Eliot Weinberger, The Art of the Essay No. 4
Eliot Weinberger , The Art of the Essay No. 4 Interviewed by Srikanth Reddy Issue 253, Fall 2025 At the Gal Vihara in Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka, 1979. Photograph by Nina Subin. All images courtesy of Eliot Weinberger. For almost half a century, Eliot Weinberger has made an art of what might be called the impersonal essay. Scholarly articles, monographs, and ancient texts furnish the source material for these works, whose titles frequently resemble encyclopedia entries—“Agate,” “Angels,” “Empedocles,” “Ice,” “Lizards,” “Muhammad,” “The Sahara,” “Wrens,” “The World.” Some evoke the form of chronicles or oral histories; others read like excerpts from antiquarian commonplace books, accumulating aphorisms and anecdotes from various—often non-Western—civilizations. A reader opening Works on Paper (1986), Karmic Traces (2000), or The Ghosts of Birds (2016) to any page might come across a Tang dynasty governor’s address to the crocodiles of the Wu River; an account of the tr...