World Famous Comics: The Best American Essays 2006 (The Best American Series (TM))
The Best American Essays 2006 (The Best American Series (TM))
From: Houghton Mifflin Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Houghton Mifflin Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 304 Publication Date: October 11, 2006
Product Description: "The essays in this volume are powerful, plainspoken meditations on birthing, dying, and all the business in between," writes Lauren Slater in her introduction to the 2006 edition. "They reflect the best of what we, as a singular species, have to offer, which is reflection in a context of kindness. The essays tell hard-won tales wrestled sometimes from great pain."
The twenty powerful essays in this volume are culled from periodicals ranging from The Sun to The New Yorker, from Crab Orchard Review to Vanity Fair. In "Missing Bellow," Scott Turow reflects on the death of an author he never met, but one who "overpowered me in a way no other writer had." Adam Gopnik confronts a different kind of death, that of his five-year-old daughter's pet fish -- a demise that churns up nothing less than "the problem of consciousness and the plotline of Hitchock's Vertigo."
A pet is center stage as well in Susan Orlean's witty and compassionate saga of a successful hunt for a stolen border collie. Poe Ballantine chronicles a raw-nerved pilgrimage in search of salvation, solace, and a pretty brunette, and Laurie Abraham, in "Kinsey and Me," journeys after the man who dared to plumb the mysteries of human desire. Marjorie Williams gives a harrowing yet luminous account of her life with cancer, and Michele Morano muses on the grammar of the subjunctive mood while proving that "in language, as in life, moods are complicated, but at least in language there are only two."
Strong, often powerfully moving essays, but monochromatically dark One would expect that a collection of essays that aspires to contain America's best would be like an abstract mosaic: a grouping of differently colored and sized pieces with no easily discernible overall theme, just very subtle ones related to the quality of the art and whatever happens to be prominent in the national consciousness that year. Some of the pieces would be dark, some would be brightly colored; some jagged, others smooth.
The format of The Best American series is to have a guest editor (in this case Lauren Slater, author of "Prozac Diary") make the final choice for the pieces included in each volume. The guest editor thus has considerable power to shape the volume to their liking. A few guest editors (I've read this series for years) appear to aspire to uphold the series claim to be a collection of the best of that year's writing. More often, as is the case with Slater's selections here, the guest editor appears to put their strong personal stamp on the volume, selecting works that appeal to the guest editor's particular biases, which might be biases of subject matter, theme, tone, or (less often, thankfully) politics.
The essays Slater selected are nearly all well-written, powerful, and moving. However, they are almost entirely dark in tone, and their subject matter often focuses on personal tragedies that have happened to the authors. Here are some opening sentences (or near opening sentences) to provide a flavor of what the reader of this volume must consume: "Outside of a psychotic who attacked me a few months ago...", "I don't seem to suffer the pains of anguish that many women whose mothers have died feel...", "When our five-year-old daughter Olivia's goldfish, Blueie, died the other week...", "I woke to a downpour the March morning in 1989 when I had to identify my mother's body at the New York City morgue...", "It was the beginning of what would turn out to be a very bad day...", "This summer I had to put my dog George to sleep...", "Even during the last nine months of her life...", "In 1989, however, Pat's husband died suddenly of a heart attack...", "The dog that mauled me...", "In the elevator going down from the seventeenth floor, everyone is crying...", "The beast first showed its face benignly...".
I almost gave this volume five stars for the quality of the essays, but I decided to deduct a star due to the dark tone of nearly all the selections. What other essays, more positive in tone and outlook, were available to Slater but didn't make it into this volume?
its good i have no issue with the product...jus the delivering of the product. it took about a week and a 3 days for me to receive my book. i ordered three books at once and i just received my last book about a week ago. mind you...i purchased the set a month ago
mediocre It's not that there weren't a few good essays, because there was, just no truly great esssays, the kind you want to anthologize forever. At least there were no truly bad essays, but most were mediocre or average. Not what I've come to expect this series.
Good sampling of American Prose As a high school AP English teacher, I love this series as an overview of current American prose. This particular year's collection is not my favorite, but it does present an assortment of strong writing styles and an interesting cross-section of American essays from a variety of publications.
Extremely dissappointed with selection I can not imagine what Lauren Slater was thinking about when she chose these essays as the best American essays of 2006. They range from the infantile to the salacious. Surely there were some other essays written in 2006 that could have better been awarded the title of Best Essay. I was extremely dissappointed in this book.
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