John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead

(2011)

The American essay was having a

moment at the beginning of the
decade, and Pulphead was smack in
the middle. Without any hard data, I
can tell you that this collection of
John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine
features—published primarily in GQ,
but also in The Paris Review, and
Harper’s—was the only full book of
essays most of my literary friends had
read since Slouching Towards
Bethlehem, and probably one of the
only full books of essays they had
even heard of.
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Well, we all picked a good one. Every

essay in Pulphead is brilliant and
entertaining, and illuminates some
small corner of the American
experience—even if it’s just one
house, with Sullivan and an aging
writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a
standout in a collection with no filler;
fittingly, it won a National Magazine
Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what
are they about? Oh, Axl Rose,
Christian Rock festivals, living around
the filming of One Tree Hill, the Tea
Party movement, Michael Jackson,
Bunny Wailer, the influence of
animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real
World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out, what

connects these essays, apart from
their general tone and excellence, is
“their author’s essential curiosity
about the world, his eye for the
perfect detail, and his great good
humor in revealing both his subjects’
and his own foibles.” They are also
extremely well written, drawing much
from fictional techniques and
sentence craft, their literary pleasures
so acute and remarkable that James
Wood began his review of the
collection in The New Yorker with a
quiz: “Are the following sentences the
beginnings of essays or of short
stories?” (It was not a hard quiz,
considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this

collection, like someone reached into
your brain, took out the half-baked
stuff you talk about with your friends,
researched it, lived it, and
represented it to you smarter and
better and more thoroughly than you
ever could. So read it in awe if you
must, but read it. –Emily Temple,
Senior Editor