David Lazar is a professor of creative writing and English at Columbia College, Chicago and the founding editor of Hotel Amerika. His works include After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays, The Body of Brooklyn, Powder Town, and Essaying the Essay.

Unfamiliar Essays

Calling for His Past

Manhattan Cab

Across the River

The City Always Speaks: London, New York, San Francisco

The Coat

Ostensible Occasions

Occasional Desire: On the Essay and the Memoir

Queering the Essay

Reading "New Year's Eve"

Playing Ourselves: Pseudodocumentary and Persona

The Useable Past of M. F. K. Fisher: An Essay on Projects

On Mentors

The Art of Survival

On Dating

Death, Death, Death, Death, Death

On Gifts

Self-Portrait: Francis Bacon's Deformity

On the Art of Survival: North by Northwest

Acknowledgments

In his new collection of essays, Occasional Desire, David Lazar meditates on random violence and vanished phone booths, on the excessive relationship to jewelry that links Kobe Bryant and Elizabeth Taylor, on Hitchcock, Francis Bacon, and M. F. K. Fisher. He explores, in his concentrically self-aware, amused, and ironic voice, what it means to be occasionally aware that we are surviving by our wits, and that our desires, ulterior or obvious, are what keep us alive. Lazar also turns his attention on the essay itself, affording us a three-dimensional look at the craft and the art of reading and writing a literary form that maps the world as it charts the peregrinations of the mind.

Lazar is especially interested in the trappings of memory, the trapdoors of memory, the way we gild or codify, select, soften, and self-delude ourselves based on our understanding of the past. His own process of selection and reflection reminds us of how far this literary form can take us, bound only by the limits of desire and imagination.