The Book of Delights: Essays

What if delight were a practice? Ross Gay spent one tumultuous year writing a short lyric essay every day — on whatever delighted him, however small, however strange — and the result is one of the most original, joyful, and quietly radical books in recent American literature.

In The Book of Delights: Essays, Gay finds wonder in a tomato seedling carried onto an airplane, the silent nod between the only two Black people in a room, a friend’s unabashed use of air quotes, and the hypnotic stillness of a praying mantis. These are not innocent delights — Gay never looks away from the complexities of living as a Black man in America, the violence of consumer culture, or the weight of loss. But he insists, with humor and precision and a poet’s eye, that delight is not a distraction from difficulty. It is a discipline. A way of paying attention. A form of love.

For readers drawn to contemplative and lyric nonfiction, The Book of Delights is an invitation — for those who find meaning in the close observation of ordinary life, for nature lovers, gardeners, and wanderers, and for anyone who suspects that joy, tended carefully, might be one of the most subversive acts available to us.

Explore more from Ross Gay: Continue with The Book of (More) Delights for a second year of Gay’s luminous daily practice, or turn to Aflame: Learning from Silence by Pico Iyer for another meditation on the gifts found in careful attention.

What You’ll Discover

• A year of lyric essays on delight — funny, poetic, philosophical, and deeply human
• Gay’s unflinching honesty about race, loss, and the complexities of American life
• A celebration of the natural world: gardens, flowers, sidewalk weeds, and praying mantises
• A genre-defying form that reads like poetry, memoir, and philosophy at once
• The first nonfiction book from one of America’s most celebrated poets

Ross Gay is a poet, essayist, and professor whose work has won the NBCC Award, the Kingsley Tufts Award, and the American Book Award. He gardens in Bloomington, Indiana, and teaches at Indiana University. The Book of Delights was heard on NPR’s This American Life and became a New York Times bestseller, praised by Tracy K. Smith as a book that “bolsters belief in the countless small miracles that surround us.”

Perfect for: Readers of lyric and contemplative nonfiction, nature lovers and gardeners, fans of poetry who want to try essays, those drawn to joy as a spiritual and political practice, readers of Pico Iyer or Katherine May, anyone navigating difficulty who needs a reminder that delight is still possible, and gift seekers looking for a book that is both beautiful and brief.

Quality hardcover edition | ISBN 9781616207922. Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights — a New York Times bestseller and a daily practice in wonder, as joyful and necessary as it is rare.