The Best American Essays 2013 [Kindle Edition] Author: Robert Atwan Cheryl Strayed | Language: English | ISBN:
B00AXS6CJ2 | Format: PDF, EPUB
Download The Best American Essays 2013
Download for free books Download The Best American Essays 2013 for everyone book 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link 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. Direct download links available for Download The Best American Essays 2013 [Kindle Edition]
- File Size: 935 KB
- Print Length: 339 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0544103882
- Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (October 8, 2013)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00AXS6CJ2
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #19,670 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Essays & Correspondence > Essays - #50
in Books > Literature & Fiction > Essays & Correspondence > Essays
- #11
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Essays & Correspondence > Essays - #50
in Books > Literature & Fiction > Essays & Correspondence > Essays
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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