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