The Best American Essays 2013 Paperback Author: Robert Atwan | Language: English | ISBN:
0544103882 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Strayed, whose best-selling memoir, Wild (2011), was the inaugural title for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, and whose popular “Dear Sugar” advice columns have been collected in Tiny Beautiful Things (2012), takes the helm of this vibrant annual. In her introduction, she attests to the power source of this flexible literary form: “Behind every good essay there’s an author with a savage desire to know more about what is already known.” Her 26 engrossing selections begin with Poe Ballantine’s potent “Free Rent at the Totalitarian Hotel,” a tale about his struggles to get by in California during the 1987 stock market crash. In “The Exhibit Will Be So Marked,” Ander Monson comes to some surprising conclusions as he considers mixtapes versus mix CDs, the lives and deaths of trees, and the mysterious Paulding Light in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Charles Baxter recounts a harrowing limo accident, and Megan Stielstra evokes a blizzard of emotions in her distilled drama of postpartum depression. Also including essays by Alice Munro, Walter Kirn, Zadie Smith, and Dagoberto Gilb, Strayed does this sterling series proud. --Donna Seaman
About the Author
ROBERT ATWAN has been the series editor of The Best American Essays since its inception in 1986. He has edited numerous literary anthologies and written essays and reviews for periodicals nationwide.
Cheryl Strayed is the author of #1 New York Times bestseller Wild, the New York Times bestseller Tiny Beautiful Things, and the novel Torch. Wild was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as her first selection for Oprah's Book Club 2.0 and optioned for film by Reese Witherspoon's production company, Pacific Standard. Wild was selected as the winner of the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and also received an Indie Choice Award, an Oregon Book Award, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and a Midwest Booksellers Choice Award. Strayed's writing has appeared in The Best American Essays, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, Allure, The Missouri Review, The Sun, The Rumpus--where she has written the popular "Dear Sugar" column since 2010--and elsewhere. Her books have been translated into twenty-eight languages around the world. She holds an MFA in fiction writing from Syracuse University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and their two children.
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- Series: Best American
- Paperback: 336 pages
- Publisher: Mariner Books (October 8, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0544103882
- ISBN-13: 978-0544103887
- Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
In my opinion, the purpose of literature is to help me see the world through other eyes, and to look beyond the narrow construct of my personal view of 'how things are'. The essay seeks to accomplish this by allowing the author to forward their personal viewpoint on matters of their choosing; a well-written essay will bring the reader into the author's world view, hopefully to expand the reader's viewpoint in the process.
"The Best American Essays 2013" opens to the reader a wide selection of windows on the world. While they are all written from a first-person perspective, the subjects they reveal go beyond simple autobiographical short stories. It's all in here: economics (the subject on everyone's mind), politics, science, psychology, relationships. Every essay reveals not just the author's personal outlook; to the perceptive reader they also show our collective views as Americans.
In this day of sound bites and tweets, maybe it is too much to ask for readers to look beyond the mere words on the page, to read between the lines, to savor and mull over the stories that are laid before us and see the deeper secrets they hold. As Charles Baxter points out in "What Happens in Hell":
"Why do you desire to believe the ideas that you hold dear, the cornerstones of your faith?" Are we more comfortable with our heads in the sand, seeing only that which is directly in front of us? That world where "... people will walk smiling through puddles of your blood, smiling and talking on their cellular phones. They're going to the movies." (J.D. Daniels, "Letter from Majorca").
Of course, the title is pure advertising. At the very least, Cheryl Strayed hasn't read all the American essays of 2013, so she's hardly in a position to call her selection the best. Unfortunately, a title like "The Best American Essays I Read in 2013" won't move books.
I happen to read a lot of essays, so I looked over the table of contents to see if I could find a familiar name. Outside of Zadie Smith and Alice Munro, no. That could be a good thing, an introduction to great writers I didn't know before. It's not that the essays chosen are incompetently-written, but they seem to be mainly of one type and one rhetorical strategy -- the essayist confesses to something shameful and then has a come-to-Jesus moment, which, one hopes, has point beyond the confines of the writer's psyche. There's nothing wrong with this per se; it's either more or less well done.
However, the essay genre contains worlds and approaches. A good essayist masters several strategies and types: reportage, criticism, memoire, history, science, sports, political analysis and persuasion, and so on. These essays are mostly memoire and mostly, as I say, confessional. The effect of one of these after the other becomes something like whining, and in some of them, the point seems to be "what a sensitive soul am I."
The essays I tended to like confounded these patterns to some extent. Alice Munro's "Night" confesses something disturbing, but winds up affirming the grace of forgiveness. Zadie Smith's "Attunement" (great title!) talks about her rapprochement to the music of Joni Mitchell as a meditation on the evolution of personal taste and the difficulties of overcoming a priori notions of what art should be.
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