Fan Mail: A Guide to What We Love, Loathe, and Mourn

Jason Guriel’s Fan Mail: A Guide to What We Love, Loathe, and Mourn is a book about fandom in all its obsessive, contradictory, and deeply personal forms. But more than that, it’s an inquiry into how love for art—books, music, movies, poetry, comics—shapes not just our tastes but our lives. Guriel, an acclaimed poet and critic, assembles a series of essays that trace his own experiences as a fan, while simultaneously constructing a larger meditation on what it means to be enthralled by culture.

The book moves through the phases of Guriel’s devotion with a kind of graceful intensity. He revels in obscure corners of the canon and forgotten pop-culture moments. Guriel also plays the anti-booster, taking on what he sees as overhyped or misguided phenomena, from Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize to the self-indulgent quirks of contemporary literary criticism. And he mourns the loss of both singular artists and a pre-internet world, where obsessions flourished in private rather than in algorithm-driven feeds.

But Fan Mail is also about the act of writing itself: Guriel’s deep engagement with poetry and criticism reveals a mind fascinated by language, metaphor, and form. His prose is crisp, aphoristic, at times acerbic, but always engaged, arguing that fandom—whether ecstatic or skeptical—is an essential part of artistic life. More than a collection of essays, Fan Mail is a love letter to the passions that shape us, for better or worse.

“At some point we’re probably going to have to reconsider this whole internet thing, and when we do, Jason Guriel’s instincts and the example of his work will come in handy. Guriel is becoming a leader in our cultural discussion because his writing is a constant assertion of values that the information deluge threatens to wash away: context, standards, memory. “I’ve held onto a lot of paper over the years,” he writes, and by the time you get to that line it comes as no surprise. Also no surprise: Here he’s produced more paper worth hanging onto.” – Paul Wells

“Jason Guriel is one of the country’s most gifted, original, and versatile writers. I would read him on absolutely anything–but it is a particular pleasure to read him on the subjects that move him most. A meditation on life’s many obsessions, this collection is as energizing as it is elegant” – Tara Henley