{"product_id":"ambivalence-brian-dillon-9798896231103","title":"Ambivalence: An Education","description":"\u003cb\u003eA coming-of-age memoir set in late-twentieth-century Dublin, recounting writer and critic Brian Dillon's first encounters with pivotal writers in his life--Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, and others--and in the process arguing for the transformative power of art, literature, and learning.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eAmbivalence\u003c\/i\u003e is the writer Brian Dillon's coming-of-age memoir set in Ireland between 1987 and 1995. When Dillon was sixteen, his mother died, and he stopped caring about school. While he courted failure, his real education was going on elsewhere: with books, music, films and television. When against all odds he made it to college, his head was already full of avant-garde writing, art, and ideas. Could he live up to the hopes and dreams he attached to culture? Halfway through college his father died, and the stakes of Dillon's education seemed even higher. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eAmbivalence\u003c\/i\u003e explores what learning meant to its author, what it enabled and denied, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six, when he left his native Dublin. It's at once a memoir of that city in the 1980s and 1990s, an uncynical portrait of the adolescent and early-adult mind, and an intimate defense of radical thinking about literature and life. In vivid present-tense fragments, Dillon describes his first encounters with writers such as Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, Samuel Beckett, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. He recalls being seduced by ambivalence, ambiguity and androgyny--on the page and in the life he hoped his reading would transfigure. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThe era he describes seemed to demand new ways of thinking about aesthetics and politics. Today, when rights are fragile, arts and humanities attacked, and students dismissed as radicals or narcissists, \u003ci\u003eAmbivalence\u003c\/i\u003e is an argument for the poetic and revolutionary force of changing yourself and even the world by changing what you know.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Brian Dillon\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9798896231103\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e New York Review of Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 09\/08\/2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 144\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback","brand":"Brian Dillon","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":48460311986431,"sku":"9798896231103","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_7f074dc1-b71a-4943-bc5d-d95fc1d45e45.jpg?v=1777413921","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/ambivalence-brian-dillon-9798896231103","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}