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The Best American Essays 2013
Selected and introduced by Cheryl Strayed, the New York Times best-selling author of Wild and the writer of the celebrated column \"Dear Sugar,\" this collection is a treasure trove of fine writing and thought-provoking essays.
eBook
The best American essays 2023
20 essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.
Book
HE WITH NO FACE, SHE WITH NO PAST
In his previous novels and essays, Mr. [Ariel Dorfman] (a Chilean citizen who teaches literature and Latin American studies at Duke University, and who lives in the United States) has explored the connections between language and politics. Like George Orwell, he has written wonderfully on mass culture and popular literature; his ''How to Read Donald Duck'' and ''The Empire's Old Clothes'' are insightful accounts of the way cartoon heroes and children's books shape public consciousness. But Orwell's fictional investigations into language and politics stayed pretty much within the boundaries of conventional realistic narrative. In Mr. Dorfman's work, we encounter a new type of political novel, one that takes enormous risks. He tackles political themes in ways that may seem disorienting to readers accustomed to political novels that depend exclusively upon straightforward narrative, true-to-life characters and historical realism. One of Mr. Dorfman's main achievements in fiction has surely been his ability to create methods of storytelling that enact, not merely record, a political vision, that fuse both the political and literary imaginations. In ''The Last Song of Manuel Sendero,'' published in the United States last year, Mr. Dorfman pushed the premise of Gunter Grass's ''Tin Drum'' into deeper literary territory. Where Mr. Grass created a 3-year-old protagonist whose protest takes the form of refusing to grow up, Mr. Dorfman weaves into a complex narrative the voices of revolutionary fetuses who refuse to be born.
Book Review
The best American essays 2019
\"A collection of the year's best essays selected by Robert Atwan and guest editor Rebecca Solnit.\"-- Publisher's description.
Book
WHAT WE CALL HOME
Ms. [Nancy Potter] takes her central theme from one of the great dilemmas of our time - the disappearance of community. In ''Legacies,'' families have drifted apart, neighborhoods scarcely exist. People live in dou-ble-wide trailers and communicate by perfunctory phone calls. In ''A Thin Place,'' a woman lives alone in a trailer in a Western suburb where it is ''illegal to build a house'' and where cocky little girls grow up wanting to be cocktail waitresses.
Book Review
FICTION ON NEWSPRINT
Two fine stories resist this epidemic of uncoupling with a surprising acceptance of older, less egocentric values. In ''The Bigamist'' by Nancy A. Potter, a hardheaded nurse allows herself to be courted by a ''womanizing'' elderly patient who ''can't stand being unmarried.'' In Irene Wanner's ''Ozzie and Harriet,'' a woman - acutely aware of how private dreams tear marriages apart - cautiously comes to terms with the once laughable 1950's ideal of a ''square'' home-loving couple. These stories, like '' 'It Got Smashed' '' by Raymond H. Abbott and ''The Hijacking'' by David Ray, push against tidy formulations of character and incident. Yet too many stories depend on predictable characterization. Stereotypes abound: in the short story -as on television - a Vietnam veteran must be emotionally disturbed; an academic husband cold and pedantic; children wise beyond their years; government officials soulless and obstructive; supersensitive women unhappy with men and unhappy without them. M ANY of the stories conspicuously lack a strong central action - what Flannery O'Connor meant by ''an action that is totally unexpected, yet totally believable.'' Judging from this volume, the American short story is becoming increasingly full of talk. Jonathan Penner's ''This Is My Voice'' provides an entertaining, parodic response to this trend.
Newspaper Article
The Best American Essays 2016
The National Book Award–winning author compiles a \"thought-provoking volume\" of essays by Joyce Carol Oates, Oliver Sacks, Jaquira Diaz and others ( Publishers Weekly).
As Jonathan Franzen writes in his introduction, his main criterion for selecting The Best American Essays 2016 \"was whether an author had taken a risk.\" The resulting volume showcases authorial risk in a variety of forms, from championing an unpopular opinion to the possibility of ruining a professional career, or irrevocably alienating one's family. What's gained are essential insights into aspects of the human condition that would otherwise remain concealed—from questions of queer identity, to the experience of a sibling's autism and relationships between students and college professors.
The Best American Essays 2016 includes entries by Alexander Chee, Paul Crenshaw, Jaquira Diaz, Laura Kipnis, Amitava Kaumar, Sebastian Junger, Joyce Carol Oates, Oliver Sacks, George Steiner, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and others.
eBook