Fan Mail

Jason Guriel's Fan Mail: A Guide to What We Love, Loathe, and Mourn is a book about fandom in all its obsessive, contradictory, and deeply personal forms. But more than that, it's an inquiry into how love for art-- books, music, movies, poetry, comics-- shapes not just our tastes but our lives. Guriel, an acclaimed poet and critic, assembles a series of essays that trace his own experiences as a fan, while simultaneously constructing a larger meditation on what it means to be enthralled by culture. The book moves through the phases of Guriel's devotion with a kind of graceful intensity. He revels in obscure corners of the canon and forgotten pop-culture moments. Guriel also plays the anti-booster, taking on what he sees as overhyped or misguided phenomena, from Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize to the self-indulgent quirks of contemporary literary criticism. And he mourns the loss of both singular artists and a pre-internet world, where obsessions flourished in private rather than in algorithm-driven feeds. But Fan Mail is also about the act of writing itself: Guriel's deep engagement with poetry and criticism reveals a mind fascinated by language, metaphor, and form. His prose is crisp, aphoristic, at times acerbic, but always engaged, arguing that fandom-- whether ecstatic or skeptical-- is an essential part of artistic life. More than a collection of essays, Fan Mail is a love letter to the passions that shape us, for better or worse.