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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.
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.
454 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 4, 2016
185 people are currently reading
679 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Franzen
90 books10.2k followersJonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.
Franzen has contributed to The New Yorker magazine since 1994. His 1996 Harper's essay "Perchance to Dream" bemoaned the state of contemporary literature. Oprah Winfrey's book club selection in 2001 of The Corrections led to a much publicized feud with the talk show host.
Franzen has contributed to The New Yorker magazine since 1994. His 1996 Harper's essay "Perchance to Dream" bemoaned the state of contemporary literature. Oprah Winfrey's book club selection in 2001 of The Corrections led to a much publicized feud with the talk show host.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 86 reviews
December 20, 2016
Not the best volume of this series I buy without miss every year, not the worst either but on the weaker side. Too much of Franzen's prissy tastes on display here, essays that are hard to read for no good reason and others that pronounce and bloviate their way through a story instead of tell it. In the plus column, a number of essays by writers who work non-academic day jobs (a border agent, a doctor, a sexologist). Do not miss any of those. And Sebastian Junger's piece about PTSD as well as the essay entitled "How They Kill in the Movies" about lynching are both platinum hits.
November 4, 2016
Jonathan Franzen, much like Cheryl Strayed, has a vision of the essay as an expulsion of the ‘I’.
I am telling a story about my family.
I am telling a story about my job.
I am telling a story about my sexuality or race.
Franzen further specifies he is looking for ‘intensity’ and ‘risk’, and indeed some of these essays are gripping in their intensity. But, like 2013, it gets repetitive. I like to see essays that explore little-known topics or examine some social phenomena or world events. There’s only so many essays you can read On My Shitty Parents before they all run together. The latter essays suffer this fate. There’s one in the last third where a woman is writing both about the mating habits of salamanders and her attempt to adopt a child. At that point, I was basically like “I don’t care about your familial drama, tell me about the salamanders!”
Anyway, here’s my favorites:
Girl by Alexander Chee: Chee details his application of makeup, wig, gown in preparation for the Castro Halloween parade. It’s the best description on the appeal of dressing in drag I’ve ever read. It’s beautiful. Also another reminder of how wondrous the Halloween Parade apparently was, making me further bitter about moving to San Francisco after it was canned.
My Heart Lies between “The Fleet” and “All the Ships” by Ella Harrison: Harrison is translating ancient Greek, a language no one speaks, into English, a massive undertaking that only a very few select specialists will even be able to interpret. Mostly, it’s a dazzling reflection on language. The disparate connotations and metaphors and etymological poetry that make one word very similar or different to another, each in a separate language and spoken thousands of years apart. While still centered around Harrison’s personal experience, this is one of the least “All about me” essays in the collection. The euphoria Harrison embraces while translating is merely dipping her toes into the greater human lingual ocean.
Sexual Paranoia by Laura Kipnis: This essay is the best example of Franzen’s point on writerly risk. Kipnis is a college professor protesting the overly harsh restrictions and punishments placed on college professors having affairs with students. Not exactly a popular opinion, especially when one is part of the establishment itself. My initial reaction to this was baffled skepticism — why defend behavior that is largely old married white men abusing their social status? Kipnis’ point is two fold. One: Adult relationships are messy and you’ll learn this sooner or later (this one isn’t entirely convincing). And two: by casting professors as potentially dangerous predators, you engineer a situation of infantilized, defenseless students and tyrannical, imposing professors. The narrative established behind the restrictions becomes real in a way that it wouldn’t without them. In other words: students are taught to fear their teachers.
Bastards by Lee Martin: Of the family drama essays, this one is the best. Martin’s father lost his hands in a farming accident and his inability to work dragged the family around Illinois. A father’s anger. A mother’s kindness. Sounds trite, but this is very well written. It took me right inside this shadowy, anger-ridden house. Oppressive.
This was originally published at The Scyring Orb.
I am telling a story about my family.
I am telling a story about my job.
I am telling a story about my sexuality or race.
Franzen further specifies he is looking for ‘intensity’ and ‘risk’, and indeed some of these essays are gripping in their intensity. But, like 2013, it gets repetitive. I like to see essays that explore little-known topics or examine some social phenomena or world events. There’s only so many essays you can read On My Shitty Parents before they all run together. The latter essays suffer this fate. There’s one in the last third where a woman is writing both about the mating habits of salamanders and her attempt to adopt a child. At that point, I was basically like “I don’t care about your familial drama, tell me about the salamanders!”
Anyway, here’s my favorites:
Girl by Alexander Chee: Chee details his application of makeup, wig, gown in preparation for the Castro Halloween parade. It’s the best description on the appeal of dressing in drag I’ve ever read. It’s beautiful. Also another reminder of how wondrous the Halloween Parade apparently was, making me further bitter about moving to San Francisco after it was canned.
My Heart Lies between “The Fleet” and “All the Ships” by Ella Harrison: Harrison is translating ancient Greek, a language no one speaks, into English, a massive undertaking that only a very few select specialists will even be able to interpret. Mostly, it’s a dazzling reflection on language. The disparate connotations and metaphors and etymological poetry that make one word very similar or different to another, each in a separate language and spoken thousands of years apart. While still centered around Harrison’s personal experience, this is one of the least “All about me” essays in the collection. The euphoria Harrison embraces while translating is merely dipping her toes into the greater human lingual ocean.
Sexual Paranoia by Laura Kipnis: This essay is the best example of Franzen’s point on writerly risk. Kipnis is a college professor protesting the overly harsh restrictions and punishments placed on college professors having affairs with students. Not exactly a popular opinion, especially when one is part of the establishment itself. My initial reaction to this was baffled skepticism — why defend behavior that is largely old married white men abusing their social status? Kipnis’ point is two fold. One: Adult relationships are messy and you’ll learn this sooner or later (this one isn’t entirely convincing). And two: by casting professors as potentially dangerous predators, you engineer a situation of infantilized, defenseless students and tyrannical, imposing professors. The narrative established behind the restrictions becomes real in a way that it wouldn’t without them. In other words: students are taught to fear their teachers.
Bastards by Lee Martin: Of the family drama essays, this one is the best. Martin’s father lost his hands in a farming accident and his inability to work dragged the family around Illinois. A father’s anger. A mother’s kindness. Sounds trite, but this is very well written. It took me right inside this shadowy, anger-ridden house. Oppressive.
This was originally published at The Scyring Orb.
March 31, 2021
No one ever reads these things, even though they're supposedly the "best."
In the introduction, Franzen explains that his singular criteria for selecting the best essays of 2016 was risk: writers who put themselves out there, revealing something highly personal or taking a publicly controversial stance on issues such as, oh I don't know, college professors dating their students.
I would say that 10% of the essays in this collection were boring. 40% were mildly interesting. 50% were mind-blowing. The first essay is written by a border patrol agent about the emotional toll of rounding up immigrants. There are essays about war, race, sexism, homophobia, antisemitism, and one slightly interesting but hilariously nerdy essay about ancient Greek.
The reason I read this book is due to vagaries of Scribd. If you don't know, Scribd is the reader's equivalent of Netflix, an online website and mobile app where for a monthly subscription fee you can read unlimited ebooks. The problem is that, just like Netflix, their selection is wonky. I was looking for the essay collection Farther Away by Jonathan Franzen, and they didn't have it, but this popped up. I read it in fits and starts over the course of a year, on my phone, waiting at the dentist or standing in line at the grocery store or killing time at work.
I honestly think you could have a satisfying life reading only the "Best American" collections each year. I've also dipped into the "Best American Short Stories," "Best American Nonrequired Reading" (courtesy of Dave Eggers), and "Best American Travel Writing" over the years, and I'd say the pie chart of quality is consistent with what I described above. I'm never excited to read these things, but I'm always glad I did.
In the introduction, Franzen explains that his singular criteria for selecting the best essays of 2016 was risk: writers who put themselves out there, revealing something highly personal or taking a publicly controversial stance on issues such as, oh I don't know, college professors dating their students.
I would say that 10% of the essays in this collection were boring. 40% were mildly interesting. 50% were mind-blowing. The first essay is written by a border patrol agent about the emotional toll of rounding up immigrants. There are essays about war, race, sexism, homophobia, antisemitism, and one slightly interesting but hilariously nerdy essay about ancient Greek.
The reason I read this book is due to vagaries of Scribd. If you don't know, Scribd is the reader's equivalent of Netflix, an online website and mobile app where for a monthly subscription fee you can read unlimited ebooks. The problem is that, just like Netflix, their selection is wonky. I was looking for the essay collection Farther Away by Jonathan Franzen, and they didn't have it, but this popped up. I read it in fits and starts over the course of a year, on my phone, waiting at the dentist or standing in line at the grocery store or killing time at work.
I honestly think you could have a satisfying life reading only the "Best American" collections each year. I've also dipped into the "Best American Short Stories," "Best American Nonrequired Reading" (courtesy of Dave Eggers), and "Best American Travel Writing" over the years, and I'd say the pie chart of quality is consistent with what I described above. I'm never excited to read these things, but I'm always glad I did.
January 7, 2017
This read was like the very best smorgasbord. There were familiar dishes, challenging flavors, things you never would have thought to mix together but that served up an amazing creation (salamanders and adoption! you have to read it!), and even the desserts were nutritious.
The essays are presented alphabetically by author's last name which makes the ordering random, and yet wonderful juxtapositions can occur. The best is at the very end, with the one-two-three punch of George Steiner's "The Eleventh Commandment", Mason Stokes's "Namesake", and Thomas Chatterton Williams's "Black and Blue and Blond". You can chew on the meaning of identity, belonging, love, exclusion, violence, and God for a long, long time with just those three. If you read nothing but these three essays, it would be worth the price of the volume, and that is saying something for a volume that contains Jill Quinn's "Big Night" (the aforementioned salamanders and adoption entry), Justin Reed's "Killing Like They Do in the Movies" and Marsha Pomerantz's "Right/Left: A Triptych".
I read the "Best of" essays at the end of every year, along with the "Best of" travel essays, and both volumes always make me regret that I don't make more time in my life throughout the year for the essay form. New year's resolution - read more essays?!? I will try!
The essays are presented alphabetically by author's last name which makes the ordering random, and yet wonderful juxtapositions can occur. The best is at the very end, with the one-two-three punch of George Steiner's "The Eleventh Commandment", Mason Stokes's "Namesake", and Thomas Chatterton Williams's "Black and Blue and Blond". You can chew on the meaning of identity, belonging, love, exclusion, violence, and God for a long, long time with just those three. If you read nothing but these three essays, it would be worth the price of the volume, and that is saying something for a volume that contains Jill Quinn's "Big Night" (the aforementioned salamanders and adoption entry), Justin Reed's "Killing Like They Do in the Movies" and Marsha Pomerantz's "Right/Left: A Triptych".
I read the "Best of" essays at the end of every year, along with the "Best of" travel essays, and both volumes always make me regret that I don't make more time in my life throughout the year for the essay form. New year's resolution - read more essays?!? I will try!
December 28, 2016
My favorites were the stigma-busting Sexual Paranoia by Laura Kipnis and Namesake by Mason Stokes. I also liked My Father and the Wine by Irina Dumitrescu: "Now and then I click a link to find out what the hipsters are up to."
September 25, 2017
I am currently reading The Best American Essays 2016, edited by Jonathan Franzen. As apart of my AP Language and Composition course we began by annotating and discussing Bajadas, where Francisco Cantú shares his experiences of being a border patrol officer on the Mexican border. I found Cantú's essay to be intriguing as his 20 detailed journal entries engaged the audience, giving us a real sense of what he had to battle both mentality and physically. I found his entries to be puzzling as it was interestingly written in diary format. From those entries I am curious to know if there was some type of symbolism in the way that he includes a full year of his duties. It seems to be strategic in the way that he expresses his feelings and emotions toward the job through two passages of sharing Christmas with his mom before and after he had gotten into routine. From these notes I have come to question what the purpose of this essay might be. Why did editor Jonathan Franzen begin the book with this essay? While not all essays have to include a thesis or introduction, what type of audience did Cantú hope to reach?
Thus far I am impressed with the essays that Jonathan Franzen has included. I am excited to keep reading the essays in The Best Essays of 2016 as they offer complex questions to arise while reading, forcing the reader to infer purpose and understanding.
Thus far I am impressed with the essays that Jonathan Franzen has included. I am excited to keep reading the essays in The Best Essays of 2016 as they offer complex questions to arise while reading, forcing the reader to infer purpose and understanding.
Want to read
September 25, 2017During my AP Language and Composition course, my class was asked to read Bajadas and follow up with a review on it. I have read countless essays throughout my education time period but I have yet to read an essay as intriguing and different than this one. The main character, Francisco Cantú, embarks on a internal fight with himself serving as a border agent in a very dangerous field of work. The major difference with this essay was how he used his writing in a journal style format, with a large paragraph for each experience he has for that day. There are several pieces of this essay that are left in the dark and the readers are faced with imagining what point it is that Cantú is trying to get across. It seems as if he is fighting with himself over a bigger problem or conflict while continuing to carry out his everyday job. After reading the essay, it seems like its not even an essay and that makes me question why this piece was written. Was it written for personal use, or was it used as a an application essay like my classmates and I are in the process of doing.
Overall, I am glad I read Bajadas in The Best Essays of 2016 and i'm excited to find out what other treasures the book has to offer.
Overall, I am glad I read Bajadas in The Best Essays of 2016 and i'm excited to find out what other treasures the book has to offer.
September 25, 2017
Although I have only read the first essay of this book, Bajadas, for my AP Language and Composition class, I can tell I am going to enjoy this collection of essays. In this piece by Cantú, he describes his experience of being a border cop in the academy and once he has graduated, through a series of journal entries. The way in which he told this story had a great effect on its message. The journal entries made the story seem more personal and honest. Throughout this essay, Cantú's perspective and attitude toward his job fluctuates. In the beginning of the story, he convinces his mother that he enjoys his work because he gets to be outdoors and help people. However, after experiencing and creating a connection with some of those he would later deport, Cantú ponders whether he is helping or hurting. I don't believe this moral dilemma would have appeared as powerfully as it did if Cantú wrote this in a different format. After reading this essay, I am very excited to be able to explore the other essays within this book. The passion and conflict expressed in this one essay captivated me as a reading unlike many pieces I have read before. I highly recommend this great assortment of essays.
March 2, 2017
BAEs 2013-2016 have all been of similar high quality. Most of the selections are strong and thought-provoking, if not exactly ones I'd read again.
According to my checkmark system (1 for good essays, 2 for great, 3 for mindblowing), this volume contains 9 pieces I'd happily revisit:
1 Checkmark
Francisco Cantú's "Bajadas"
Alexander Chee's "Girl"
Ela Harrison's "My Heart Lies Between 'The Fleet' and 'All the Ships'"
Sebastian Junger's "The Bonds of Battle"
Lee Martin's "Bastards"
Lisa Nikolidakis's "Family Tradition"
Mason Stokes's "Namesake"
2 Checkmarks
Paul Crenshaw's "Names"
Crenshaw's essay is a fun, compact, evocative examination of what soldiers call each other and how these nicknames articulate affection and fear.
Overall, this BAE contains a well-chosen array of topics, tones, and styles. While Jonathan Franzen tends to be a polarizing literary figure, I have always respected his nonfiction. His intro identifies risk as one of the qualities he observed in all the essays, and I too felt this risk and seek it, with renewed energy, in my own writing.
According to my checkmark system (1 for good essays, 2 for great, 3 for mindblowing), this volume contains 9 pieces I'd happily revisit:
1 Checkmark
Francisco Cantú's "Bajadas"
Alexander Chee's "Girl"
Ela Harrison's "My Heart Lies Between 'The Fleet' and 'All the Ships'"
Sebastian Junger's "The Bonds of Battle"
Lee Martin's "Bastards"
Lisa Nikolidakis's "Family Tradition"
Mason Stokes's "Namesake"
2 Checkmarks
Paul Crenshaw's "Names"
Crenshaw's essay is a fun, compact, evocative examination of what soldiers call each other and how these nicknames articulate affection and fear.
Overall, this BAE contains a well-chosen array of topics, tones, and styles. While Jonathan Franzen tends to be a polarizing literary figure, I have always respected his nonfiction. His intro identifies risk as one of the qualities he observed in all the essays, and I too felt this risk and seek it, with renewed energy, in my own writing.
Read
September 25, 2017In my AP Language and Composition class, we have started to tackle The Best American Essays 2016, edited by John Franzen. To start off, we read, annotated, and discussed Bajadas, written by Francisco Cantú. In Bajadas, Cantú serves as a border agent for the United States Border Patrol. We observe from the beginning of the essay to the end how Cantú’s behavior changes because of his job and how it affects him mentally and physically. The essay begins with him talking to his mother on Christmas Eve. She tells him she's worried about him, and that she thinks he’s too qualified to be a border cop. He tells her he wants to understand the border, and that he wants to help people. This is evident throughout the whole essay. We study how different Cantú is from all the other agents- how he’s kind and quiet. Whenever he catches someone he never fails to show at least some kindness and empathy. But towards the end of the essay, Cantú starts to have nightmares of the people he captures and it haunts him. By the end, he doesn’t know what he’s become. He realizes he can’t help all the people that need it.
October 12, 2019
I chose the "Best Essays" 2016 collection after comparing Franzen's Introduction with the Introductions to the other "Best Essays" collection at the bookstore: Franzen promised essays in which the author had "taken a risk." I found some of these to be excellent. Lee Martin's Bastards most of all. Sebastian Junger's Bonds of Battle too, but I preferred Tribe,, his longer book on the same topic. I found others to be compelling and worthwhile. Overall, however, the collection ended up not keeping me involved - whether because certain essays' topics went too far afield for me, or because they were simply too long or uninteresting, or because they were put forth in voices and styles I don't find appealing. Despite my somewhat negative experience with the collection, I do appreciate it for helping me realize that I tend to appreciate a certain type of personal, biographic essay. I don't know if I would characterize the essays I found appealing as embodying work that "took a risk" though. Instead, I think what distinguished the best essays in this collection were authors who shared insights in a very human, vulnerable, and understated or plainly-spoken way.
September 24, 2017
For my AP Language and Composition course we just began The Best American Essays 2016 but have only read Bajadas thus far. Personally, I found the essay to be unique due to the various journal entries that were spaced out over a period of time. Francisco Cantú shows the internal fight with himself while pursuing a dangerous career. One thing that made me question his writing style in the essay was the lack of a purpose or thesis. Cantú does a good job telling his story, but he does not outright say what he is trying to prove by writing it. Even with the absence of a purpose I still want to know why he wrote this essay. Questions that arose: what was the context of the essay? Was it for a college application? Was it for an English professor? Was it for fun? What point is Cantú trying to get across? Was it a true story? Is any of it exaggerated?
Although I am only a couple of pages into the book, I have already seen an example of strong writing and I am excited to see what the rest of the book holds in store.
Although I am only a couple of pages into the book, I have already seen an example of strong writing and I am excited to see what the rest of the book holds in store.
September 24, 2017
This year for my AP Language and Composition class, we are reading The Best American Essays 2016, and the first essay we read was Bajadas by Francisco Cantu. I enjoyed the journal essays that shed light on Cantu's time as a border patrol agent. His journal entries portray the toll the job takes on one's conscience. Throughout the story, Cantu had to battle the moral dilemmas and address the issues of illegal immigrants. The essay was not your typical argumentative essay and did not have a definitive thesis statement. This made it difficult to recognize what Cantu was trying to argue. I want to know why Cantu chose to write the essay in the form of journal entries. Why did he start with, "Santiago quit the academy yesterday,"? How did he end up dealing with the moral issues associated with the job? Overall I really enjoyed this essay, and I am looking forward to reading the rest of the book. I would highly recommend this essay to anyone who is looking for a short single sitting read.
December 4, 2017
Some good ones and some not good ones! Mostly good ones! Personal favorite was "Big Night" by Jill Sisson Quinn!
Read
February 7, 2017This is a strange, strange collection of essays, at least from where I'm standing. It's always amusing to think about the logic people use when they interpret the word, "best." Franzen seems to have quite a simple metric, choosing voices and messages he thought people needed to hear. There is a lot of writing about trauma of various kinds, experiences that stick with us psychologically, from military service to car wrecks to poverty to sexual exploitation to murder to violence in visual media to illness to the social experience of race and gender...is there something you're trying to work through, Mr. Franzen?
I loved many of the works that he picked, which reflect the excellence and diversity of style that I'm sure he was going for, and were indeed interesting, compelling, important. They include some writers who promise to become old favorites, people I'll follow for years. But diversity also produced strange juxtapositions and, I would say, outliers. Like Laura Kipnis, who dismisses power dynamics in student-teacher relationships with when-I-was-your-age-it-was-uphill-both-ways. Or George Steiner, whose weird assertion that Jews are just naturally better at abstract thinking pairs oddly with Thomas Chatterton Williams' insightful observations about race and its social (not biological) construction. Franzen says in his intro (which I read last) that he chose essays based on their propensity for risk. It's not a bad metric, I suppose. But it does make for a strange, strange collection.
I loved many of the works that he picked, which reflect the excellence and diversity of style that I'm sure he was going for, and were indeed interesting, compelling, important. They include some writers who promise to become old favorites, people I'll follow for years. But diversity also produced strange juxtapositions and, I would say, outliers. Like Laura Kipnis, who dismisses power dynamics in student-teacher relationships with when-I-was-your-age-it-was-uphill-both-ways. Or George Steiner, whose weird assertion that Jews are just naturally better at abstract thinking pairs oddly with Thomas Chatterton Williams' insightful observations about race and its social (not biological) construction. Franzen says in his intro (which I read last) that he chose essays based on their propensity for risk. It's not a bad metric, I suppose. But it does make for a strange, strange collection.
August 16, 2022
Essays 2016
I love reading these, even if only a few of the essays ever really leave a clear and long-lasting impression – some of them living instead like ghostly outlines in my mind as I carry on some vague idea about a man going to Burning Man with his father or a woman’s ongoing battle with cancer that leads, as all things do, to death. But damn, I think I love essays while I read them. Maybe I should re-subscribe to the New Yorker.
Part of it, I’m sure, is that I imagine myself an essay writer. Of the handful of things I’ve ever written that I liked, some personal anecdotes that work their way to truths about myself and about the world are the ones that feel like they could live somewhere else and have a purpose on page in someone else’s house. I like to see myself as an essay writer and not just a guy who rambles incoherently on Goodreads while he’s at work. Honestly - I think I’ve been reading as much as I have this year because I’ve made myself post a review each time and it’s an excuse to put my thoughts down and imagine someone else will read them.
Here, I’ll try to just jot down a few thoughts about each essay. I thought the forward by Robert Atwan, the series editor, was dry and generally unpleasant to read. Maybe that’s fitting since he writes a bit about Emerson’s essays and I remember trying to read a book of those in law school and putting them down because they were dry and unpleasant to read. Franzen, the editor of this edition, writes a much more interesting introduction that makes essay writing feel exciting and daring.
If you generally read my reviews to be polite but don’t want to slog through one this long, it won’t hurt my feelings. My favorites were My Father and the Wine, Sexual Paranoia, and Family Traditions. These favorites have a lot more to do with which essays I identified with than on their merits (though I think they have lots of merits!).
Bajadas – Francisco Cantu
Written as a series of diary entries as Cantu begins a career as a border patrol officer. The medium makes it feel like it’s not written for the reader and so there’s no expectation that the purpose will be spelled out for us. Instead, we can see why the author takes up the job he does. We get a sense of his hopes and we see what he sees and only get a sense of what it does to him and he learns from it.
Girl – Alexander Chee
Chee, a half-Korean half-white gay man, dresses in drag for the first time. The idea of passing is what’s most interesting here. Chee is certainly uncomfortable with the idea of ‘passing’ for white, but at the same time so excited by the idea of ‘passing’ as a woman. The reader is left with an interesting question about identity – how we’re put in boxes and told to be a thing but how easy or difficult it might be to choose to be something else.
Against Honeymoons - Charles Comey
My wife and I never had a honeymoon. Money was tight then and the wedding was put together in a hurry for the traditional reason and it’s been tight ever since. We like to imagine we’ll scrounge a few bucks together to do it right at the ten-year mark.
This one isn’t REALLY about honeymoons, but about being able to appreciate fine things in the moment. We’ve been on those vacations where you have a list of things you must do, or vacationed with someone who carried such a list. When something goes wrong (too much rain, or a bad sun burn on the first day, or something’s wrong with the hotel) you’ve spoiled your expectations and so spoiled the memories you’ve already decided to create about the adventure.
Names – Paul Grenshaw
Short but powerful piece that helps us get into the heads of the young immature kids who join our military and fight and die in our wars.
Ordinary Girls – Jaquira Diaz
A really good one. We get a look at mortality through the lens of a girl contemplating (and attempting, more than once) suicide. She compares herself to the ordinary girls while she suffers her mother’s abuse and navigated middle school and experiments with romance and tries to swallow enough pills to end it all.
My Father and the Wine - Irina Dumitrescu
I had an immediate connection to this one. I didn’t see it coming. As soon as Dumitrescu started writing about Tuica, a traditional Romanian plum brandy, I knew I had to send a copy of this essay to my brother (I couldn’t find it readily available online so I actually scanned it in in the office).
It’s funny. I don’t even think I learned of my Transylvanian roots until a handful of years ago, but I’ve been curious about it lately and this essay, which dives into ways we cling to these roots (and here with some funny parallels to the strange line of Krachun men) felt really personal to me. I’ve always felt distant from any real heritage. People who cling to Irish American or Italian American heritage feel sort of fake to me. Being raised ostensibly Catholic doesn’t feel like it differentiates me. I have sort of always yearned for a connection to some tradition that would help define and differentiate me (which is probably why I always sort of wished I was Jewish).
My father isn’t a Romanian immigrant. Even my grandfather was born here (but HIS father, Wuka Krachun Senior was the Coffin-maker from Transylvania who found a boat to take him over here) – so any connection I have to Eastern European are so tenuous and strained. I’m just a white American man so I don’t have the same drive to make my own wine (or brandy) to remind me of a homeland or a culture or some common identity.
My Heart Lies Between “The Fleet” and “All the Ships” – Ela Harrison
An interesting essay for anyone who thinks linguistics and language are pretty neat. I do think they’re pretty neat! I’m not qualified (or interested, or frankly smart enough) to do the kind of translation work Harrison is writing about, but I do like to think about the importance of precision and the connotations of words sometimes.
The Bonds of Battle – Sebastian Junger
This one starts by getting into PTSD and remains loosely focused there, but the author gets into some of abuse of our VA system (maybe PTSD isn’t as common among vets as the money we pay out would imply) which is a brave thing to say since criticizing vets is an unpopular move. He dives into some of the deeper societal problems that lead to a culture of isolation, one that may be feeding the psychological issues our service men and women feel so acutely upon their return to civilian life – but he makes the broader point that it’s affecting us all.
Sexual Paranoia – Laura Kipnis
This essay feels brave at first (and could only be written by a woman) because it challenges how we criticize sexual power dynamics (specifically student/professor on college campuses). Risk-taking was one of Franzen’s stated criteria in choosing essays for this edition and I see it here. It feels a little like a challenge to the Me Too movement, which is a dangerous thing to write. I don’t buy the complaints about Cancel Culture and think most of the celebrities who can’t find work for being awful people deserve it, but Kipnis does point out some indicators that maybe we’re looking at power dynamics in a problematic way (not sure I agree with her but I’m not sure I don’t agree with her).
She does make a passing reference to The Corrections and it feels a little weird that Franzen would pick this one because of the optics of that alone, but I liked it regardless. The essay felt like the kind of thing I couldn’t say aloud lest I sound like those awful family-members on Facebook ranting against wokeness, but Kipnis articulated her points really well and in a manner that made for a good read.
Thin Places – Jordan Kisner
Kisner describes OCD in way wholly unlike the images we get from television shows about idiosyncratic detectives. While this wasn’t my favorite essay to read in the volume, I do always like to come out of these books with a broader sense of something I didn’t know much about before. It isn’t overly technical or anything, which can occasionally be the case when an essay dives into disease or neurosis.
Pyre – Amitava Kumar
This is a portrait of Kumar’s grief at his mother’s passing and her funeral. We get a look at funeral rites in another part of the world, but the feelings, I think, are universal.
Of Human Carnage – Richard M. Lange
This essay has a reference to bird-watching in the first paragraph and it made me think how nice it is to feel you know the editor of one of these volumes. I’ve read some essays Franzen himself has written about birding (and did he give the hobby to one of his characters - maybe the guy from Freedom?). It’s fun to feel that familiarity.
This is not a story about bird-watching though. It’s about trauma. Lange and his girlfriend see something really violent and awful he reflects on the effect it had on him afterward, his reactions to seeing violence portrayed on television, and I had to wonder if maybe we SHOULD react as he does when we such grisly portrayals. I wondered about the distance those of us who have lived free of this kind of trauma can have from scenes that should turn out stomachs.
Bastards – Lee Martin
This one is about the author’s problematic relationship with his imperfect father. Sounds right up my alley. It’s really a story about anger though, one that tries to get across a subtle notion of how love can be expressed alongside it, albeit imperfectly.
Family Traditions – Lisa Nikolidakis
This essay starts with Nikolidakis’s father murdering his girlfriend and her daughter in ‘a two-bedroom bungalow in New Jersey.’ Neat, I thought, New Jersey. When the second paragraph harkens back to her maternal grandfather’s suicide, the author’s mother leaves her shift at Olga’s Diner, I thought: shit, how many Olga’s can there be in New Jersey? That’s my hometown. I imagined that this two bedroom bungalow was own parents’ house. It’s the second essay I came to that I knew I’d have to send to my brother.
Murders and suicides aside (though there was at least one suicide at my parents’ house – a cousin I never knew), and apart from the fictions her father told her, I felt connected to her childhood in the way she never really felt like she knew her father. She writes: “I rarely saw pictures from his childhood, though I knew he had two sisters because they visited us in the States when I was a child. I never understood who lived in the house he grew up in – or even if it was a house.” The mysteries of her father’s upbringing echoed all the blank spaces about my own father’s youth (my grandfather, a one eyed toothless alcoholic, lived in our basement but I never quite understood if my father lived with him growing up, or if he and my grandmother had been divorced (or, perhaps, were they never married at all). There never was (and still isn’t) any reason I couldn’t simply ask, but still…
I’d like to state clearly, by the way, that while I look for parallels here and while I love (can love be the right word?) stories about awful fathers, my own is not and was never abusive. He isn’t an alcoholic or addict. I’ve never feared my father – we’re not even estranged.
The Lost Sister: An Elegy – Joyce Carol Oates
At first, I was turned off to the poetical style of this essay, but Oates plays with form as she goes and by the time she shifted to the second person (a favorite device of mine since college), I had nearly forgotten my misgivings. Here, we’re treated to a story – or perhaps a history – of Oates’s autistic sister. Autism is personal to me because of my son, but it’s a spectrum and the realities of Lynn Anne’s condition is wholly alien to my Jackson. Still, it’s a topic I’m invested in.
Right/Left: A Triptych – Marsha Pomerantz
I like the perspective in the first section (of three, it’s a triptych, get it?), we’re reading about Pomerantz’s childhood and so we read her as a child. I like the mechanism of the list she uses to organize these first few pages. The second section shifts into something else – still playful, but I started to wonder where we were really going. By the end, I think the essay was selected more for the art of it’s composition (a study of dichotomies: mother/father, Easter/Passover, left/right, Israel/America) than for any explanation of characters or events, but I was left to wonder what I really should have taken out of it.
Big Night – Jill Sisson Quinn
Here’s an essay about salamanders that’s really about adoption. I remember wanting to teach my students about writing essays this way when I taught 8th grade English. We’d always have to explain to them how to start your essay with a ‘hook’ and I tried so hard to teach them how not to write a bad hook, but it was always so formulaic. What they really needed to be doing was to find an engaging way to write about whatever they were writing about and why not use salamanders to do it.
It's not a tool that teachers really give their students though. It’s not something I was ever taught and it wasn’t anything I could ever figure out how to impart on middle-schoolers. I also wonder if the graders of standardized test would appreciate it even though it makes for such good writing.
I couldn’t write an essay that makes it to a Best American Essays book myself, but if I won the lottery and was in the market for a part time job to keep me entertained, I wouldn’t mind taking an adjunct gig somewhere that would let me teach a creative non-fiction course. I wouldn’t mind spending my time with essays like the ones in this book and trying to help students figure out which of these approaches they could make work for them.
Anyway, despite making me ponder essay-writing itself, this wasn’t one of my favorites.
Killing Like They Do in the Movies – Justin Phillip Reed
This one is about the portrayal of lynchings in film, but it’s not a researched detached review, but something of a personal narrative attached dressed loosely in the clothes of this kind of study. It’s about Reed and it’s about violence against black people in our society yesterday and today – the inventory of on-screen deaths is just another way to talk about it.
A General Feeling of Disorder – Oliver Sacks
This one dug into migraines and danced around mortality a bit. The narrator was sympathetic, but I don’t know it left me with anything I’ll carry with me.
In Praise of Contempt – Katherine E. Standefer
This one was sexy. Standefer writes about sexual relationships she has with married men. She writes about her needs and how she’s ended up having the kinds of encounters she’s had in a way that helps us to reflect on our own opinions about sex and morality a bit.
I like to see an essay like this in each volume, even if this one wasn’t my favorite. I liked that people could see my book cover while I was reading at the pool and must have assumed I was reading something dry or academic when really it felt a bit like smut. Sometimes the best essays ARE a bit smutty!
The Eleventh Commandment – George Steiner
This was my least favorite essay in this book. I might have been a little sleepy when I read it, but it meant close to nothing to me. It felt like it was written to be impenetrable. I’m the kind of guy who wants to read an essay about Judaism. I’m someone who is more likely than most to understand references to Spinoza and Nietchze and Schopenhauer and if I am struggling to keep up and keep interested, maybe your essay isn’t ‘of general interest’ in the way essays from this series are supposed to be.
Namesake – Mason Stokes
An essay about Stokes coming out to his parents in 1996, something I like to think is very different from coming out to your parents in 2022 (or even 2016 when this was published). It’s about his Uncle Mason, too (for whom Stokes is named) who either was or wasn’t gay himself. The exploration this character is nuanced and tender, but also fun. It’s sad though, too, to think of this maybe-probably-perhaps-gay uncle who maybe had to hide who he was for his whole life.
Black and Blue and Blond – Thomas Chatterton Williams
A great essay about race from a Black man whose children are decidedly less black. Williams marries and sires a child by a French woman and so he child pops out not only lighter skinned, but blond! Williams, of course, is himself mixed-race – so he imagines the cascading effect of less and less blackness in his line. He has a recurring reference to the Ship of Theseus and calls us to wonder if, one or two generations removed, when the whitest boy you’ve ever met talks about his Black heritage at a Parisian café, he will be met with acceptance or mischief or disbelief. The question persists: what does it mean to be Black? Can a blond French boy be black?
I love reading these, even if only a few of the essays ever really leave a clear and long-lasting impression – some of them living instead like ghostly outlines in my mind as I carry on some vague idea about a man going to Burning Man with his father or a woman’s ongoing battle with cancer that leads, as all things do, to death. But damn, I think I love essays while I read them. Maybe I should re-subscribe to the New Yorker.
Part of it, I’m sure, is that I imagine myself an essay writer. Of the handful of things I’ve ever written that I liked, some personal anecdotes that work their way to truths about myself and about the world are the ones that feel like they could live somewhere else and have a purpose on page in someone else’s house. I like to see myself as an essay writer and not just a guy who rambles incoherently on Goodreads while he’s at work. Honestly - I think I’ve been reading as much as I have this year because I’ve made myself post a review each time and it’s an excuse to put my thoughts down and imagine someone else will read them.
Here, I’ll try to just jot down a few thoughts about each essay. I thought the forward by Robert Atwan, the series editor, was dry and generally unpleasant to read. Maybe that’s fitting since he writes a bit about Emerson’s essays and I remember trying to read a book of those in law school and putting them down because they were dry and unpleasant to read. Franzen, the editor of this edition, writes a much more interesting introduction that makes essay writing feel exciting and daring.
If you generally read my reviews to be polite but don’t want to slog through one this long, it won’t hurt my feelings. My favorites were My Father and the Wine, Sexual Paranoia, and Family Traditions. These favorites have a lot more to do with which essays I identified with than on their merits (though I think they have lots of merits!).
Bajadas – Francisco Cantu
Written as a series of diary entries as Cantu begins a career as a border patrol officer. The medium makes it feel like it’s not written for the reader and so there’s no expectation that the purpose will be spelled out for us. Instead, we can see why the author takes up the job he does. We get a sense of his hopes and we see what he sees and only get a sense of what it does to him and he learns from it.
Girl – Alexander Chee
Chee, a half-Korean half-white gay man, dresses in drag for the first time. The idea of passing is what’s most interesting here. Chee is certainly uncomfortable with the idea of ‘passing’ for white, but at the same time so excited by the idea of ‘passing’ as a woman. The reader is left with an interesting question about identity – how we’re put in boxes and told to be a thing but how easy or difficult it might be to choose to be something else.
Against Honeymoons - Charles Comey
My wife and I never had a honeymoon. Money was tight then and the wedding was put together in a hurry for the traditional reason and it’s been tight ever since. We like to imagine we’ll scrounge a few bucks together to do it right at the ten-year mark.
This one isn’t REALLY about honeymoons, but about being able to appreciate fine things in the moment. We’ve been on those vacations where you have a list of things you must do, or vacationed with someone who carried such a list. When something goes wrong (too much rain, or a bad sun burn on the first day, or something’s wrong with the hotel) you’ve spoiled your expectations and so spoiled the memories you’ve already decided to create about the adventure.
Names – Paul Grenshaw
Short but powerful piece that helps us get into the heads of the young immature kids who join our military and fight and die in our wars.
Ordinary Girls – Jaquira Diaz
A really good one. We get a look at mortality through the lens of a girl contemplating (and attempting, more than once) suicide. She compares herself to the ordinary girls while she suffers her mother’s abuse and navigated middle school and experiments with romance and tries to swallow enough pills to end it all.
My Father and the Wine - Irina Dumitrescu
I had an immediate connection to this one. I didn’t see it coming. As soon as Dumitrescu started writing about Tuica, a traditional Romanian plum brandy, I knew I had to send a copy of this essay to my brother (I couldn’t find it readily available online so I actually scanned it in in the office).
It’s funny. I don’t even think I learned of my Transylvanian roots until a handful of years ago, but I’ve been curious about it lately and this essay, which dives into ways we cling to these roots (and here with some funny parallels to the strange line of Krachun men) felt really personal to me. I’ve always felt distant from any real heritage. People who cling to Irish American or Italian American heritage feel sort of fake to me. Being raised ostensibly Catholic doesn’t feel like it differentiates me. I have sort of always yearned for a connection to some tradition that would help define and differentiate me (which is probably why I always sort of wished I was Jewish).
My father isn’t a Romanian immigrant. Even my grandfather was born here (but HIS father, Wuka Krachun Senior was the Coffin-maker from Transylvania who found a boat to take him over here) – so any connection I have to Eastern European are so tenuous and strained. I’m just a white American man so I don’t have the same drive to make my own wine (or brandy) to remind me of a homeland or a culture or some common identity.
My Heart Lies Between “The Fleet” and “All the Ships” – Ela Harrison
An interesting essay for anyone who thinks linguistics and language are pretty neat. I do think they’re pretty neat! I’m not qualified (or interested, or frankly smart enough) to do the kind of translation work Harrison is writing about, but I do like to think about the importance of precision and the connotations of words sometimes.
The Bonds of Battle – Sebastian Junger
This one starts by getting into PTSD and remains loosely focused there, but the author gets into some of abuse of our VA system (maybe PTSD isn’t as common among vets as the money we pay out would imply) which is a brave thing to say since criticizing vets is an unpopular move. He dives into some of the deeper societal problems that lead to a culture of isolation, one that may be feeding the psychological issues our service men and women feel so acutely upon their return to civilian life – but he makes the broader point that it’s affecting us all.
Sexual Paranoia – Laura Kipnis
This essay feels brave at first (and could only be written by a woman) because it challenges how we criticize sexual power dynamics (specifically student/professor on college campuses). Risk-taking was one of Franzen’s stated criteria in choosing essays for this edition and I see it here. It feels a little like a challenge to the Me Too movement, which is a dangerous thing to write. I don’t buy the complaints about Cancel Culture and think most of the celebrities who can’t find work for being awful people deserve it, but Kipnis does point out some indicators that maybe we’re looking at power dynamics in a problematic way (not sure I agree with her but I’m not sure I don’t agree with her).
She does make a passing reference to The Corrections and it feels a little weird that Franzen would pick this one because of the optics of that alone, but I liked it regardless. The essay felt like the kind of thing I couldn’t say aloud lest I sound like those awful family-members on Facebook ranting against wokeness, but Kipnis articulated her points really well and in a manner that made for a good read.
Thin Places – Jordan Kisner
Kisner describes OCD in way wholly unlike the images we get from television shows about idiosyncratic detectives. While this wasn’t my favorite essay to read in the volume, I do always like to come out of these books with a broader sense of something I didn’t know much about before. It isn’t overly technical or anything, which can occasionally be the case when an essay dives into disease or neurosis.
Pyre – Amitava Kumar
This is a portrait of Kumar’s grief at his mother’s passing and her funeral. We get a look at funeral rites in another part of the world, but the feelings, I think, are universal.
Of Human Carnage – Richard M. Lange
This essay has a reference to bird-watching in the first paragraph and it made me think how nice it is to feel you know the editor of one of these volumes. I’ve read some essays Franzen himself has written about birding (and did he give the hobby to one of his characters - maybe the guy from Freedom?). It’s fun to feel that familiarity.
This is not a story about bird-watching though. It’s about trauma. Lange and his girlfriend see something really violent and awful he reflects on the effect it had on him afterward, his reactions to seeing violence portrayed on television, and I had to wonder if maybe we SHOULD react as he does when we such grisly portrayals. I wondered about the distance those of us who have lived free of this kind of trauma can have from scenes that should turn out stomachs.
Bastards – Lee Martin
This one is about the author’s problematic relationship with his imperfect father. Sounds right up my alley. It’s really a story about anger though, one that tries to get across a subtle notion of how love can be expressed alongside it, albeit imperfectly.
Family Traditions – Lisa Nikolidakis
This essay starts with Nikolidakis’s father murdering his girlfriend and her daughter in ‘a two-bedroom bungalow in New Jersey.’ Neat, I thought, New Jersey. When the second paragraph harkens back to her maternal grandfather’s suicide, the author’s mother leaves her shift at Olga’s Diner, I thought: shit, how many Olga’s can there be in New Jersey? That’s my hometown. I imagined that this two bedroom bungalow was own parents’ house. It’s the second essay I came to that I knew I’d have to send to my brother.
Murders and suicides aside (though there was at least one suicide at my parents’ house – a cousin I never knew), and apart from the fictions her father told her, I felt connected to her childhood in the way she never really felt like she knew her father. She writes: “I rarely saw pictures from his childhood, though I knew he had two sisters because they visited us in the States when I was a child. I never understood who lived in the house he grew up in – or even if it was a house.” The mysteries of her father’s upbringing echoed all the blank spaces about my own father’s youth (my grandfather, a one eyed toothless alcoholic, lived in our basement but I never quite understood if my father lived with him growing up, or if he and my grandmother had been divorced (or, perhaps, were they never married at all). There never was (and still isn’t) any reason I couldn’t simply ask, but still…
I’d like to state clearly, by the way, that while I look for parallels here and while I love (can love be the right word?) stories about awful fathers, my own is not and was never abusive. He isn’t an alcoholic or addict. I’ve never feared my father – we’re not even estranged.
The Lost Sister: An Elegy – Joyce Carol Oates
At first, I was turned off to the poetical style of this essay, but Oates plays with form as she goes and by the time she shifted to the second person (a favorite device of mine since college), I had nearly forgotten my misgivings. Here, we’re treated to a story – or perhaps a history – of Oates’s autistic sister. Autism is personal to me because of my son, but it’s a spectrum and the realities of Lynn Anne’s condition is wholly alien to my Jackson. Still, it’s a topic I’m invested in.
Right/Left: A Triptych – Marsha Pomerantz
I like the perspective in the first section (of three, it’s a triptych, get it?), we’re reading about Pomerantz’s childhood and so we read her as a child. I like the mechanism of the list she uses to organize these first few pages. The second section shifts into something else – still playful, but I started to wonder where we were really going. By the end, I think the essay was selected more for the art of it’s composition (a study of dichotomies: mother/father, Easter/Passover, left/right, Israel/America) than for any explanation of characters or events, but I was left to wonder what I really should have taken out of it.
Big Night – Jill Sisson Quinn
Here’s an essay about salamanders that’s really about adoption. I remember wanting to teach my students about writing essays this way when I taught 8th grade English. We’d always have to explain to them how to start your essay with a ‘hook’ and I tried so hard to teach them how not to write a bad hook, but it was always so formulaic. What they really needed to be doing was to find an engaging way to write about whatever they were writing about and why not use salamanders to do it.
It's not a tool that teachers really give their students though. It’s not something I was ever taught and it wasn’t anything I could ever figure out how to impart on middle-schoolers. I also wonder if the graders of standardized test would appreciate it even though it makes for such good writing.
I couldn’t write an essay that makes it to a Best American Essays book myself, but if I won the lottery and was in the market for a part time job to keep me entertained, I wouldn’t mind taking an adjunct gig somewhere that would let me teach a creative non-fiction course. I wouldn’t mind spending my time with essays like the ones in this book and trying to help students figure out which of these approaches they could make work for them.
Anyway, despite making me ponder essay-writing itself, this wasn’t one of my favorites.
Killing Like They Do in the Movies – Justin Phillip Reed
This one is about the portrayal of lynchings in film, but it’s not a researched detached review, but something of a personal narrative attached dressed loosely in the clothes of this kind of study. It’s about Reed and it’s about violence against black people in our society yesterday and today – the inventory of on-screen deaths is just another way to talk about it.
A General Feeling of Disorder – Oliver Sacks
This one dug into migraines and danced around mortality a bit. The narrator was sympathetic, but I don’t know it left me with anything I’ll carry with me.
In Praise of Contempt – Katherine E. Standefer
This one was sexy. Standefer writes about sexual relationships she has with married men. She writes about her needs and how she’s ended up having the kinds of encounters she’s had in a way that helps us to reflect on our own opinions about sex and morality a bit.
I like to see an essay like this in each volume, even if this one wasn’t my favorite. I liked that people could see my book cover while I was reading at the pool and must have assumed I was reading something dry or academic when really it felt a bit like smut. Sometimes the best essays ARE a bit smutty!
The Eleventh Commandment – George Steiner
This was my least favorite essay in this book. I might have been a little sleepy when I read it, but it meant close to nothing to me. It felt like it was written to be impenetrable. I’m the kind of guy who wants to read an essay about Judaism. I’m someone who is more likely than most to understand references to Spinoza and Nietchze and Schopenhauer and if I am struggling to keep up and keep interested, maybe your essay isn’t ‘of general interest’ in the way essays from this series are supposed to be.
Namesake – Mason Stokes
An essay about Stokes coming out to his parents in 1996, something I like to think is very different from coming out to your parents in 2022 (or even 2016 when this was published). It’s about his Uncle Mason, too (for whom Stokes is named) who either was or wasn’t gay himself. The exploration this character is nuanced and tender, but also fun. It’s sad though, too, to think of this maybe-probably-perhaps-gay uncle who maybe had to hide who he was for his whole life.
Black and Blue and Blond – Thomas Chatterton Williams
A great essay about race from a Black man whose children are decidedly less black. Williams marries and sires a child by a French woman and so he child pops out not only lighter skinned, but blond! Williams, of course, is himself mixed-race – so he imagines the cascading effect of less and less blackness in his line. He has a recurring reference to the Ship of Theseus and calls us to wonder if, one or two generations removed, when the whitest boy you’ve ever met talks about his Black heritage at a Parisian café, he will be met with acceptance or mischief or disbelief. The question persists: what does it mean to be Black? Can a blond French boy be black?
June 10, 2017
In the introduction to last year's Best Essays collection, editor Jonathan Franzen writes that his "main criterion for selecting . . .essays was whether an author had taken a risk." He admits to excluding some fine essays because they didn't satisfy his "taste for intensity." The selections in this anthology do indeed mirror the intense global climate of the last few years. Treating such issues as race, sexuality, severe family dysfunction, mental and physical disabilities, sexual harassment, war and mental illness, these pieces force the reader into discomfort zones. In the foreword, Robert Atwan, who began the best of series in the 1980's quotes premier essay writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, ". . .I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back." Atwan notes that Emerson's essays are not "'safe spaces. Not even for himself." Each of the essays in this anthology could be accompanied with trigger warnings. But because they are not safe spaces for their readers, they push readers into questioning, learning, seeking. . . . within and beyond the self.
The essays that particularly stood out to me:
Family Tradition/Lisa Nikolidakis--in which the author comes to terms with her abusive, ultimately murderous father.
"But over the years, as I abandoned my youthful angst and anger and attempted to embrace a life that actually lets strangers in with a shred of hope, I always, deep down, believed that my father knew how to toe the line between abusive and sociopathic. Yes, he had threatened the lot of us, but he had never crossed over. This time he had."
The Lost Sister: An Elegy/Joyce Carol Oates--Oates writes poignantly of her sister born on Oates's 18th birthday, who has autism so severe that their parents eventually had to institutionalize her.
Killing Like They Do in the Movies/Justin Phillip Reed--Reed explores how horror films reflect racism, especially the "liberal" kind.
"A young New Yorker sits across from me and gets bored with my pointing out how white spaces have 'this thing' for making ornament of nonwhite strife and achievement--which are often difficult to tell apart."
In Praise of Contempt/Katherine E. Standefer--Standefer explores the ambiguous nuances of love and sex.
The Bonds of Battle/Sebastian Junger--Junger explores how supportive communities develop in times of war--and meet a deep-seeded human need for companionship and meaning.
The essays that particularly stood out to me:
Family Tradition/Lisa Nikolidakis--in which the author comes to terms with her abusive, ultimately murderous father.
"But over the years, as I abandoned my youthful angst and anger and attempted to embrace a life that actually lets strangers in with a shred of hope, I always, deep down, believed that my father knew how to toe the line between abusive and sociopathic. Yes, he had threatened the lot of us, but he had never crossed over. This time he had."
The Lost Sister: An Elegy/Joyce Carol Oates--Oates writes poignantly of her sister born on Oates's 18th birthday, who has autism so severe that their parents eventually had to institutionalize her.
Killing Like They Do in the Movies/Justin Phillip Reed--Reed explores how horror films reflect racism, especially the "liberal" kind.
"A young New Yorker sits across from me and gets bored with my pointing out how white spaces have 'this thing' for making ornament of nonwhite strife and achievement--which are often difficult to tell apart."
In Praise of Contempt/Katherine E. Standefer--Standefer explores the ambiguous nuances of love and sex.
The Bonds of Battle/Sebastian Junger--Junger explores how supportive communities develop in times of war--and meet a deep-seeded human need for companionship and meaning.
May 28, 2017
This is the first time I have purchased the Greatest American Essay collection. While there were some essays of strong interest the collection suffered a bit of unevenness. Some of these essays were not of interest to me.
Essays of Note include Girl by the author Alexander Chee from Guernica magazine in which he writes about his experiences as a homosexual man in SAN Francisco and in particular in dressing up and going out in drag as well as his initial experiences with makeup as a young boy growing up in Maine.
Names, by Paul Crenshaw from Hobart, is a story about the use of nicknames, derogatory or otherwise, by members of a tight knit army unit and the purposes these colorful names serve.
The strongest, most relevant essay in the collection is the stunning " The Bonds of Battle " by Sebastian Junger, which was originally published in Vanity Fair. Junger explores recent studies of PTSD and its effects on different populations of soldiers and other domestic victims such as those of violent attacks. The information coming out of these studies is pretty amazing. Junger shows that the relative level of danger and violence in the experience of war is one of the least likely predictors of if a soldier will have a PTSD experience. It appears that PTSD is related in a much more demonstrable way with the environment that a soldier returns home to. The more a soldier feels separated from those that have knowledge and experience, and the rapidity of that separation is a high factor. Simply put, it is hard to stop being a soldier. It is even harder to stop being a soldier when few, if any, people in the life you return to have a similar experience in their background. Junger points out that the more separate a war is from the daily lives of those citizens left behind on the home front the harder it is for the retuning soldiers to adjust. In this case, shared sacrifice, shared experience, even shared thoughts, count a great deal. Today's environment of a professional military, mostly isolated from the rest of the citizens in both thought and deed, is a perfect breeding ground for feelings of isolation and trauma for the returning soldier. In fact the closer a war is geographically to the soldiers home country the less likely he or she is to experience trauma upon her return. The expression of " Thank you for your service " is shown to be a well meaning bit overall ineffective if not downright harmful statement to a returning soldier by pointing out how different he is than those he returns to. The essay goes into great detail, comparing the experience of a close knit army unit with the anthropology of ancient man and the communities they existed in. This is an important, should be mandatory, read, for anyone affiliated in anyway with the members of our military.
Laura Kipnis wrote an article called " Sexual Paranoia " in Chronicle Review in which she speaks of the recent prohibitions of contact between professors and students on college campuses. Speaking in a way that has been very controversially read she makes the argument that learning to navigate situations and relationships where both parties are not of equal power is essential to both young women and men. Should these young adults, for we are not talking about high school students, be sheltered until they are 24 and in their first professional stop in their career. Comparing today's environment with her own experience as both a graduate student and later a teacher of graduate students she feels that today's youth is being ill served by all this protection from unequal and uncomfortable situations and relationships. I, have to say, I heartily agree.
Thin Places from Jordan Kisner from n+1 is a strong, very informative, essay about OCD. Beginning with a demonstration of the process of Deep Brain Stimulation which, although rare, has been used to some positive effect, on those patients afflicted with the worst cases of obsessive compulsive disorder. The author take us through history, the nineteenth century when " monomania " became a desired affinity, making oneself special in some way with an affliction. This moves to today when we might often hear people claiming themselves to be OCD about their house, or their garden, or their car, many different ways. These people are dealt with by the author stating that, like gluten disorders, OCD has become a chic disorder, especially for those that do not have it. As we are taken through the history of the disorder it is quick to see it is not chic, it is not to be desired, it is no picnic. As a diagnosed and under treatment obsessive I heartily concur. The numbers on affliction and disability as well as comorbidity with other unpleasant disorders should help any reasonable person see this is nothing to be desired. I did learn that nuerochemically the process of falling in love and an active OCD incident show in much the same way. The author does not, but one can easily see how this can be another avenue where one has to wonder at what point we acknowledge crime, in some cases, in many cases, to be nothing more than a nuerochemical event. Imagine a love struck obsessive who gets caught stalking a desired partner, at what point are we victims of our own brainwaves. An important essay about a too much joked about problem.
Of Human Carnage visits upon a young American couple traveling in South America who witness a brutal suicide as a man jumps into traffic. How they deal with and recover from that trauma is shown. In the essay titled Pyre and Indian American returns to India to take part in the funeral of his Mother, in fact, in being the oldest son, he lights the pyre.
Joyce Carol Oates writes " The Lost Sister : An Elegy. In this moving piece of writing we learn about Oates younger sister, born when she herself was eighteen who was very disabled with severe autism. Her parents, in an attempt Joyce believes to create a bond between the sisters two decades apart in age, had urged Joyce to come up with the baby's name. The name when chosen was Lynn Ann but her naming might have been the highlight of the baby's life and Jane's relationship to her. While Jane was at school it became evident something was seriously wrong. Oates takes us through the life of her sister, and her parents struggle to raise her, provide her, keep her safe from herself and the world. The author acknowledges she has not seen her sister since 1971 when, at the age of 15, she was placed in a facility. Lynn Ann was not mildly autistic and functioning. She was severely disabled, she never spoke, she never smiled, laughed, acknowledges another person's presence. She never made eye contact, or physical contact with anyone willingly. Her parents efforts to keep her home until she was fifteen are described as and were heroic. Still, one can see, that her parents protectiveness of their afflicted youngest had to change their relationship with Joyce and her brother. Later now, her parents long dead, she still has not seen her sister. Her brother who is Lynn's guardian has done so but only rarely, if she knows who he is he has no sign of it. The author decides any desire on her part to see her sister is for her own purposes and nothing to benefit her sister. Still, she acknowledges at some point she will have to follow through.
In The New England Review Jill Sisson Quinn published " Big Night " which in an exemplary way wrote about the one night a year that salamanders abandon their solitary lives to get together in an orgy of fertility rites. She contrasts this story with her and her husbands own battles with the process of becoming a parent. Infertility, adoption, what exactly is the desire that makes us want to be a parent. We learn a great deal about salamanders, such as that at any one time the total biomass of salamanders on Earth than that of all birds. Still, the primary focus, is on what has happened to her and her husband. The expense and mental pain of invitro, the cost of adoption and the various ways that process can malfunction. Her and her husband stop and start many times, something one can easily understand, but, at essay's end, have started the long process of adoption once again. Having had friends and family members go through all these trials and tribulations I wish them great luck and fortitude.
Everything Oliver Sacks writes is worthy of your time. " A General Feeling of Disorder " from The New York Review of Books " is a brief writing about a embolization procedure he underwent on his liver as he fought cancer. At this point he knew he was terminal but the hope was this would include his quality of life for a bit of time. It did and his writing about it was one of his last gifts to us.
An essay titled " Mason " appeared in Colorado Review. Written by Mason Stokes it is his story of growing up as a gay man. His family was very upset when he came out, even his favorite uncle, his namesake, the man he was named for expressed disappointment. This, in itself, is explored in great detail, because the author's uncle was one of those " confirmed bachelor's " that large families all seem to hold one or more of. After his Uncle dies we watch the author trying to piece together his Uncle's private life to determine if his hunch is true, that his Uncle himself was a gay man, a gay man from a different time and place.
There were several other essays and those might well have a better impact on other readers of different interests and sensibility. As is often the case with my reviews by the time I finished this review I have to acknowledge there was more of merit in this collection than I actually thought.
Essays of Note include Girl by the author Alexander Chee from Guernica magazine in which he writes about his experiences as a homosexual man in SAN Francisco and in particular in dressing up and going out in drag as well as his initial experiences with makeup as a young boy growing up in Maine.
Names, by Paul Crenshaw from Hobart, is a story about the use of nicknames, derogatory or otherwise, by members of a tight knit army unit and the purposes these colorful names serve.
The strongest, most relevant essay in the collection is the stunning " The Bonds of Battle " by Sebastian Junger, which was originally published in Vanity Fair. Junger explores recent studies of PTSD and its effects on different populations of soldiers and other domestic victims such as those of violent attacks. The information coming out of these studies is pretty amazing. Junger shows that the relative level of danger and violence in the experience of war is one of the least likely predictors of if a soldier will have a PTSD experience. It appears that PTSD is related in a much more demonstrable way with the environment that a soldier returns home to. The more a soldier feels separated from those that have knowledge and experience, and the rapidity of that separation is a high factor. Simply put, it is hard to stop being a soldier. It is even harder to stop being a soldier when few, if any, people in the life you return to have a similar experience in their background. Junger points out that the more separate a war is from the daily lives of those citizens left behind on the home front the harder it is for the retuning soldiers to adjust. In this case, shared sacrifice, shared experience, even shared thoughts, count a great deal. Today's environment of a professional military, mostly isolated from the rest of the citizens in both thought and deed, is a perfect breeding ground for feelings of isolation and trauma for the returning soldier. In fact the closer a war is geographically to the soldiers home country the less likely he or she is to experience trauma upon her return. The expression of " Thank you for your service " is shown to be a well meaning bit overall ineffective if not downright harmful statement to a returning soldier by pointing out how different he is than those he returns to. The essay goes into great detail, comparing the experience of a close knit army unit with the anthropology of ancient man and the communities they existed in. This is an important, should be mandatory, read, for anyone affiliated in anyway with the members of our military.
Laura Kipnis wrote an article called " Sexual Paranoia " in Chronicle Review in which she speaks of the recent prohibitions of contact between professors and students on college campuses. Speaking in a way that has been very controversially read she makes the argument that learning to navigate situations and relationships where both parties are not of equal power is essential to both young women and men. Should these young adults, for we are not talking about high school students, be sheltered until they are 24 and in their first professional stop in their career. Comparing today's environment with her own experience as both a graduate student and later a teacher of graduate students she feels that today's youth is being ill served by all this protection from unequal and uncomfortable situations and relationships. I, have to say, I heartily agree.
Thin Places from Jordan Kisner from n+1 is a strong, very informative, essay about OCD. Beginning with a demonstration of the process of Deep Brain Stimulation which, although rare, has been used to some positive effect, on those patients afflicted with the worst cases of obsessive compulsive disorder. The author take us through history, the nineteenth century when " monomania " became a desired affinity, making oneself special in some way with an affliction. This moves to today when we might often hear people claiming themselves to be OCD about their house, or their garden, or their car, many different ways. These people are dealt with by the author stating that, like gluten disorders, OCD has become a chic disorder, especially for those that do not have it. As we are taken through the history of the disorder it is quick to see it is not chic, it is not to be desired, it is no picnic. As a diagnosed and under treatment obsessive I heartily concur. The numbers on affliction and disability as well as comorbidity with other unpleasant disorders should help any reasonable person see this is nothing to be desired. I did learn that nuerochemically the process of falling in love and an active OCD incident show in much the same way. The author does not, but one can easily see how this can be another avenue where one has to wonder at what point we acknowledge crime, in some cases, in many cases, to be nothing more than a nuerochemical event. Imagine a love struck obsessive who gets caught stalking a desired partner, at what point are we victims of our own brainwaves. An important essay about a too much joked about problem.
Of Human Carnage visits upon a young American couple traveling in South America who witness a brutal suicide as a man jumps into traffic. How they deal with and recover from that trauma is shown. In the essay titled Pyre and Indian American returns to India to take part in the funeral of his Mother, in fact, in being the oldest son, he lights the pyre.
Joyce Carol Oates writes " The Lost Sister : An Elegy. In this moving piece of writing we learn about Oates younger sister, born when she herself was eighteen who was very disabled with severe autism. Her parents, in an attempt Joyce believes to create a bond between the sisters two decades apart in age, had urged Joyce to come up with the baby's name. The name when chosen was Lynn Ann but her naming might have been the highlight of the baby's life and Jane's relationship to her. While Jane was at school it became evident something was seriously wrong. Oates takes us through the life of her sister, and her parents struggle to raise her, provide her, keep her safe from herself and the world. The author acknowledges she has not seen her sister since 1971 when, at the age of 15, she was placed in a facility. Lynn Ann was not mildly autistic and functioning. She was severely disabled, she never spoke, she never smiled, laughed, acknowledges another person's presence. She never made eye contact, or physical contact with anyone willingly. Her parents efforts to keep her home until she was fifteen are described as and were heroic. Still, one can see, that her parents protectiveness of their afflicted youngest had to change their relationship with Joyce and her brother. Later now, her parents long dead, she still has not seen her sister. Her brother who is Lynn's guardian has done so but only rarely, if she knows who he is he has no sign of it. The author decides any desire on her part to see her sister is for her own purposes and nothing to benefit her sister. Still, she acknowledges at some point she will have to follow through.
In The New England Review Jill Sisson Quinn published " Big Night " which in an exemplary way wrote about the one night a year that salamanders abandon their solitary lives to get together in an orgy of fertility rites. She contrasts this story with her and her husbands own battles with the process of becoming a parent. Infertility, adoption, what exactly is the desire that makes us want to be a parent. We learn a great deal about salamanders, such as that at any one time the total biomass of salamanders on Earth than that of all birds. Still, the primary focus, is on what has happened to her and her husband. The expense and mental pain of invitro, the cost of adoption and the various ways that process can malfunction. Her and her husband stop and start many times, something one can easily understand, but, at essay's end, have started the long process of adoption once again. Having had friends and family members go through all these trials and tribulations I wish them great luck and fortitude.
Everything Oliver Sacks writes is worthy of your time. " A General Feeling of Disorder " from The New York Review of Books " is a brief writing about a embolization procedure he underwent on his liver as he fought cancer. At this point he knew he was terminal but the hope was this would include his quality of life for a bit of time. It did and his writing about it was one of his last gifts to us.
An essay titled " Mason " appeared in Colorado Review. Written by Mason Stokes it is his story of growing up as a gay man. His family was very upset when he came out, even his favorite uncle, his namesake, the man he was named for expressed disappointment. This, in itself, is explored in great detail, because the author's uncle was one of those " confirmed bachelor's " that large families all seem to hold one or more of. After his Uncle dies we watch the author trying to piece together his Uncle's private life to determine if his hunch is true, that his Uncle himself was a gay man, a gay man from a different time and place.
There were several other essays and those might well have a better impact on other readers of different interests and sensibility. As is often the case with my reviews by the time I finished this review I have to acknowledge there was more of merit in this collection than I actually thought.
June 29, 2017
An excellent anthology.
October 21, 2016
These books are always more about the editor than the best writing, I've found. They can be amazingly strong, as was last year's, or truly bad (one a few years ago was just incessant essays about death). This is...in the middle.
Many of the essays seem to be faux-edgy (lookit me, using 'fuck!' *yawn*) and the ones that are obviously chosen to push the social justice agenda (disclaimer: I am pro-social justice but anti-shoving-stuff-down-my-throat) are plagued with weak writing. Last year's had a number of essays about race which managed to also combine lyrical writing, fascinating structure--things that made them best ESSAYS and not best polemics.
Most of the writing, to be honest, was disappointingly weak. If these truly are the best essays that America produced in the last year, we're in trouble. I expect beautiful writing in these collections, such as Solnit or Purpura or even Dillard. I expect meditative writing, deep dives on insight and thought, and a valuation of language. Instead, this collection veers to the confessional, the sloppy confessional, without the art or lyricism in words. "Thin Places" is possibly the best example of this--something with great potential, but gets mired in the author's soppy wrangling.
There are a few decent essays, with those limitations. As always, Sacks's essay stands out as exactly what I want in these collections...but here it serves the point as showing how deficient the others are. Kipnis's "Sexual Paranoia" was fascinating to me, as an educator (who, frankly, always felt that sort of dating to be repugnant), but I'm not sure if I were not invested in education, if I'd have liked it quite as much. Similarly, Junger's essay--a nice study of PTSD, but it gets a little too preachy toward the end.
I guess it's a good record of 2016, where we do seem invested in preaching and telling people what to do, rather than inviting them to think. Let's hope 2017 is better.
Many of the essays seem to be faux-edgy (lookit me, using 'fuck!' *yawn*) and the ones that are obviously chosen to push the social justice agenda (disclaimer: I am pro-social justice but anti-shoving-stuff-down-my-throat) are plagued with weak writing. Last year's had a number of essays about race which managed to also combine lyrical writing, fascinating structure--things that made them best ESSAYS and not best polemics.
Most of the writing, to be honest, was disappointingly weak. If these truly are the best essays that America produced in the last year, we're in trouble. I expect beautiful writing in these collections, such as Solnit or Purpura or even Dillard. I expect meditative writing, deep dives on insight and thought, and a valuation of language. Instead, this collection veers to the confessional, the sloppy confessional, without the art or lyricism in words. "Thin Places" is possibly the best example of this--something with great potential, but gets mired in the author's soppy wrangling.
There are a few decent essays, with those limitations. As always, Sacks's essay stands out as exactly what I want in these collections...but here it serves the point as showing how deficient the others are. Kipnis's "Sexual Paranoia" was fascinating to me, as an educator (who, frankly, always felt that sort of dating to be repugnant), but I'm not sure if I were not invested in education, if I'd have liked it quite as much. Similarly, Junger's essay--a nice study of PTSD, but it gets a little too preachy toward the end.
I guess it's a good record of 2016, where we do seem invested in preaching and telling people what to do, rather than inviting them to think. Let's hope 2017 is better.
February 10, 2017
I like to use the most recent editon of the Best American Essays when I teach Creative Nonfiction—as a way of saying, here's what people who write "essays" are writing right now.
So this edition, like all of them, has some terrific pieces: sensitive, nuanced, well-crafted. But I have to say, in a year that brought us Trump. Syria, Brexit, the immigrant crisis, global warming, the Dakota Pipeline—why is so much of the "best" nonfiction writing about domestic scenes, sensitive kids and uncaring parents, drugs, and drinking, and existential loneliness? This edition seems intended as an illustration of the irrelevance of literature to the pressing concerns of our day. While I have no objection to any one of the pieces, as a group this is a terribly selected and edited collection.
So this edition, like all of them, has some terrific pieces: sensitive, nuanced, well-crafted. But I have to say, in a year that brought us Trump. Syria, Brexit, the immigrant crisis, global warming, the Dakota Pipeline—why is so much of the "best" nonfiction writing about domestic scenes, sensitive kids and uncaring parents, drugs, and drinking, and existential loneliness? This edition seems intended as an illustration of the irrelevance of literature to the pressing concerns of our day. While I have no objection to any one of the pieces, as a group this is a terribly selected and edited collection.
July 14, 2019
I started reading a book about how to write a memoir or a short story. Won't be writing one soon... The author, whose name I now forget, suggested reading a book from this series of The Best American Essays. I randomly chose 2016, no rationale at all behind it. Each year has a different editor, and there is quite a strict criteria on essays which are eligible within any one year for selection. Editor Jonathan Franzen in his Forward picks the idea of risk as the theme of the essays that he chooses. He has a broad definition of risk: encompassing any decision or process that could be threatening to the writer or someone in the story. The stories that stick in my mind come from a university professor who may or may not be sabotaging her career through relationships with students, a man doing US/Mexico border patrol work, a journalist reporting on PTS following a stint in Afghanistan, writer Joyce Carol Oates on her younger autistic sister. Some stories I didn't finish, one or two I just did not get at all. But they were all written from the heart, the writers taking moments from their lives and crafting intriguing and revealing reading.
The quality of writing as one would expect is outstanding, at times words so beautifully put together, I just did not want the essays to end. I read on line that this 2016 edition is not the best; this first timer certainly enjoyed it, and I have now got the 2015 edition, which apparently is better than 2016. Looking forward to that.
The quality of writing as one would expect is outstanding, at times words so beautifully put together, I just did not want the essays to end. I read on line that this 2016 edition is not the best; this first timer certainly enjoyed it, and I have now got the 2015 edition, which apparently is better than 2016. Looking forward to that.
October 15, 2016
I've read many of these anthologies, and I always have found essays that I have really enjoyed. However, I have to say that this 2016 edition offers the most variety of essays regarding content, tone and style that I have seen in a long time. I was thrilled to see work by Jill Sisson Quinn, who is one of my favorite authors, but I also loved the essays by Francisco Cantu, Sebastian Jungar, Amitava Kumar, and Mason Stokes. Finally, I can't say that I loved the essay, "Sexual Paranoia" by Laura Kipnis, but her words really made me think....A great collection that relays the state (which is a good state, I think) of the contemporary essay in America.
February 1, 2017
I like the smorgasbord of ideas in collections like this
May 12, 2017
This year's The Best American Essays was an eclectic and interesting collection. Again they feature personal reminisces over almost everything else, but once I've understood that's what they think essays are, I've accepted it. There's even an essay about salamanders ("Big Night" by Jill Sisson Quinn) that manages to tie into her life.
This year's book was guest edited by Jonathan Franzen, most notably known as the author of doorstop novels, but I found his selection pretty good. Of course, I have no idea what he passed over, but I was engaged by almost every essay. Many concerned disease or death, always pleasant topics. Consider the opening line of "Family Tradition," by Lisa Nikolidakis: "On my twenty-seventh birthday, in a two-bedroom bungalow in New Jersey, my father murdered his live-in girlfriend, her fifteen-year-old daughter, then shot himself. I never sensed the shots." Now that's a grabber.
There's also a fascinating essay about treatment for OCD by Jordan Kisner called "Thin Places," which starts with a description of a type of brain operation. The late Oliver Sacks, one of the greatest medical writers of all time, writes about migraines with "A General Feeling of Disorder," and Amitava Kumar lets Westerners know about Indian funeral rites in "Pyre," dealing with the death of his mother. For one thing, sons are expected to shave their heads. Justin Phillip Reed writes about the death of his uncle by lynching, and how it relates to death in movies, in "Killing Like They Do in Movies."
The prolific Joyce Carol Oates writes about her sister, who was institutionalized for severe autism, in "The Lost Sister," which is very moving. Oates hasn't seen her sister, eighteen younger than she, for more than forty years, and while that may sound harsh, it seems completely reasonable once the article is read.
In more buoyant topics, Charles Comey writes about that magic trip after the wedding in "Against Honeymoons," where we learn that the name Viagra resembles Niagara, a frequent honeymoon destination, on purpose. Irina Dumetrescu, in "My Father and the Wine," opens with "Now and then I click a link to find out what the hipsters are up to. The hipsters are raising chickens and
slaughtering them at home, I read; the hipsters are distilling hooch." Her father made wine.
Laura Kipnis writes a very controversial essay in "Sexual Paranoia," which takes on the statistics of college rape. Mostly she's writing that it's not so terrible when a student and a professor hook up/ "But somehow power seemed a lot less powerful back then. The gulf between students and faculty wasn't a shark-filled moat; a misstep wasn't fatal. We partied together, drank and got high together, slept together." Sticking with sex, I very much enjoyed Katherine E. Standefer's "In Praise of Contempt," which reads at times like a Penthouse Forum letter: "Back in the wash, night settles. Owls. The flutish, descending song of canyon wrens. Stars brightening. The rock ledge, radiating heat. Bats flutter over the wash. Some bird makes a kind of vibrating sound, high-pitched, almost electronic. Then my phone buzzes. It is a picture of his erect cock."
My favorite essay belongs to Jaquira Diaz for "Ordinary Girls," a remembrance of her time as a juvenile delinquent: "All those people, they just didn’t get that there was no way in hell we could care about homework, or getting to school on time—or at all—when our parents were on drugs or getting stabbed, and we were getting arrested or jumped or worse." I would love to have my sixth-grade students read this, but the profanity in it would get me fired. As if my students don't deal with profanity every day.
September 24, 2017
I just read the first essay in this book, Bajadas, for my AP Langage and Composition class and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I loved reading about the main character Cantu and his moral dilemma that came with being a border patrolman. Each character had a unique personality and backstory that I really enjoyed. I especially liked reading about the different Mexicans that tried to cross the border. Many of them were crossing to either find work or to be with their families. I thought that this was a new perspective to an ongoing issue that I had never really heard before. This moral dilemma that Cantú developed began after he started talking to the people that attempted to cross. One of these times came when Cantú brought one of the men that attempted to cross into the police station. He asked if he could do anything to help them out, to prove all he wanted to do in the United States was work. Cantú responded, "I know." After this, he began having dreams about dead bodies and him grinding all his teeth out so they fell out. I had never thought about how severe a toll this job must take on these border patrolmen until now. Overall, I think this essay was incredibly enlightening and approached a topic that many other stories do not. After reading Bajadas, I am very excited to read the following essays in this book.
September 24, 2017
Borders. Out of all subjects clattered in conversations of friends or strangers, “borders” seem to appear persistently everywhere in the world. The topic tiresomely evolves with heavy political tensions, too heavy that I’ve grown bored of this topic.
But I never regretted picking up Bajadas, although to be fair, it was an AP English Language and Composition assignment, of which I always grow a little tired. Bajadas, according to the dictionary, refers to the slope of alluvial at the foot of an escarpment or mountain. Francisco Cantu, the author of this uncanny essay, used this word as the title of his accounts for the experience as a Border Patrol agent. His experience at the border put me in discomfort, revealing the side of the renowned political topic that has never been exposed: humanitarian. Illegal immigration is a political crisis, but also one of human’s morality, thus Cantu was conflicted by his responsibility and sympathy towards the eerily beautiful human beings he encountered. His significance shift of perspective throughout the experience exposes the fault that we all are guilty of: looking at borders and illegal immigration as a radical problem belonging to the States, while neglecting the existence of suffering people who are just seeking for survival.
But I never regretted picking up Bajadas, although to be fair, it was an AP English Language and Composition assignment, of which I always grow a little tired. Bajadas, according to the dictionary, refers to the slope of alluvial at the foot of an escarpment or mountain. Francisco Cantu, the author of this uncanny essay, used this word as the title of his accounts for the experience as a Border Patrol agent. His experience at the border put me in discomfort, revealing the side of the renowned political topic that has never been exposed: humanitarian. Illegal immigration is a political crisis, but also one of human’s morality, thus Cantu was conflicted by his responsibility and sympathy towards the eerily beautiful human beings he encountered. His significance shift of perspective throughout the experience exposes the fault that we all are guilty of: looking at borders and illegal immigration as a radical problem belonging to the States, while neglecting the existence of suffering people who are just seeking for survival.
February 23, 2017
I have read these anthologies of essays for many years and usually think they are great. I had high expectations for this one because I think the 2016 anthology editor, Jonathon Franzen, is a terrific author but I was greatly disappointed. Most of these essays had flaws that made them seem uninteresting. Some were so personal that the essay topic got lost while others only seemed to be saying - look what a terrible world this is.
There were some good ones, though. Here are my favorites:
Of Human Carnage by Richard M. Lange, which starts out in Costa Rica where he observed a man commit suicide by throwing himself under a truck on a narrow road. This observation led to reflections on how many people have seen other people killed, which led to reflections on the history of war and carnage.
Bastards by Lee Martin was about a father who was always angry after an industrial accident in which his hands were cut off .
Big Night by Jill Sisson Quinn was about salamanders and not having success in the adopted child lottery.
Overall - too many downers in this particular anthology.
There were some good ones, though. Here are my favorites:
Of Human Carnage by Richard M. Lange, which starts out in Costa Rica where he observed a man commit suicide by throwing himself under a truck on a narrow road. This observation led to reflections on how many people have seen other people killed, which led to reflections on the history of war and carnage.
Bastards by Lee Martin was about a father who was always angry after an industrial accident in which his hands were cut off .
Big Night by Jill Sisson Quinn was about salamanders and not having success in the adopted child lottery.
Overall - too many downers in this particular anthology.
July 5, 2017
Yet another brilliant collection in this series. But this time my experience of reading it was a bit different. Normally I find almost all essays in these anthologies to be good, with some of course being my favorites for various reasons. This time there were quite a few essays here I couldn’t engage with, either because their topic was of no interest to me and the prose wasn’t strong enough to redeem the theme, or they were written in a quite pedestrian way (Chee’s and Kumar’s essays are examples of the latter; I was interested in their topics but found reflection to be flat, un-enlightening). However, there were also more absolutely outstanding works here than I usually find in this series. My top-top ones are Jordan Kisner’s Thin Places, Lisa Nikolidakis’s Family Tradition and Thoman Chatterton Williams’s Black and Blue and Blond. But there were at least 5 more excellent ones (okay then, I’ll list the authors – Diaz, Junger, Kipnis, Standefer, Stokes). As usual with these anthologies, I finished the book feeling a better, spiritually I dare say richer, human being than I was before reading it.
November 1, 2017
Though I know of Jonathan Franzan, I am not so into his writing so I had no idea of what to expect of this volume of the best American essays for 2016. The interesting thing about The Best American Essays Series is that while the curators are chosen and provided tons of choices (by Robert Atwan who has been doing this series forever and whose forwards make each book worth reading themselves) the final choices come together as a collection in a telling manner depending on who the guest curator is.
Franzan makes it clear that among the choices he was given, he chose his collection based on how much risk and daring the essays showed. His choices are great and the collection is a page turner.
Franzan makes it clear that among the choices he was given, he chose his collection based on how much risk and daring the essays showed. His choices are great and the collection is a page turner.
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