“It is easy to make loneliness poignant and moving now. What is striking about Richard Deming’s remarkable book is that he has managed to make loneliness interesting, something that we might now begin to have real conversations about. The powerful and devastating personal experiences recounted here, woven into the lives of figures like Walter Benjamin, Melanie Klein, and Zora Neale Hurston, among others, make This Exquisite Loneliness an essential contemporary book.”