Reading and Sleeping and Other Essays

“Everyone has perversions and one of mine is washing dishes,” Gonzalo Maier writes in an essay called “The True Problem of Philosophy.” Like the essayists he admires—Geoff Dyer, Phillip Lopate, Annie Dillard—he knows how to take a reader by surprise.

The first book by Maier to appear in English, Reading and Sleeping brings together two sequences of essays. The first is about the pleasures and perils of being a reader and a sleeper, and by extension a dreamer, in the twenty-first century. The second is about things he finds—or can imagine finding—in his pockets: old napkins, old receipts, an old cigarette lighter. These are surprising, digressive, often balletic short pieces of writing in which we never quite know what we are going to encounter next; only that whatever it is, it will be treated with humor, candor, and a nimbleness of mind that catches us napping.

Ranging from recollection to criticism, and from the Netherlands to Chile, where Maier was born and now lives, Reading and Sleeping introduces us to a singular, searching writer who can’t help but turn a walk around the block—or a quick search of his own pockets—into a meditation on existence.