The Best American Essays 2003

by Anne Fadiman (Editor), Robert Atwan (Series Editor)

Since 1986, The Best American Essays has gathered the most interesting and provocative writing of the year, establishing a firm place as the leading annual of its kind. The volume is edited each year by an esteemed writer who brings a fresh eye to the selections. Previous editors have included Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag, Geoffrey C. Ward, Cynthia Ozick, and Stephen Jay Gould. This year’s volume is terrifically diverse, with subjects ranging from driving lessons to animal rights to citizenship in times of emergency.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Anthologies, Collections

368 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2003

About the author

Anne Fadiman is the author, most recently, of the essay collection Frog (2026). Her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997), won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Salon Book Award. In 2017, she published The Wine Lover’s Daughter, a memoir about her father. Fadiman has also written two essay collections, Ex Libris and At Large and At Small, and edited Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love. She is Professor in the Practice of English and Francis Writer in Residence at Yale.

Reviews

[Suica]

I took me almost one year to just finish this book, because this was not easy reading and I needed time to digest each essay. I have to say this is an excellent book - almost all essays were excellent and offered me some kind of knowledge. Some of them were filled with emotions and autobiographical notes that tasted like some intense short films.

The following essays are my favorite from the collection:

'Lavender' (Andre Aciman) - this could be due to primacy effects, but this is the BEST essay of the book. Nothing much happened, yet I did not want this essay to end.
'I bought a bed' (Donald Antrim)
'Home alone' (Caitlin Flanagan)
'The learning curve' (Atul Gawande) - this is a gem right here.
'Bumping into Mr Ravioli' (Adam Gopnik) - ahhh, this is also my favorite because it touches the subject of communications and media (my research field/graduate major). Very well-written and appealing.
'F.P.' (Myra Jehlen) - I was reading this essay when I had some trouble with my work, and somehow this soothed me. This essay read like a dream, and when it ended, I wanted to do nothing but just sit at the school lawn and stare at the sky for some time. And that was enough reading for the whole day.
'The reporter's kitchen' (Jane Kramer) - very well-chosen metaphor. I am going through this phase too, and this made me feel a bit less disappointed in myself.
'A delivery for Fred Astaire' (Frederic Morton) - a very weird essay which doesn't seem to belong to the collection, but I love its queerness!
'Citizenship in emergency' (Elaine Scarry) - excellent piece with well-grounded arguments. You know that feeling when you attended a seminar/class/lecture at your university, and at the end of it, you feel so fulfilled because you get to exchange so much knowledge and learn so much? I read this essay during my vacation, and it gave me back such feeling.

I won't touch on Cheryl Strayed's essay because I believe it formed the first part of her book 'Wild' which I already read and gave it 4 stars.

[Kati]

When I started reading this book, I experienced it as a reminder of why I love reading, and writing and talking and thinking about reading and writing. I felt like I was connecting to something important about myself of which I had lost the thread.
Not every essay struck me personally, but I adored the ones by Andre Aciman and Jane Kramer and found several others quite well done as well.

[Jamie]

It's really funny looking at the change in essay styles from the mid-80's to the early 21st century. Basically people dropped a lot of the word-dropping and pretentious bullshit, and started writing funnier, more accessible stuff. I really the like the 2003 edition, both for the Anne Fadiman's selection of essays and her excellent introduction, where she talks about how she wanted to bust the series out of it's heavy use of essays from the New Yorker and Granta, then found that when it came down to her final selection she realized that even though there were lots of truly excellent essays from other publications she realized that the ones that stood out had been the best edited pieces, with the fat trimmed and the sentences tightened. Which meant that she ended up choosing a lot of New Yorker stuff. Oh the irony. I like the pine green cover of this one too. Better than that ugly powder blue they chose for the next year...

[Kyle Minor]

I like this edition of Best American Essays because Anne Fadiman used her editorship to champion the expansive, muscular personal essay. Best American Essays is one of the only places generally interested readers of the personal essay can reliably discover new essays -- and new writers -- each year, but in recent years, guest editors (David Foster Wallace, David Brooks, Mary Oliver, Christopher Hitchens, etc.) have chased other preoccupations at the expense of the personal essay.

Meantime, check out some of the better volumes in the series, including those edited by Edward Hoagland, Cynthia Ozick, Susan Sontag, Joyce Carol Oates, and Lauren Slater.

[Cindy]

Another hidden jewel of a book I have had on my bookshelf for YEARS but now that I finally have had some reflective time--out of the young kids at home years, no more crazy 13-14 hour days of grading, teaching, dealing with admin craziness--I totally love this book. I rarely give 5 stars but that doesn't mean I can't love a book with four stars! Ha, ha.

If you want to discover authors worth reading or just want short bites of thoughtful reflections, life stories, moments of turning, learning moments then this series is probably one for you. A friend gave it to me as gift, or was it one of my sisters? And I am so thankful!

Lovely stories with historical depth, personal hooks, melancholic in nature it is my book to read at the end of the day or a short snatch of interesting ideas. Still reading since I read so many books at one time but I highly recommend the series because they put one out every year. I almost think of it as a Harper's but just for essays.

[Joan]

There are times when writing seems like magic--you're lifted out of yourself into somewhere that shows you the world in a new way. So many of the essays in this book leave me breathless. The three I have in mind so far are "The Reporter's Kitchen," by Jane Kramer, "Learning to Drive," by Katha Pollett, and "Citizenship in Emergency," by Elaine Scarry. The first two show how much can be explored through a single image (okay, experience over time). Scarry's essay got me thinking about national defense in a way I'd never considered before. Any anthology will contain things you love and things you don't like quite so much; this one leans much more toward the first for me.

[Bibliophile10]

This BAE is quite good. Among its strengths: 10 of the 24 essays are read-agains. 11 of the 24 are by women. (Cheryl Strayed's 2013 BAE also has a respectable showing of women, suggesting yet again that, shockingly, female editors tend to give less of an edge to male writers than do male editors.)

My two favorite essays from this collection are Atul Gawande's "The Learning Curve," which I might use when I teach my next research writing class, and Francis Spufford's "The Habit," a standout piece about reading and an admirable example of fine conclusions.

[Anna]

I've never read essays before, but it was recommended I read Atul Gawande's "The Learning Curve," which is all about the "practice" of medicine. I found it uncomfortably true to life, but very interesting. Now I'm plowing through the rest of the essays, which so far have covered buying a bed, the search for the perfect lavender, and Martha Stewart.

[Hamuel Sunter]

This was the only result of a search for "Susan Sontag" in the Sapporo library database.

The highlights were Anne Fadiman's introductory essay, Adam Gopnik's "Bumping Into Mr. Ravioli," Cheryl Strayed's "The Love of My Life," Donald Antrim's "I Bought A Bed," and Rachel Cohen's "Lost Cities."

[Wendy]

Anne Fadiman is a brilliant editor. This volume is one of best in this series -- that is to say, the best of the best.

[Emily]

I love reading essays, but hadn't done so for years until I picked up this book at a book sale. Some of the essays were phenomenal. It makes me want to subscribe to The New Yorker.

[Avis Black]

Anne Fadiman does not have the talent-spotting ability that her father Clifton had.

[Andria]

There are some gems in here, especially "looking for mr. ravioli", a must read.

[Elizabeth]

Anne Fadiman is a goddess. All these intro essays are so fascinating to read from the point of view of how to write an essay about writing an essay. Fadiman takes a not obvious approach.

[Stephanie]

I feel like a failure saying this, but these essays - other than Anne Fadiman's introductory essay about choosing essays - didn't work for me at all.

Maybe I will try again another time.

[Jeff Lacy]

An inconsistent dynamic of essays for which I was searching to teach a college freshman English composition course. I had a wide scope.

[Anne]

One of my favorite collections of essays.

[Victoria]

really liked the Michael Pollan and Adam Gopnik essays!

[Aaron Dalton]

http://perlkonig.com/2012/06/18/best-...

[erin]

It is so fun to read writing by Anne Fadiman. . .Thoughtful and satisfying.

[Lisa]

Lavendar by Andre Aciman
Memoria ex Machina by Marshall Jon Fisher
Bumping into Mr. Ravioli by Adam Gopnik
The Habit by Francis Spufford