Writing about such major artists as Diane Arbus, Claude Cahun, and William Eggleston, Brian Dillon is interested in the slippages between life, work, and reputation. He attends to the formal strangeness of the art of Julia Margaret Cameron, Hannah Höch, Eileen Gray, and Loie Fuller. And he finds contemporary echoes of their dissident modernism in the sculpture of Helen Marten, Eva Rothschild, and Enrico David. In writing about contemporary writers such as Eimear McBride and Claire Louise Bennett, he is looking for the kind of formal adventure he is convinced can and must accompany the personal or political.

Objects in This Mirror posits a polemical defense of intellectual and cultural generalism and curiosity. The collection of essays rewardingly navigates such diverse subjects as the writings of W. G. Sebald and Roland Barthes to the history of cravat-tying manuals and the search for a cure to the common cold.

Sanctuary is a fiction set in the ruins of a Modernist building on the outskirts of a city in Northern Europe. The structure, a Catholic seminary built in the 1960s and abandoned twenty years later, embodies the failure of certain ambitions: architectural, civic, and spiritual.