In Praise of Nothing by Eric LeMay

Eric LeMay’s In Praise of Nothing is by turns wry, wise, elegant, snazzy, smart, and tender. His essays are filled with clear-eyed intelligence and consistently surprise us in both form and content. We have found our digital Montaigne.

—Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic and Desire

Eric LeMay writes of his Ohio upbringing—watching Boy George on TV, mythologizing Patient Zero during the AIDS pandemic, receiving (and rebelling against) communiqués from his father via Post-Its—with a rare and welcome quietude. Nothing in this book feels amped-up or overblown. I love it.

—John Bresland, author of Zero Station and Other Essays

What an adventure it is to read this collection by Eric LeMay! In Praise of Nothing is something, a smorgasbord of subjects and forms. LeMay unpacks and explores subjects as various as John and Jane Doe, lotteries, the suffix “–ize,” and a production of Hamlet at Ground Zero. Audaciously, amazingly, and successfully, he rewrites E. B. White’s “Once More to the Lake” and Bacon’s “Of Studies.” This book is a feast.

—Ned Stuckey-French, author of The American Essay in the American Century

A bucket full of weird stuff.

—James Hennigan, protagonist of "Two Little Girls"

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The erudite essays in In Praise of Nothing are force multipliers, propelling the Zen meditation to Zeno’s paradox. Always null but, no, not dull, the book is never nothing but whole, the complete Enso. It effortlessly records and enacts Pascal’s infinite and noisy silence between the stars.

—Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Four for a Quarter

A lively collection of pensées, LeMay’s In Praise of Nothing is a charming investigation of memory, humor, serendipity, and the existential problem of "being me."

—Christina Thompson, author of Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All

In Praise of Nothing is jammed with profound, yet effortless seeming micro-pieces to be read and reread. If you hated writing essays in school, picking up this brutally-honest, heart-wrenching, and new-neural-pathway-forming book might just inspire you to try your hand at some nonfiction, start a blog, or at the very least, you’ll step away enlightened, refreshed, and entertained. LeMay’s work is as original and distinctive as a sort of Walter Benjamin for our digital ADD age of alternate social media realities.

—Nicholaus Patnaude, author of First Aide Medicine