The art of the essay at its best strives to explore, reveal the writer’s self

These days the word “essayist” sounds fussy and a little old-fashioned, nearly as archaic as “bookman” and “poetess.” The essay as we once knew it has given way to other forms of expression: Now we blog, we tweet, we post to Facebook, our website and our newsletter; we practice “long-form” new journalism. Still, whatever label we attach to our personal pieces, at their best they strive to explore and reveal the writer’s self.

D.H. Lawrence famously proclaimed that his motto wasn’t “art for art’s sake, but art for my sake.” Even though his novels have fallen out of critical favor and general popularity, Lawrence’s nonfiction and criticism remain forceful, immediate and striking. “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” That’s from his book-length “Studies in Classic American Literature,” but the same vividness runs through the “selected essays” of “The Bad Side of Books,” recently published by NYRB Classics. As Geoff Dyer emphasizes in his penetrating introduction, Lawrence ignores genre straitjackets as he blends travel writing, memoir, philosophical musings, storytelling and a novelist’s flair for portraiture and description.

In subject matter, Lawrence ranges from considerations of Thomas Mann, Thomas Hardy and Ernest Hemingway to reflections on religion, the novel, obscenity, New Mexico and our once-close relationship to nature (“Pan in America”). No matter what he writes about, though, Lawrence generates — in language crackling with passion and conviction — an intensely reimagined experience. Jonathan Swift, when challenged, could produce a brilliant essay about a broomstick; Lawrence outdoes him in his tour-deforce “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine.”

Much of D.H. Lawrence’s fiction is almost innocently transgressive, whether depicting sexual ecstasy in “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” or reconceiving Christian dogma in “The Man Who

Died.” As it happens, Emmanuel Carrère — arguably France’s greatest contemporary writer of nonfiction — is similarly daring in his choice of subjects for “97,196 Words” (from Farrar, Straus and Giroux). He is invariably drawn to figures with complex lives and even multiple identities.

For example, he writes about Jean-Claude Romand, who murders his wife, children and parents rather than allow them to learn that he’s only been pretending to be a doctor and medical researcher for 18 years. Carrère later expanded his initial reportage into a chilling and unputdownable book, “The Adversary,” which — we learn from another essay — he deliberately modeled after Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” Some of Carrère’s other 97,196 words examine the visionary writings of Philip K. Dick, the cosmic horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and the kaleidoscopic life of the Russian writer and nationalist Eduard Limonov. Dick and

Limonov would also become the subjects of full-length books.

Of all these essays, my favorite is “In Search of the Dice Man.” In it Carrère describes his obsession with Luke Rhinehart and his cult classic, “The Dice Man,” the purportedly autobiographical account of a psychoanalyst who breaks free of all societal and moral constraints by allowing his life to be governed by the chance roll of a die.

Brooklyn writer Greg Gerke is far more bookish than either Lawrence or Carrère. “I read,” he declares, “to apprise myself of the distinguished enterprise of being.”

Such precise diction hints at the character of the essays in “See What I See” (published by Splice): Throughout Gerke strives to transform each of his sentences into a little work of art or, failing that, of gorgeous artifice. In Gerke’s view, writers too often settle for producing the ephemeral when they should be aiming to create the eternal.