks to the author.
4.0 out of 5 stars Delightful
This book is a collection of essays the author started on his birthday one year and continued through his birthday the following year. He sees delight in many different ways that I hadn't thought of until reading his thoughts. The book is about how he delighted in even small things and negative things, which he turned into positives. It's a reminder to any reader to seek those things for ourselves.
5.0 out of 5 stars poetic and profound
I feel I have found a kindred spirit in the protagonist of this volume. I myself keep a diary of delights in which I tally mine and also attempt to justify a life devoted to delight, “Delight soothes sadness, calms fear, assuages anger, lessens the tenure of horror, compensates loss, ameliorates humiliation, kindles hope, inspires love of life, fulfills a day’s experience. What shall we do today? What we did yesterday: create delightful homes, tend their gardens, cook delightful food, delight in friends, in family, and in language.”In his book, Gay delights also in nature, which should be in the list, for sure.So, from my perspective, Ross Gay’s book is profound. It is also poetic, in keeping with its subject. Gay doesn’t have to record that he is delighting in the language he uses. It’s manifest.This is the second book I have begun to reread as soon as I finished it. The other was Garrison Keillor’s Homegrown Democrat, another delight.A reader who cultivates delight may learn from this book that delight may be defiantly employed as a poke in the eye of racism, for instance, in Gay’s case. Or, if the president of the beautiful country in which you reside is an anhedonic (David Brooks’ word) teetotaler, defiantly lift your glass of first-rate pinot noir a little higher and taste with deep attention. You’ll feel better. In the rural setting where I grew up in the middle of the last century, delight was a bulwark against poverty, not an even match but often sufficient. About fabulous farm food my dad crowed, “Now that’s what I call eating!” He was delighted by it.I learned from Ross Gay that delight may be compounded by sharing. Thanks.
5.0 out of 5 stars You need this book.
This is not just a delight, but something you need to read with a friend…or your grown child (so defiant buy two). It will change your life and make you send spontaneous texts or pictures to said child with the caption “delight” and then increase your own delight for the day x2.You will also learn new words like negreet (not so delightful, but so powerful and sobering) and onomatopoeicness which is a delight because I’m a 7th grade English teacher and can’t wait to use that one this fall.In other words,10/10. Highly recommend.
One of the worst books ..cant even continue few pages....so dumb
One of the worst books ..cant even continue few pages....so dumb..there is no such thing called delight
Depressing book
It was not a book of delights but a diary of the author's daily encounters with people he knew. No reflections on these people. Most of then crude remarks about comments of his daily activities. A book of delights should have been what could have been a pleasant reflection of what joys he found in his encounters with a person he had just met. Or say a piece of joy he discovered around the next corner. There was no delight in his book. I threw it in the bin after being a quarter of the way through..
Life-changing
Absolutely life-altering. These words will forever change the way you see the world, most powerfully how you evaluate your own experiences — your own existence. Your most embarrassing moments just might be your best moments. For your vulnerability is your humanity. You will love yourself, delight in yourself, genuinely. And you will find delight in what you once thought to be the most mundane aspects of your life. A gem.
Love this book
Be inspired to write a delight book
A Tonic
Little nuggets of delight delivered by poet, Ross Gay. This covers everything from smiling babies to the way plants grow, speech patterns, words and feelings. It's a project Gay set himself to notice one delightful thing a day and write about it in an unedited splurge of joy. As he progresses he finds more and more things to be delighted by. This is a perfect read for the times we live in. I might even have a go at it myself.
Visit the Algonquin Books Store
The Book of Delights: Essays
AED9682
Quantity:
Order today to get by 7-14 business days
Delivery fee of AED 20. Free for orders above AED 200.
Imported From: United States
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Similar suggestions by Bolo
More from this brand
Similar items from “African American Studies”
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Visit the Algonquin Books Store
The Book of Delights: Essays
AED9682
Quantity:
Order today to get by 7-14 business days
Delivery fee of AED 20. Free for orders above AED 200.
Imported From: United States
At BOLO, we work hard to ensure the products you receive are new, genuine, and sourced from reputable suppliers.
BOLO is not an authorized or official retailer for most brands, nor are we affiliated with manufacturers unless specifically stated on a product page. Instead, we source verified sellers, authorized distributors or directly from the manufacturer.
Each product undergoes thorough inspection and verification at our consolidation and fulfilment centers to ensure it meets our strict authenticity and quality standards before being shipped and delivered to you.
If you ever have concerns regarding the authenticity of a product purchased from us, please contact Bolo Support. We will review your inquiry promptly and, if necessary, provide documentation verifying authenticity or offer a suitable resolution.
Your trust is our top priority, and we are committed to maintaining transparency and integrity in every transaction.
All product information, images, descriptions, and reviews originate from the manufacturer or from trusted sellers overseas. BOLO is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or an authorized retailer for most brands listed on our website unless stated otherwise.
While we strive to display accurate information, variations in packaging, labeling, instructions, or formulation may occasionally occur due to regional differences or supplier updates. For detailed or manufacturer-specific information, please contact the brand directly or reach out to BOLO Support for assistance.
Unless otherwise stated, all prices displayed on the product page include applicable taxes and import duties.
BOLO operates in accordance with the laws and regulations of United Arab Emirates. Any items found to be restricted or prohibited for sale within the UAE will be cancelled prior to shipment. We take proactive measures to ensure that only products permitted for sale in United Arab Emirates are listed on our website.
All items are shipped by air, and any products classified as “Dangerous Goods (DG)” under IATA regulations will be removed from the order and cancelled.
All orders are processed manually, and we make every effort to process them promptly once confirmed. Products cancelled due to the above reasons will be permanently removed from listings across the website.
Description:
Editorial Reviews
Review
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
“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
“The Book of Delights is a great gift for a new graduate, because it is a wise lesson on what happens when you pay attention to the world around you. The Book of Delights reminds you not to miss your life.”
—Elle.com / Shelf Life
“I didn't read The Book of Delights for ages because I thought it would be sentimental. I was wrong. Each essay is a delicious little controlled explosion of joy, which is activism in a broken world.”
—The Week (UK)
About the Author
Reviews:
5.0 out of 5 stars To have eyes like this!
Now that I have read this book, I am trying to recall how or where I came to know about it and what prompted me to read it in the first place. I care only because I would like to thank them. I love this book.Gay's style here is not what you might expect. So many of his "essayettes" read like he was stream-of-conscious, journaling his delight of the day and doing very little revision. But, just listening to his voice and seeing the pictures he paints about the delights he wants to share is captivating.Before I read anything about the author, it was apparent he was a poet. His words and thoughts sometimes seem to ebb and flow across the page. But they always get tied up in a beautiful bow at the end. In addition to how he writes, another clue to his poetic leaning is his power of observation. I suppose that if you are looking for a different delight every day, life being what it is and what it has been for all of us these past few years, some days you REALLY have to look hard. But he makes it seem effortless, and as you read, you realize that he appears to be surrounded by delight. I would love to cultivate vision and sensitivity like that.Some reviewers seem to have been put off by the author's oversharing. I just feel he is being as honest about how he puts on coconut oil as he is about pulling weeds in his garden. To me, this makes him more believable and makes the act of finding delight more attainable for the rest of us.The more I read, the more I loved Ross Gay and this book. I was less than halfway through before I bought copies of the book and sent them to my 3 kids and a friend. I also bought one for myself. I try and check books out at the library and only purchase what I know I will want to read again. This one will be on my reading table for a long time.
5.0 out of 5 stars a true gift! funny, profane, gut-punching; inspired us to speak our delights out loud daily
Reads like free form poetry, which might take getting used to, but well worth it. The writing is like a bee looping around a garden--wiggling down into the pollen, then zooming someplace new, then returning to a particularly enchanting flower. Once I started reading these mini essays out loud to my husband, the syntax and flow immediately made perfect sense. They are each an intimate journey through the author's own brain. The meandering journal-like quality is the whole point--to observe, meditate, see. I like that sorrow, grief, and injustice are not separate from delight but intertwined. If you are expecting a book only of happy snapshots, this is much deeper. For me it was about noticing the glimmers of humor and wonder hidden in the mundane moments of daily life, and the beauty too. We now declare "Delight!" regularly in our house--soap bubbles doing dishes, watching a hen run at full speed, the dog's teeth showing when she sleeps, the intertwined legs of a family in the packed waiting room of the emergency room, the woman using her hands to make a pillow for her elderly mom's head, the construction guy dancing... Some days these little delights are life rafts. Many thanks to the author.
4.0 out of 5 stars Delightful
This book is a collection of essays the author started on his birthday one year and continued through his birthday the following year. He sees delight in many different ways that I hadn't thought of until reading his thoughts. The book is about how he delighted in even small things and negative things, which he turned into positives. It's a reminder to any reader to seek those things for ourselves.
5.0 out of 5 stars poetic and profound
I feel I have found a kindred spirit in the protagonist of this volume. I myself keep a diary of delights in which I tally mine and also attempt to justify a life devoted to delight, “Delight soothes sadness, calms fear, assuages anger, lessens the tenure of horror, compensates loss, ameliorates humiliation, kindles hope, inspires love of life, fulfills a day’s experience. What shall we do today? What we did yesterday: create delightful homes, tend their gardens, cook delightful food, delight in friends, in family, and in language.”In his book, Gay delights also in nature, which should be in the list, for sure.So, from my perspective, Ross Gay’s book is profound. It is also poetic, in keeping with its subject. Gay doesn’t have to record that he is delighting in the language he uses. It’s manifest.This is the second book I have begun to reread as soon as I finished it. The other was Garrison Keillor’s Homegrown Democrat, another delight.A reader who cultivates delight may learn from this book that delight may be defiantly employed as a poke in the eye of racism, for instance, in Gay’s case. Or, if the president of the beautiful country in which you reside is an anhedonic (David Brooks’ word) teetotaler, defiantly lift your glass of first-rate pinot noir a little higher and taste with deep attention. You’ll feel better. In the rural setting where I grew up in the middle of the last century, delight was a bulwark against poverty, not an even match but often sufficient. About fabulous farm food my dad crowed, “Now that’s what I call eating!” He was delighted by it.I learned from Ross Gay that delight may be compounded by sharing. Thanks.
5.0 out of 5 stars You need this book.
This is not just a delight, but something you need to read with a friend…or your grown child (so defiant buy two). It will change your life and make you send spontaneous texts or pictures to said child with the caption “delight” and then increase your own delight for the day x2.You will also learn new words like negreet (not so delightful, but so powerful and sobering) and onomatopoeicness which is a delight because I’m a 7th grade English teacher and can’t wait to use that one this fall.In other words,10/10. Highly recommend.
One of the worst books ..cant even continue few pages....so dumb
One of the worst books ..cant even continue few pages....so dumb..there is no such thing called delight
Depressing book
It was not a book of delights but a diary of the author's daily encounters with people he knew. No reflections on these people. Most of then crude remarks about comments of his daily activities. A book of delights should have been what could have been a pleasant reflection of what joys he found in his encounters with a person he had just met. Or say a piece of joy he discovered around the next corner. There was no delight in his book. I threw it in the bin after being a quarter of the way through..
Life-changing
Absolutely life-altering. These words will forever change the way you see the world, most powerfully how you evaluate your own experiences — your own existence. Your most embarrassing moments just might be your best moments. For your vulnerability is your humanity. You will love yourself, delight in yourself, genuinely. And you will find delight in what you once thought to be the most mundane aspects of your life. A gem.
Love this book
Be inspired to write a delight book
A Tonic
Little nuggets of delight delivered by poet, Ross Gay. This covers everything from smiling babies to the way plants grow, speech patterns, words and feelings. It's a project Gay set himself to notice one delightful thing a day and write about it in an unedited splurge of joy. As he progresses he finds more and more things to be delighted by. This is a perfect read for the times we live in. I might even have a go at it myself.
Similar suggestions by Bolo
More from this brand
Similar items from “African American Studies”
Share with
Or share with link
https://www.bolo.ae/products/U1643753282