New Directions is proud to present Fleur Jaeggy's strange and mesmerizing essays about the writers Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob. A renowned stylist of hyper-brevity in fiction, Fleur Jaeggy proves herself an even more concise master of the essay form, albeit in a most peculiar and lapidary poetic vein. Of De Quincey's early nineteenth-century world we hear of the habits of writers: Charles Lamb -spoke of 'Lilliputian rabbits' when eating frog fricassse-; Henry Fuseli -ate a diet of raw meat in order to obtain splendid dreams-; -Hazlitt was perceptive about musculature and...