J. D. Daniels studied at the University of Louisville and Boston University. He is the author of The Correspondence (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). 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.
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The CorrespondenceEssaysFrom"Letter from Kentucky"
Gary was a big boy, ugly and pale, with a nose like a peeled potato. I’m not just saying that because my ex-wife slept with him once. We all slept around. She slept with Larry, too, but I don’t have anything bad to say about Larry. I myself almost slept with Larry, he was irresistible, a beautiful man. Gary and Larry—these names have been changed to protect the innocent, but not mine: I am guilty.
The Correspondence:Essays -
The CorrespondenceEssaysFrom"Letter from Majorca"
It was at this time that the captain called me long-distance from Tunisia and said, “I need a man. Get over here.”
“I’m sick,” I said. “I don’t know how much help I can be to you.”
“All I need is arms and legs,” he said. “Do you still have arms and legs? Then buy a ticket for Cagliari and meet us in Carloforte.”
The captain was a grey giant out of Tel Aviv. One holiday I had seen him surrounded by his daughters, by his sons-in-law, his grandchildren, his pretty young girlfriend, and I thought: This man has something to teach you about what a certain kind of happiness is in life, so learn it, you dummy.
I already felt at sea, as they say, lost in familiar places is another thing they say. I decided to spend some time at sea, where my bewilderment might make more sense, because disorientation and chaos would actually be happening.
Why do people feel things and go places, tell me if you know.
The Correspondence:Essays -
The CorrespondenceEssaysFrom"Letter from Majorca"
Once I admitted how much I wanted to kill and eat the children who had been entrusted to my care, I tried to forgive myself for any harm I might have done them over the years, for all the crackling bolts I had hurled from my cloud of self-serving ignorance, and I left that institution of learning to resume my position of nothingness in a world where I had no power to abuse my subordinates because I had no subordinates, where I had no authority save whatever I might seize by force or by cunning—where, as each day proves afresh, people will walk smiling through puddles of your blood, smiling and talking on their cellular phones. They’re going to the movies.
The Correspondence:Essays
“Achingly well written . . . full of crafty rambling and quick jumps . . . you see a narrative flash like lightning, spreading quick blue light for a moment over the whole shadowy, tortured territory . . . his work is sly, and wicked, and playful, and, most of all, it’s true.” —John Hodgman, citation for Terry Southern Prize
“Raw, vigorous, right-on-the-money prose.” —Lee Siegel, The New York Sun
J.D. Daniels’ 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.