the book of delights essay

Literature & Fiction
Essays & Correspondence

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The Book of Delights: The life-affirming New York Times bestseller

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The Book of Delights: The life-affirming New York Times bestseller Paperback – September 8, 2020

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 . . . contagious in their joy' New York Times 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 . Among Gay's funny, poetic, philosophical delights: a friend's unabashed use of air quotes, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an aeroplane, the silent nod of acknowledgement 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 other subject, 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 . *** 'These charming, digressive "essayettes" surprise and challenge more than a reader might expect . . . 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.' New Yorker ' 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 '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

Print length 274 pages
Language English
Publisher Coronet Books
Publication date September 8, 2020
Dimensions 5.12 x 0.87 x 7.72 inches
ISBN-10 152934977X
ISBN-13 978-1529349771
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Coronet Books (September 8, 2020)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 274 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 152934977X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1529349771
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.12 x 0.87 x 7.72 inches
#2,134 in Political Philosophy (Books)
#2,539 in Essays (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

Customer reviews

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Customers say

Customers find the book delightful, thoughtful, and enjoyable. They praise the writing style as exquisite, creative, and poetic. Readers say the book helps them notice all the wonders around them each day. They also say it's inspiring, bringing hope and possibility. However, some customers feel the book is dull and disgusting.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the book delightful, thoughtful, and wonderful. They also appreciate the essayettes, saying they inform and inspire them. Readers say the book is a perfect selection for a community read. They are delighted by the author's openness and delight in living.

"...His ability to turn the most simplistic of delights into wonderful , rich imagery is astounding...." Read more

"This is a fun and thoughtful little book. Even though the essays seem spontaneous, I'm certain that the author edited and curated the selection...." Read more

"...anger, lessens the tenure of horror, compensates loss, ameliorates humiliation , kindles hope, inspires love of life, fulfills a day’s experience...." Read more

"...I wish I could say this book was a delight to read . Some of the essays are nice, and a few are legitimately delightful...." Read more

Customers find the writing style exquisite, creative, and sublime. They say the essays are easy to read and give them a bit to ponder throughout the day. Readers also mention the author is a good writer and the collection is a realistic expression of the ordinary in a poetic frame.

"...to turn the most simplistic of delights into wonderful, rich imagery is astounding . Because Gay is a poet, his prose continues with that poetic feel...." Read more

"Arrived on-time and in perfect condition. Essays are easy to read and sometime give you a bit to ponder throughout the day." Read more

"This is a fun and thoughtful little book. Even though the essays seem spontaneous , I'm certain that the author edited and curated the selection...." Read more

"...premise, apparently. I found this annoying, distracting and confusing ...." Read more

Customers find the book insightful, intense, and thoughtful. They say it helps them appreciate all the wonders around them each day. Readers also mention the book brightens their days.

"...It was very personal and intense look into the mind of a stranger...." Read more

"...humiliation, kindles hope, inspires love of life, fulfills a day’s experience . What shall we do today?..." Read more

"... Thoughtful , whimsical, funny, sometimes very lighthearted, sometimes very deep, this collection contains a connection to a gentler and more joyful..." Read more

"...author is conveying or could convey with their writing it makes it all the more exciting . My only wish is for it to be longer or have a second book...." Read more

Customers find the book inspiring, mentioning it lends hope and possibility. They say it helps get them through the scariest times. Readers also mention that hope springs from every page and every well-chosen word.

"...to find something of beauty and goodness every single day is beyond inspiring . In a world full of darkness, this book is a beacon of light...." Read more

"...“Delight soothes sadness, calms fear, assuages anger, lessens the tenure of horror , compensates loss, ameliorates humiliation, kindles hope,..." Read more

"...but I had to own the book so I could refer back. It helped get me through the scariest times . I love his writing so much." Read more

"...Mr. Gay makes joy seem possible as a daily experience, lending hope and possibility , it helped me to notice goodness, and challenged me to pause,..." Read more

Customers find the book intimate, personal, and intense. They also say it's lovely and profound with joy and perception.

"Lovely and loving , this book of essays increases ones desire to observe and document while also expressing gratitude for the ordinary." Read more

"Joyful, insightful, the perfect balance of bitter and sweet. Intimate and honest...." Read more

"...Ross tackles the sublime, the mundane and the profound with joy and perception ." Read more

Customers find the book delightful. They say the delights are individual and good to be shared.

"...Some of the essays are nice, and a few are legitimately delightful . The one I like best is #87, “Loitering.”..." Read more

"... No scarcity of delight .”" Read more

" Delights are individual but good to be shared..." Read more

"Delightful, delectable, delicious ..." Read more

Customers find the book dull, disgusting, and not what they expected.

"...this after reading the gushing reviews and comments but found it disappointing . It went straight to a local second-hand-bookstore." Read more

"...Also, most important, they are not essays . I can’t write an essay as to how this book is all a man selling his diary pages...." Read more

"I had high hopes for this little book. However I did not find it delightful . Rather it felt like a vanity project. Sorry, I would not recommend." Read more

"...Yes I said devious and I am not a prude. It was disgusting . So if you don't like to read about disgusting things, avoid this book." Read more

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Word of Mouth

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

When Henry James admonished writers to be “one of the people on whom nothing is lost,” he could well have been describing poet Ross Gay. Author of three books of poetry, including the National Book Critics Circle prize-winning collection CATALOG OF UNABASHED GRATITUDE , he now has applied his considerable talent to the essay.

In THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS, Gay delivers more than 100 bite-sized entries that carry him through one year, beginning on his 42nd birthday in 2016. Intensely personal, wise, witty and sensuous, these glimpses of life through Gay’s perceptive eyes aren’t merely an introduction to his unique world. Collectively they’re an invitation to readers to awaken to the delights that surround us every day.

When he embarked on the project that became this book, Gay’s plan was to “write a daily essay about something delightful,” and though he hewed scrupulously to that theme, he admits his commitment to the regimen of producing a piece each day faltered.

From his hometown of Bloomington, Indiana, where he teaches at Indiana University, Gay digs deeply and with an infectious exuberance into the life he’s living, at the same time ranging over a lifetime of memories and experiences that take him back to his childhood in Levittown, Pennsylvania, and forward as we share his 43rd year.

"THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS isn’t simply a lighthearted romp through Gay’s enjoyably observant life. Though politically themed essays don’t dominate, he chooses his targets with care, and hits them when he does."

Coining the term “essayette” for these explorations, Gay’s delight-provoking preoccupations are diverse, but they gradually coalesce around a handful of themes, among them family, friendship, the challenges of life as an African-American in 21st-century America, and, above all, his deep engagement with the natural world, especially through his passion for horticulture. A typical entry runs three to four pages, while the briefest are a single paragraph. And whether he’s writing about basketball, bakeries or bobbleheads, Gay is relentlessly enthusiastic about even the most mundane subject that catches his eye.

But for all its emphasis on life’s pleasures, THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS isn’t simply a lighthearted romp through Gay’s enjoyably observant life. Though politically themed essays don’t dominate, he chooses his targets with care, and hits them when he does.

A piece about his love for “weird vernacular sayings that roll off the tongue” that focuses on “I need x like I need a hole in the head” is illustrative. In it, Gay describes horrifying radiation experiments conducted in the 1920s in a small southern Indiana town established by free blacks in the 19th century. “I’m trying to remember the last day I haven’t been reminded of the inconceivable violence black people have endured in this country,” he writes.

In another essay about Whitney Houston, he points out how “one of the objectives of popular culture, popular media, is to make blackness appear to be inextricable from suffering,” something he says is “clever as hell if your goal is obscuring the efforts, the systems, historical and ongoing, to ruin black people.” But he ends on a note of hope, reminding us that we have been “reading a book of delights written by a black person.”

As one would expect from a poet of Gay’s skill, words themselves are objects of delight, as when an essay on harvesting two kinds of carrots he and his partner plant in the spring moves into a contemplation of the word kindness and how it and kin “have the same mother.”

And speaking of carrots, THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS is overflowing with a profusion of vegetables, fruits and flowers, spread like a feast by this self-described “novice naturalist.” Gay’s frequent, mouth-watering descriptions of a cornucopia of produce probably make it a bad idea to read his book on an empty stomach.

He also writes seductively about the world of insects, watching a praying mantis “bouncing and swaying, like it’s hearing a music I’m not yet tuned to” or describing “thumb-size all black bumblebees” and the way they “spin their legs into the base of the flower, shimmy some, swirl their abdomens for good measure, and, exhaling, haul their furry bodies, gold-flecked, to the next bloom for more.”

Gay’s zest for life bursts forth on almost every page. And one of the evolving joys of the collection is how the finely tuned antennae that helped him discover delight in his own life only became more sensitive as the year passed: “It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar,” he writes. “Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”

It’s that encouragement that makes THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS such an inspiring, life-affirming volume. Reading an essay on just about any subject here, it’s nearly impossible not to focus on the things --- often simple --- in one’s own life that yield pleasures akin to the ones Gay experiences. The critic James Wood once wrote that literature “makes us better noticers of life.” Ross Gay almost certainly will be pleased if his project inspires at least some of his readers to become better noticers, more attentive to the joy that’s there to greet them in their own lives, at least when they take the time to look for it.

Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg on March 1, 2019

The Book of Delights: Essays by Ross Gay

Publication Date: August 16, 2022
Genres: Essays , Nonfiction
Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN-10: 1643753282
ISBN-13: 9781643753287

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The Book of Delights: Essays

Reviewed by Lauren Brownlee

September 1, 2019

By Ross Gay. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2019. 288 pages. $23.95/hardcover; $11.99/eBook.

I was introduced to Ross Gay when I happened to pick up a copy of the January/February 2019 issue of Poets & Writers magazine, which was the “Inspiration Issue.” Reading Gay’s interview therein led to changing my Facebook biography to a quote from him: “I believe in hollering about what you love.” His new book, The Book of Delights , is reflective of that sentiment and is the result of having completed a goal to write a short essay every day for a year about a delight he had experienced that day. He follows the philosophy that the more one loves, the happier one will be, and he believes in an ethic of sharing about love and beauty. The Book of Delights is a testament to that philosophy and ethic.

Throughout the book, Gay models George Fox’s call: walking cheerfully over the earth answering the Light in everyone. One sentiment at the heart of the book is his understanding that “in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. . . . This caretaking is our default mode and it’s always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise.” This idea is present in many of the essays and stories: the therapist Gay loves because of the therapist’s belief that our goal should be to achieve pure love; Gay’s love of any physical affection people show him (including a delightful story about a high five!); Gay’s love of being called pet names by strangers and giving nicknames to loved ones; Gay’s belief that babies bring out the best in us all and his faith in common decency. He is equally delighted by strangers as by those with whom he is intimately connected. Toward the end of the book, he writes, “kindness and kin have the same mother. Maybe making those to whom we are kind our kin. To whom, even, those we might be. And that circle is big.” By this point, he has already shown his readers how living that ideal can look.

Gay is also deeply in unity with nature. He shares that gardens nourish his delight and explains the ways he makes the most of not only his own garden, but all the gardens he encounters. He describes how his garden sings out to him and reminds him that every living being is “rooting around for the light” together. He believes that a lily from his garden “will in fact kill you with delight . . . and the lily will resurrect you, too.” One of his essays is a love letter to the sun, and another extols the many talents of bees. His love of nature is a call to action for all of us to decenter ourselves and think about the mutuality we share with the natural world.

I was particularly impressed by the fact that, despite his omnipresent joy, Gay does not wear rose-colored glasses. He acknowledges the prejudices of society and delights in both facing them and navigating around the obstacles they create. He shares such concerns as the valuing of property over people, the teaching of fear, and the ubiquity of statues that feature guns. In one essay he delights in a T-shirt that says, “Make it scary to be a racist again,” and then reflects, “difficult as this is, I want light shone on the racist, too, and the hateful in me, too.” One powerful essay examines how Blackness and suffering are all too often conflated in popular culture and how he hopes that his book will show people that Black delight is as “Daily as air.”

I was thrilled when I saw that Gay was coming to my neighborhood bookstore to read from The Book of Delights . The book’s acknowledgements end with “And finally, Dear Reader, as always, as always , I am grateful to you,” and I experienced that sense of love in each moment of his author talk (which leads me to recommend listening to the audio version of the book if you can; Gay is an outstanding narrator). As soon as the talk was over, I bought the book and waited to get it signed. When I got to the front of the line, I told Gay how much I loved the talk, how I had been sitting next to his cousin, and how I wished I were his cousin. He asked me about my work then and signed my book, “In Joy Together, Cousin!” The Book of Delights is a most delightful book by a most delightful human.