Ambivalence: An Education

A 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.

When Brian 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 televisio...