The Best American Essays 2004
- Book Review,
by Louis Menand (Editor)
From Publishers Weekly
Medical trauma is a recurrent theme in the latest edition of Houghton Mifflin’s popular Best American reprints series, which is edited this year by The Metaphysical Club author Menand. In her essay "An Enlarged Heart," poet Cynthia Zarin recalls the anxiety and helplessness of caring for a seriously ill child. "A Sudden Illness" by Laura Hillenbrand (Seabiscuit) chronicles her fight against an untreatable illness that would confine her to bed for days at a time. And Gerald Stern’s "Bullet in My Neck" reveals that the author is so accustomed to his injury that he never thinks of it, "only when the subject comes up and someone—full of doubt or amazement—gingerly reaches a hand out to feel it." Menand also selects several pieces of cultural criticism: Rick Moody’s "Against Cool," Alex Ross’s "Rock 101" and Wayne Koestenbaum’s head-spinning tour of the explosion of AIDS in New York during the 1980s. Humor makes appearances in Anne Fadiman’s "The Arctic Hedonist" and Leonard Michael’s recollection of growing up in New York’s Jewish culture, "My Yiddish." But it’s the artful, unsentimental examination of personal experience—stunningly exemplified in Kathryn Chetkovich’s "Envy"—that really glues these disparate pieces together. Only two them—Jared Diamond’s essay on the inevitability of environmental devastation and Adam Gopnik’s extended critique of the Matrix Reloaded—dispense with the first-person altogether. Although regular readers of the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Threepenny Review and Granta may have encountered at least a few of these works before, each of these essays merits rereading. They may even be improved by each other’s fine company.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
One of the many pleasures found in each year's incarnation of this consistently refined and lively series is the guest editor's introductory essay. It will come as no surprise that Louis Menand, author of the highly acclaimed The Metaphysical Club (2001), begins by musing over the metaphysical properties of writing, particularly what we mean by voice, but his description of writing as a form of singing is unexpected and felicitous, as is his confession that he chose most of these essays by ear. So whose voices seduced Menand? James Agee, in a long-lost and hard-hitting rumination on hatred and violence, and, in another discovery, Tennessee Williams, on becoming a playwright. Then there's Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond on the collapse of civilizations and today's precarious environmental realities; Laura Hillenbrand, author of the best-selling Seabiscuit (2001), on her horrendous bout with chronic fatigue syndrome; as well as Cynthia Ozick, Kyoko Mori, Luc Sante, the poet Gerald Stern, and 14 other superb stylists and crisp thinkers. Menand's selections make for a particularly stimulating and sonorous essay collection. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind. Here you will find another "splendid array of unpredictable and delectable essays" (Booklist), chosen by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Louis Menand, another collection with "delights on every page" (Dallas Morning News). The Best American Essays once again earns its place as the liveliest and leading annual of its kind.
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