Inciting Joy, Ross Gay
Inciting Joy, Ross Gay
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

Inciting Joy
Essays

Author: Ross Gay

Narrator: Ross Gay

Unabridged: 8 hr 21 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/25/2022


Synopsis

From New York Times bestselling author Ross Gay comes a "brilliant" intimate and electrifying collection of essays about the joy that comes from connection (Ada Limón, U.S. poet laureate).

In these gorgeously written and timely pieces, prizewinning poet and author Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life’s inevitable hardships. Throughout Inciting Joy, he explores how we can practice recognizing that connection, and also, crucially, how we can expand it.   

Taking a clear-eyed look at injustice, political polarization, and the destruction of the natural world, Gay shows us how we might resist, how the study of joy might lead us to a wild, unpredictable, transgressive, and unboundaried solidarity. In fact, it just might help us survive. 

In an era when divisive voices take up so much airspace, Inciting Joy offers a vital alternative: What might be possible if we turn our attention to what brings us together, to what we love?   
 

Reviews

Goodreads review by Lucy on May 27, 2023

I will read everything Ross Gay writes.......more

Goodreads review by Amy on November 07, 2022

4.5 stars The power of community and the healing abilities of positive growth and shared love. Inciting Joy is a collection of "feel good" that I think is the perfect balm for those struggling in these times. Sense of joy: ★★★★★ Flow of stories: ★★★★ Writing style: ★★★★ There are some books that are bot......more

Goodreads review by Gwen on June 05, 2022

Gratitude, delight, and now joy. If Ross Gay spends the rest of his life writing about, cataloguing, reveling in, emotions...I will follow right along as he does so, and consider myself fortunate. These essays are longer than the small exercises in The Book of Delights, and I loved that. It gave him......more

Goodreads review by Ava on October 21, 2024

"My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow--which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow--might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love." In Ross Gay's collections of essay......more

Goodreads review by Carrie on December 19, 2022

I loved his last essay collection, The Book of Delights, so I was thrilled to receive this book. However, this did not incite any joy for me. It is getting rave reviews so I’m willing to admit I’m the problem. It’s me. Hi.......more


Quotes

“Stunning…Gay’s curiosity is present on every page and his precise yet playful prose sparkles…This resonant, vivid meditation shouldn’t be missed.”
 —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“This is instantly one of my favorite books ever. A wondering-aloud to which I will be returning often, and a brilliant manifesto making a case for joy as a thing which is as complex and rigorous as it is lovely and free. In that sneaky way Ross Gay has of lovingly disarming you before getting you to dwell in rooms of your heart you’d left vacant, Inciting Joy uses its titular emotion as a window into sorrow and rage, into gifts and loss, into the tricky business of being alive.”—Eve L. Ewing, author of Ghosts in The Schoolyard, Electric Arches, and Marvel Comic’s Ironheart series

"Ross Gay is as insightful and lyrical as an essayist as he is as a poet. His essays are as trenchant as they are moving, finding in the minutiae of life the grand themes of human existence.”
 —Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of War is Force that Gives Us Meaning and America: The Farewell Tour

“With language that skips along like a game of hopscotch, Inciting Joy promises to deliver heart-swelling insights into life, death and the joyful necessity of interdependence.”
 —BookPage (Most Anticipated Books of the Fall)

“Warm, candid … breezy and soulful… A pleasingly digressive and intimate memoir in essays."—Kirkus Reviews

“Ross Gay's work throws off so much light, I've often wondered if it was powered by a superior energy source. He has done something new and beautiful with Inciting Joy. He has sunk a bioluminescent depth-charge into our time, one which peers into the whole sea of experience around us: revealing it full of connection, mystery and a longing for relief.”—John Freeman, founder of Freeman’s literary magazine and editor of The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story

“In this masterful, raw, and stirring collection of essays, Ross Gay has once again coaxed his readers to awaken to our full humanity. There is no way to dance through these vivid and skillful recollections of life’s truest moments—planting a community orchard, witnessing a loved one pass away, eating your first fresh fig—without emerging misty eyed at the hallowed beauty of what it is to be alive. Ross Gay helps us to understand that our joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with each other, and when we can invite sorrow close to share a proverbial cup of tea, that is when our deepest joy is incited. In caring for one another, in paying attention to what we mourn and love in common, in emulating the generosity of the garden, in inhabiting our sacred and unpayable debt to the earth—therein lies our kinship and the possibility of collective joy and liberation. Inciting Joy will make you gasp in wonderment as your truest truths are laid bare, and you will go back and reread the lines over and over, whispering, ‘This, yes, this!’”—Leah Penniman, co-founder of Soul Fire Farm and author of Farming While Black