The Correspondence

'What a nutjob!' - Geoff Dyer'Questions that occurred to me as I read this brilliant, baffling book: What the hell is this? Who the hell is this? Is this poetry?' - Tom BissellCan civilization save us from ourselves? That is the question J. D. Daniels asks in his first book, a series of six letters written during dark nights of the soul. Working from his own highly varied experience – as a janitor, night watchman, adjunct professor, drunk, exterminator, dutiful son –he considers how far books and learning and psychoanalysis can get us, and how much we're stuck in the mud.In prose wound as tight as a copper spring, Daniels takes us from the highways of his native Kentucky to the Balearic Islands and from the Pampas of Brazil to the rarefied precincts of Cambridge, Massachusetts. His travelling companions include psychotic kindergarten teachers, Israeli sailors, and Southern Baptists on fire for Christ. In each...