The Correspondence

September 19, 2016
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.

Starred review from November 15, 2016
A number of authors, including Ben Lerner and Karl Ove Knausgaard, have led a recent resurgence of so-called auto-fiction, bending the line between genres by injecting autobiography into their stories and novels. Strip away that self-conscious label, and the result looks something like this stunning debut collection of six pieces by Whiting Award winner Daniels, four of which were published originally as nonfiction, with two appearing first as short stories. Delivered with the storytelling talents of John Jeremiah Sullivan and harmonizing with the folkloric, true-life tales of Breece D'J Pancake, these essays are funny; unrepentantly realist; and, in their way, awfully elegant. Composed as a series of letters, each one centers around a different, often-strange experience: suffering several weeks of repeated obliteration in a Brazilian jujitsu dojo; tracing genealogical roots to Kentucky only to spiral into intensely personal introspection; and a horrifying, hilarious few days inside a bizarre conference where the meeting's topic is the meeting itself. With careful wit, an attention to emotional nuance that reaches down to the gut, and an astounding ear for dialogue, Daniels writes with a kind of brutal authenticity that is not easily faked, whichever side of auto-fiction's hyphen he's writing from.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)