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WORK TITLE: The Correspondence
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1974
WEBSITE:
CITY: Cambridge
STATE: MA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://us.macmillan.com/thecorrespondence/jddaniels/9780374535940/ * https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/03/23/j-d-daniels-nonfiction/ * http://www.whiting.org/awards/winners/j-d-daniels#/ * https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2017/01/05/daniels-shares-disturbing-original-essays-writer-struggling-find-better-way-live/46q5dFKyz0PYoPPPkKnF4K/story.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2016002314
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2016002314
HEADING: Daniels, J. D., 1974-
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046 __ |f 1974-11-15 |2 edtf
100 1_ |a Daniels, J. D., |d 1974-
370 __ |e Massachusetts |s 2010
372 __ |a Essays |2 lcsh
374 __ |a Authors |2 lcsh
375 __ |a male
377 __ |a eng
400 1_ |w nne |a Daniels, J. D. |c (Essayist)
670 __ |a Best American essays 2013, 2013: |b contents (Letter from Majorca, J.D. Daniels)
670 __ |a bu.edu, 20 November 2015: |b (J. D. Daniels is the 2013 recipient of The Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize. His Letter from Majorca appears in Best American Essays 2013. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, AGNI, n+1, The Oxford American, and elsewhere. (updated 1/2015))
670 __ |a The Correspondence, 2017: |b ECIP t.p. (J.D. Daniels) data view (b. 11/15/74)
670 __ |a Paris Review online blog, viewed June 14, 2016: |b (J. D. Daniels lives in Massachusetts. He will contribute an essay on Brazilian jiu-jitsu to the fall issue of The Paris Review [blog dated June 8, 2010])
PERSONAL
Born November 15, 1974.
EDUCATION:Studied at the University of Louisville and Boston University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Essayist.
AWARDS:Terry Southern Prize, Paris Review, 2013; Whiting Writers’ Award, 2016.
WRITINGS
Author of Paper Monument, 2007; contributor to Best American Essays 2013; contributor to journals and periodicals, including Paris Review, AGNI, n+1, and Oxford American.
SIDELIGHTS
J.D. Daniels is an American essayist. After growing up in Kentucky, he studied at the University of Louisville and Boston University. Daniels won the Whiting Award in 2016 for nonfiction and the Paris Review’s 2013 Terry Southern Prize. He has contributed to a number of periodicals and journals, including the Paris Review, AGNI, n+1, Oxford American, and The Best American Essays.
Daniels published the essay collection The Correspondence in 2017. The collection of six essays spans a brief 126 pages and is presented in the form of letters. “Letter from Majorca” chronicles his seafaring experiences in the time after he left university in the aftermath of yelling at a student until she broke into tears. This particular essay was included in the Best American Essays 2013 collection. “Letter from Kentucky” is about Daniels’s time returning to his home state to cover a story that he believes is no longer current. Here he also reflects on how this return home was more like finding a completely different place than what he had assumed would be waiting for him. He also learns much about his own father. “Letter from Level Four” shows Daniels’s interaction with a mentally unstable man but also the similarities he believes they share in life and his own questions on the nature of sanity. “Letter from Cambridge” offers an alternative take on defining masculinity as Daniels trains and competes in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. “Letter from Devils Tower” uses the third-person to relate a series of romantic disasters. And “Letter from the Primal Horde” examines the dynamics of group psychology as Daniels gets involved in a remote psychotherapy quasi cult. It also stimulates him to think about the nature of working as a writer, where the majority of his time is spent writing in isolation about experiences he has while in larger social groups and settings.
A Kirkus Reviews contributor found that “one gets the sense that Whiting Writers Award winner Daniels is belatedly coming into his own and exercising some distinct literary muscle.” The same critic called The Correspondence “an uncommonly auspicious debut.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly said that “although the essays mostly lack traditional qualities of letters, they comprise a fascinating correspondence from his world.” The reviewer labeled Daniels “an essayist to watch.” Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Dwight Garner observed that when reading this book, “you’re in the presence of an original voice.” Reviewing the book in the London Guardian, J. Robert Lennon observed that “Daniels’s prose is restrained, but leaves room for unexpected metaphors and bouts of unabashed sentiment.” Lennon admitted that “it’s a shame that the book leads with ‘Letter from Cambridge;’ it’s far and away the worst piece of writing here, and undersells many of the delights to come. Indeed, each essay is better than the one before it; the second half of the book dispenses entirely with the cycle of boasting and self-negation that mars the first, and the final piece, ‘Letter from the Primal Horde,‘ is one of the funnier and more disturbing pieces of reportage I’ve ever read.”
A critic in the Paris Review pointed out that the essays included in this collection “reveal a sharp, ironic intelligence and a keen sense of rhythm.” In a review in the Boston Globe, Kent Black lauded that “Daniels’s work is deceptive. On one hand, the book is short, simple, and easy to read in a single sitting. But then something smacks you in the back of the head as you walk away and realize with a jolt that what you just read is deep, dark, and complex. You read it again and realize that The Correspondence is raw, funny, and contains more moments of true pathos than” most other nonfiction works.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Boston Globe, January 6, 2017, Kent Black, review of The Correspondence.
Guardian (London, England), April 28, 2017, J. Robert Lennon, review of The Correspondence.
Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2016, review of The Correspondence.
New York Times Book Review, April 28, 2017, Dwight Garner, review of The Correspondence.
Paris Review, March 23, 2016, review of The Correspondence.
Publishers Weekly, September 19, 2016, review of The Correspondence, p. 58.
ONLINE
Whiting Awards Web site, http://www.whiting.org/ (July 11, 2017), author profile.*
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J. D. Daniels
J. D. Daniels is the recipient of a 2016 Whiting Writers’ Award and The Paris Review’s 2013 Terry Southern Prize. His “Letter from Majorca” was selected for The Best American Essays 2013. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
J. D. Daniels
2016 Winner in Nonfiction
J. D. Daniels studied at the University of Louisville and Boston University. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, AGNI, n+1, The Oxford American, The Best American Essays, and elsewhere. Daniels is the recipient of The Paris Review’s 2013 Terry Southern Prize. His collection, The Correspondence, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2017.
J.D. Daniels: THE CORRESPONDENCE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Oct. 1, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
J.D. Daniels THE CORRESPONDENCE Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Nonfiction) 20.00
The debut collection by an essayist who writes like a rattlesnake, his sentences coiled yet always ready to strike with venomous impact.One gets the sense that Whiting Writers Award winner Daniels is belatedly coming into his own and
exercising some distinct literary muscle. These essays are presented asbut not necessarily written likeletters from the author to himself, and they could pass as fragmentary notes for a memoir or another much longer and more unified
work. Not that this slim volume of six pieces doesnt work on its own; they have a cumulative power that can leave readers devastated. Though Letter from Majorca, about his seafaring experiences after he abruptly quit the
university after shouting at a student until she began to cry, has earned distinction by inclusion in Best American Essays 2013, others are even stronger. Perhaps the best is Letter from Kentucky, which found Daniels
returning home on a magazine assignment but realizing, its an old story. The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh: you go back to the place but the place isnt there anymore. His spare, elemental prose conjures old haunts, old hurts,
and old friends who are dead or are in prison before he goes deeper into a meditation on his father, whose aim was to protect me from the darkness all around us, using the darkness inside himself. Following this is the extraordinary
Letter from Level Four, in which the author meets a man who is plainly mad and does his best to avoid him but also sees himself in him. He reflects on his own brief stay in the hospital, where all of this, they told me, was reality. There
are no other worlds than this one. There isnt even this one.
An uncommonly auspicious debut.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"J.D. Daniels: THE CORRESPONDENCE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Oct. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA465181877&it=r&asid=8967f86dd3f9ada8e6d213260cfa6b92. Accessed 28 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A465181877
---
5/28/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1496016545098 2/2
The Correspondence
Publishers Weekly.
263.38 (Sept. 19, 2016): p58.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Correspondence
J.D. Daniels. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $20 (144p) ISBN 978-0-374-53594-0
In this collection of six essays, loosely styled as letters (though not addressed to anyone in particular), Daniels investigates a series of personal subjects and experiences. In the first letter, written from Cambridge, Mass., Daniels details
the years he spent training and competing in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He enjoys the fighting, for reasons he can barely identify, but there are costs to his personal life. The next letter, written from Majorca, explains how an Israeli ship captain
recruited Daniels to work on a boat just as Daniels's relationships were falling apart at home. His "Letter from Kentucky" is a conflicted but passionate personal odyssey through the region where his family has lived for generations.
Here he realizes he can't help but write about his father: "His aim was to protect me from the darkness all around us, using the darkness inside himself." The other letters feature profiles of a disturbed, paranoid man, a couple enmeshed
in a love triangle, and Daniels's bizarre experience with something called a "residential group-relations conference." Throughout the book, Daniels masterfully hints at other stories just off the page, revealing much about himself but
never too much. Although the essays mostly lack traditional qualities of letters, they comprise a fascinating correspondence from his world. The letters here represent a bold and daring contribution to belles lettres; Daniels is an essayist
to watch. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Correspondence." Publishers Weekly, 19 Sept. 2016, p. 58+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464352753&it=r&asid=e63da7029592dd101d812129ebc13315.
Accessed 28 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A464352753
BOOKS
Review: With ‘The Correspondence,’ a New Contender in the Ring
Books of The Times
By DWIGHT GARNER DEC. 27, 2016
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“Don’t make your books any shorter, please,” Graham Greene begged his friend Muriel Spark in a 1974 letter, “or you’ll disappear like Beckett.”
J. D. Daniels’s first book, “The Correspondence,” is all of 126 pages. It’s so slim you can use it as a bookmark inside another book. It’s so slim it’s over before it’s quite gotten going.
But from the moment you crack it open, you’re in the presence of an original voice. Mr. Daniels is a young writer, raised in Kentucky, who lives in Cambridge, Mass. His book comprises a series of letters with titles like “Letter From Majorca” and “Letter From Kentucky.”
These aren’t addressed to anyone in particular. Each could profitably be called, to borrow the title of a James Baldwin essay, “Letter From a Region in My Mind.”
The Correspondence by JD Daniels review – blackly comic verve
These essays by a young American writer are wrongly advertised as reinventing masculinity but prove to be funny and disturbing
A commission to write about JD Daniels’s home state of Kentucky is transformed into a profile of his father.
A commission to write about JD Daniels’s home state of Kentucky is transformed into a profile of his father. Photograph: David Coyle/TeamCoyle for the Guardian
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J Robert Lennon
Friday 28 April 2017 09.00 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 13.20 EDT
In the first three pages of The Correspondence, a tightly written, often brilliant, occasionally exasperating collection of essays by the American writer JD Daniels, we are treated to a jockstrap, some football players, a gymnasium, pool playing, a toilet, a street fight, and the phrase “Big Tony knocked me down and sat on my neck.” Cigars, booze and drugs are soon to follow, along with a page-long list of books the author has read, a dig at “professional writers” and their penchant for pontificating, and a lament at having a piece spiked at the London Review of Books.
These details come from “Letter from Cambridge”, an essay ostensibly about the author’s experiences training for, and competing in, Brazilian jiu-jitsu. It seems to satisfy the promise of the book’s PR and blurbs, which would have it reinventing masculinity or some such nonsense; and it doesn’t bode well for the rest, which I fully expected to hate.
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But The Correspondence defied my expectations. I should probably have known; even these opening pages, misguided or not, are alive with deft asides and daring intuitive leaps. Daniels is a very good writer, and once it’s through with its twitchy throat-clearing, The Correspondence reveals itself to be a very good book.
The collection’s title refers to its organising principle, the familiar notion of essays as dispatches from somewhere; a couple of these pieces really do function as travelogues, but the book also embraces, fairly successfully, the idea of the past as a destination, and the self as correspondent. Raised by a drunk, tortured by mental and physical ailments and haunted by career and relationship disasters, Daniels dramatises his suffering and failure with blackly comic verve. “Letter from Majorca” gives us a sea voyage repurposed as a cleansing of body and soul, and populated by damaged loners whose misery shines light on the author’s. (One sailor, asked for an example of the memory loss he complains of, says that “in the army he had once carried a dead man on his back for two days and now he couldn’t remember the man’s name”.)
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In “Letter from Kentucky”, the first really fine essay, Daniels transforms a doomed magazine assignment about his own home state into an unexpected – even to him – profile of his father, which then itself defies expectations. “Where has this nice old man,” he writes, bewildered, “hidden the menacing ogre of my childhood?”
“Letter from Level Four” begins as a deadpan profile of a crazy acquaintance, but soon pivots to the author’s own precarious hold on sanity: “Edgar, in the dairy aisle, saw me seeing him and he winced, he froze, he was afraid even to wave – or was it my own fear it seemed I saw myself seeing in him?”
“Letter from Devils Tower” is a formally inventive third-person account of intertwined romantic fiascos: “All of it had begun years ago as a kind of performance art. Who was he fooling? Not even himself.” And “Letter from the Primal Horde”, initially presented as a neo-gonzo immersion in a geographically isolated psychotherapy quasi-cult, ultimately serves as a meditation on the dynamics of group psychology, and the relationship between writing and writer, wherein Daniels contemplates “how and why I have chosen my line of work (we might call it the emotion-recollected-in-tranquility racket), in which I spend one-third of my time having experiences in groups and the other two-thirds sitting alone in a room, thinking about what went wrong”.
Ultimately, the self is the well from which all these essays are drawn; or perhaps it’s the sewer into which all these essays drain. We’re never allowed to forget that Daniels is flawed, that he’s a writer, that he’s a flawed writer and he’s writing the essay we’re reading, right now. I can understand why this might represent a legitimate and informative framing for a first essay collection, but I do think it undersells Daniels’s talents, which are at their most prodigious when focused outward, and brought to bear on other people and the strange social and mental worlds they inhabit. He transcribes dialogue with a documentarian’s ear, catching, in just a handful of lines, the strange syntax and diction of the characters he encounters, like the seafarer who complains that “My brain is fucking,” or the internet-avoidant paranoid who tells him: “You have no idea what their technology can do. They tore me down and showed me to myself.” His evocations of place are vivid and economical, giving us just enough failed US commerce, Christian talk radio, bland bucolic conference campus. He dispenses with an entire ocean in a few adroit strokes: “black sea, night sky, burning moon, a foretaste of death”.
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Daniels’s prose is restrained, but leaves room for unexpected metaphors and bouts of unabashed sentiment; a page about his father’s family ends with these surprising lines: “But twenty years later my father’s foster mother is dead, as anyone but me might have foreseen, because she was a person and not a tree, and I would eat a photocopier in exchange for two more bowls of her soup beans and cornbread – one for me, and one for my father, to whom it would mean the world made young again.”
It’s a shame that the book leads with “Letter from Cambridge”; it’s far and away the worst piece of writing here, and undersells many of the delights to come. Indeed, each essay is better than the one before it; the second half of the book dispenses entirely with the cycle of boasting and self-negation that mars the first, and the final piece, “Letter from the Primal Horde”, is one of the funnier and more disturbing pieces of reportage I’ve ever read.
At one point, Daniels writes about the frustration of seeing someone else labour under the weight of personal problems that he, the author, has already solved for himself. “But the world is not my private fiefdom,” he goes on, checking himself; “it is our common property.” The best parts of the book never forget this wisdom. The Correspondence is a complete work about a work-in-progress, the self-portrait of a writer slowly coming into his own.
• The Correspondence is published by Jonathan Cape. To order a copy for £9.34 (RRP £10.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
J. D. Daniels, Nonfiction
By Whiting Honorees March 23, 2016 WHITING AWARDS 2016
PHOTO: ASAF GEFFEN.
J. D. Daniels studied at the University of Louisville and Boston University. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, AGNI, n+1, Oxford American, The Best American Essays, and elsewhere. Daniels is the recipient of The Paris Review’s 2013 Terry Southern Prize. His collection, The Correspondence, will be published in 2017.
Citation
J. D. Daniels’s essays reveal a sharp, ironic intelligence and a keen sense of rhythm. His work has an exhilarating nimbleness, the ability to pivot or shift within a sentence and open up new territory. His essays often explore the way in which you can go in search of one story and find another one unfolding. These often end up being stories about masculinity, too, with a deliberately macho tone that he both reinforces and undercuts. Daniels is fluid and funny, and while for the most part he keeps his fists flying, occasionally he holds up his hands and lets himself get punched in the gut, a disarming vulnerability that completes and complicates his self-portrait.
From “Letter from Kentucky”
We sang about the blood Wednesday nights at church suppers, Thursday nights at choir practices, mornings and evenings on Sundays, and every summer at a peacock-ridden revival camp in Alabama.
The old rugged cross, stained with blood so divine. There is a fountain filled with blood. I must needs go on the blood-sprinkled way. He bled, He died to save me. How I love to proclaim it, redeemed by the blood.
They vainly purify themselves, said Heraclitus, by defiling themselves with blood, just as if one who had stepped into the mud were to wash his feet in mud. Any man who marked him doing thus would deem him mad.
Our pastor had a method. After his sermon, we sang “Just As I Am” over and over again—without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me, and so on. We would sing until someone gave in. We sang all day.
It was the same unrelenting method of the middle school phys-ed coach who, perceiving that Weak Henry was weak, hit on the technique of making the whole class do extra push-ups until Henry finished his allotted twenty. Henry couldn’t make it happen. We did twenty more, thirty more, forty; and after class, Demetrius and Alonzo beat Henry in the locker room until he peed.
One morning, after an hour of “Just As I Am,” my mother shrieked and fell into the aisle. My father helped her stand. His face was strange. The two of them knelt and prayed at the altar. A nice old lady wearing a white gauze eye patch smiled. I waited to see what the people who told me what to do were going to tell me to do next.
It was this child grown into a man, then, if anyone ever grows up, who now drove past Lynn Camp Baptist Church, who drove past Hazel Fork Holiness Church and Living Waters Pentecostal Church, who drove past Faith Tabernacle Pentecostal Church and Turkey Creek Baptist Church short of breath, sweating like a sinner, drowning in blood.
I played Jesus one year and Judas the next in the passion play. I taught Vacation Bible School, and visited and sang hymns to the homebound, and, all that rigamarole having been accomplished, I chased the preacher’s daughter through the cornfield after Sunday evening services until I caught her.
And my father mowed the field out back of our church. He helped Deacon Jack repaint the sanctuary and he helped Deacon Willy reshingle the roof. He cooked and served at the Wednesday night church suppers and was happy to do it. But he didn’t have much time for what he called churchified people.
“I find it difficult to believe that the Creator of the universe gives a fuck if I drink a cold beer on a sunny day,” my father said. “These people can’t say sugar, they just got to say sucrose. Meanwhile they don’t have no more idea what God wants from me than the man in the moon. It’s my own dick I’m talking about, and I can jump up and down on it like a pogo stick if I want to.”
BOOK REVIEW
J.D. Daniels shares disturbing, original essays of a writer struggling to find a better way to live
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By Kent Black GLOBE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY 06, 2017
J.D. Daniels explores his fascination with jiu-jitsu in “The Correspondence.”
RONEN ZILBERMAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS/FILE
J.D. Daniels explores his fascination with jiu-jitsu in “The Correspondence.”
The first paragraph of “Letter From Cambridge,” the first piece in J.D. Daniels’s highly original and often disturbing book of essays, makes it immediately apparent that this is not a typical memoir/confessional.
The Cambridge author puts us on notice that in his highly earnest quest to learn truths about himself and the world in which he lives, he is prepared to risk everything — mentally, emotionally, and physically. “A couple years ago I joined one of those clubs where they teach you how to knock the [expletive] out of other people. The first lesson is how to get [it] knocked out of yourself. The first lesson is all there is. It lasts between eighty and a hundred years, depending on your initial [expletive] content.”
Daniels tells in this first of six essays, delivered in the form of letters from various settings, including Greater Boston, of his experiences joining a Brazilian jiu-jitsu club. He is regularly pummeled at his gym, travels to Brazil to get pummeled by experts, and then travels home, where he becomes obsessed with all things Brazilian, with moving in and out of competitive weight classes, and with pummeling someone else for a change.
Yes, he finally wins a match and admits his deep satisfaction in breaking another opponent’s ribs. He also stinks, sweats too much, loses focus, and alienates his girlfriend. By the end of this first essay, fighting has become an indelible part of his life: “And then I did it all again, the way you find yourself eating dinner the next night; the way you have sex, if you do, again; the way too much to drink was barely enough. It didn’t end, it doesn’t end, and if I knew what to say next, this wouldn’t be the end.”
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I was prepared to dismiss what I suspected might be a mix of macho posturing and self-conscious pratfalls, but Daniels changed my mind. As I moved on to the next few chapters, in which the Whiting Award winner discusses his life as a janitor, professor, exterminator, and a son, I found that his quest had a very different cast from that of other writers in his genre. Sure, he comes off alternately as hapless and helpless in these pieces, but I began to think of the letters as earnest quests by Daniels to discover whether there was something he could do to make himself happy, or at least happier.
Daniels’s personal narrative differs from many of the recovering bad boy memoirs in that he has no interest in picking at the scabs of his past. He has no interest in entertaining the reader with vivid recollections of horrific behaviors and life circumstances in order to prove that whatever thoughts you may have about your own background or self-destructive behaviors his are 100 times worse. Sure, he’s a recovering alcoholic and, yes, his childhood experiences include attending a fringe evangelical church and living with a Vietnam vet father given to bursts of rage that would’ve unhinged anyone, but he doesn’t wallow in them. Instead, he pushes ahead in prose that is spare and sharp with explorations that take him to Sardinia to work as a deckhand on a boat, on a road trip to his home state of Kentucky, and, finally, to a group therapy retreat that leads to an abrupt and brutally honest conclusion.
The difference between “The Correspondence’’ and most of its peers is the sincere attempts Daniels makes to find out whether there is some other way for him to exist, some way to break completely with the past, with his demons, and forge a new identity through new experiences. Daniels’s work is deceptive. On one hand, the book is short, simple, and easy to read in a single sitting. But then something smacks you in the back of the head as you walk away and realize with a jolt that what you just read is deep, dark, and complex. You read it again and realize that “The Correspondence’’ is raw, funny, and contains more moments of true pathos than any piece of personal nonfiction you will encounter in a long time to come.