The Best American Essays, Series Editor Robert Atwan

Highlights of Poetry. Index of poetry. How to Write Poetry. Books read.

How to write specific forms: Haibun. Haiku. Hay(na)ku. Rengay. Tanka. Concrete. Ghazal. Lai. Pantoum. Prose poem. Rondeau. Rubáiyát. Sestina. Skaldic verse. Sonnet. Terza rima. Triolet. Tritina. Villanelle.

Poets: Adam Zagajewski. Aleda Shirley. Anne Carson. Bashō. The Beowulf Poet. Billy Collins. Billy Collins exercise. Snorri's Edda. Carl Dennis. Charles Atkinson. Chase Twichell. Corey Marks. François Villon Franz Wright. Galway Kinnell. Gary Young. The Gawain Poet. J. D. McClatchy. J. Zimmerman. J. Zimmerman (haiku). J. Zimmerman (tanka). Jack Gilbert. Jane Hirshfield. Jean Vengua. Jorie Graham. Karen Braucher. Karl Shapiro. Kay Ryan. Laureate Poets: Britain; USA. Len Anderson. Les Murray. Li-Young Lee. Linda Pastan. Louise Glück. Mary Oliver. Nordic Skalds. Pulitzer Poetry Prize (U.S.A). Rainer Maria Rilke Richard Hugo. Robert Bly. Sappho. Sara Teasdale. Shiki (haiku). Snorri's Edda. Stephen Dunn. Ted Kooser. W.S. Merwin.

Series Editor Robert Atwan. Compare with others in series: The Best American Essays: 2009; Guest Editor Mary Oliver. The Best American Essays: 2008; Guest Editor Adam Gopnik. The Best American Essays: 2007; Guest Editor David Foster Wallace.

Year:
2007 2008 2009
1996

Places of first publication.

The Best American Essays 2009

• Issue Guest Editor Mary Oliver.
• Slight 2-page introduction.
• 187 pages, 22 essays, some as small as 2 pages; mean page length of 8.5 pages per essay.
• Pretty good collection thought many of the choices seem rather close to the editor's style; all are touchy-feely rather than scientific.
• Favorites include:
  • Sue Allison's prose-poem scant-page essay "Taking a Reading" (names of measurements).
  • Wendell Berry's "Faustian Economics".
  • Brian Doyle's 2-page "The Greatest Nature Essay Ever".
  • Amy Leach's "You Be the Moon" (even if it's a little over-exuberant in its tropes).
  • Jill McCorkle's "Cuss Time" (one of the of wisest parental essays).
  • Ryan van Meter's "First".
  • Jerald Walker's "The Mechanics of Being" on living with his two blind parents.

The Best American Essays 2008

• Issue Guest Editor Adam Gopnik (staff writer at The New Yorker).
• Good 10-page introduction:

  The essay, in partial definition, is ... a shortish prose form in which the apparent object of the piece is different from its real subject, and the writer thinks he [sic] knows what the difference is. ... The essay begins with an ordinary subject — a goldfish dies — and ends, the essayist hopes, with an unexpected subject: what is death? [Pity that this is such a cliché example, Ed.] The essay differs from the lyrical poem (which does the same kind of thing) by being in prose, but also by being funny and by being clear — the essay is rarely ambiguous in itself, as the poem might have to be. It is closer to philosophy and psychology than to poetry and polemic. ... If a poet knows too exactly what the small object means for the big subject, in fact, it doesn't feel sufficiently poetic. ... Each one of these essayists asks the essayist's essential question, which is not the preacher's or polemicist's question — how shall we live? — but Montaigne's question: what does it feel like to be alive.

• 281 pages, 21 essays, mean page length of 13.4 pages per essay.
• A somewhat post-modern collection: sometimes I'm not sure if the author is sincere or taking the Mickey.
• Jonathan Lethem's tour de force "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism" (from Harper's Magazine) wins the annual "Redundancy" award.
• Favorites include:
  • Atul Gawande's thorough and deep meditation on "The Way We Age Now" (from The New Yorker).

    Chad Boult, the geriatrics professor now at Johns Hopkins, ... would direct geriatricians toward training all primary-care doctors in caring for the very old, instead of providing the care themselves. ... ninety-seven percent of medical students take no course in geriatrics. ... [and he's] recruiting local nurses for a highly compressed, three-week course in how to recognize specific problems of the elderly, such as depression, malnutrition, isolation, and danger of falling.

  • Hugh Raffles' "Cricket Fighting" (from Granta). Having grown up with the leisurely British game of cricket, I was intrigued by the title. Um, this essay concerns an entirely different kind of cricket. Were it not for Raffles' bio, this would be the strongest contender for the "taking the Mickey" prize.

  • Sam Shaw's "Run Like Fire Once More" (from Harper's Magazine) on "The Self-Transcendence 3,100", a foot slog of 5,649 circuits around a city block in Jamaica, Queens, which takes participants 6 to 8 weeks; "if they logged fewer than fifty miles on a given day, they risked disqualification". For the winner, Self-Transcendence Guru Sri Chimnoy "led the crowd in a triumph sing-along ... [and] dispense vanilla creme cookies". Shaw listens to a speech by the Guru: "I dutifully recorded what I could ... Now and then the Guru paused for a bite of creme cookie, and sounds of mastication crackled from the PA. My notes resembled a collection of haikus [sic]."

  • Lee Zacharias' "Buzzards" (from Southern Humanities Review). Even if he means "vultures" (Sibley has no buzzard; a British birding book would show it as referring to a large hawk, similar to the North American red-tail).

    On the ground a group of vultures is called a venue, but a group circling in the air is a kettle, as if they are swirling in a clear cauldron, a school of black fish swimming in a pure soup of air.

The Best American Essays 2007

• Issue Guest Editor David Foster Wallace.
• Delightful introduction.
• 22 essays
• A great collection of rich and intense work that fill the brain with well-written facts and connections.
• Possibly the best of these annuals read by 2010.
• See Places of first publication.

Edited and with an introduction by David Foster Wallace; Robert Atwan, series editor.

Atwan [p. xi] summarizes criteria for an essay's inclusion, ending:

To qualify for this volume, the essay must be a work of respectable literary quality, intended as a fully developed, independent essay on a subject of general interest (not specialized scholarship), originally written in English (or translated by the author) for publication in an American periodical during the calendar year. Today's essay is a highly flexible and shifting form, however, so these criteria are not carved in stone.

Be sure to read David Forster Wallace's Introduction: Deciderization 2007 -- A Special Report. :

I think it's unlikely that anyone is reading this as an introduction. Most of the people I know treat Best American Essays like Whitman Samplers. They skip around, pick and choose ... Which means that the reader has more freedom of choice, which of course is part of what this country is all about. ... The guest editor's intro is last, if at all.  ... your guest editor is not really even the main sub-subcontractor on this job. The real Decider, in terms of processing info and reducing entropy, is Mr. Robert Atwan, the BAE series editor ... he's really the one doing the full-time reading and culling.  Given the amount of quiet, behind-the-scenes power he wields over these prize collections, you're entitled to ask about Mr. Atwan's standard's for inclusion and forwarding; [Here Wallace gives us the footnote for this page; he displays affection for peppered and peppery footnotes: I believe this is what is known in the nonfiction industry as a transition. We are starting to poke tentatively at 'Best', which is the most obviously fraught and bias-prone word on the cover. J.Z.] but he's far too experienced and cagey to encourage these sorts of questions. ...  I, on the other hand, have a strict term limit. After this, I go forever back to being an ordinary civilian and BAE reader (except for the introductions). I therefore feel free here to try for at least partial transparency about my Decidering criteria, some of which are obviously — let's be grownups and just admit it — subjective. ...  But it is possible for something to be both a quantum of information and a vector of meaning.

Of the essays themselves, favorites are:

• Ian Buruma's "The Freedom to Offend" (6 pp.) from The New Republic, which ends:

  It certainly was necessary to educate the mainstream of democratic societies to respect the rights of minorities, but now immigrants and their offspring must learn that to be offended is the price we all must pay for our freedom of speech and freedom of thought. Since many immigrants come from places where such freedom does not exist, they should be the first to appreciate its benefits.

• Mark Danner's "Iraq: The War of the Imagination" (34 pp.) from The New York Review of Books.

• George Gessert's "An Orgy of Power" (13 pp.) from Northwest Review, which includes:

  Documents surfaced, such as the so-called torture memo of August 1, 2002, showing that very close associates of President Bush, apparently with his full approval, had encouraged torture.  Lions and hyenas kill swiftly. Housecats play with their victims, but only to practice pouncing, not to cause pain. Tapeworms and the shingles virus keep their victims alive as sources of sustenance, not to cause pain. Only humans torture.   ... The deeper our society descends into militarism, one-party rule, and rule by a single branch of government, the more embedded the practice of torture will become in American life.

• Malcolm Gladwell's "What the Dog Saw" (17 pp.) from The New Yorker, about Cesar Millan, bringer of discipline to undisciplined, biting dogs:

  "She's not apologizing. ... If she was sorry," Cesar said softly, "she wouldn't do it in the first place."

• Garret Keizer's "Loaded" (7 pp.) from Harper's Magazine, which ends:

  Give me some people with very fanatical ideas about the sanctity of habeas corpus and the length of time an African American or any other American ought to wait in line to vote. Give me some people who are not so evolved that they have forgotten what it is to stand firm under fire or even to squat near the fire in a cave. Give me an accountant who can still throw a rock.

• John Lahr's "Petrified" (11 pp.), also from The New Yorker, which deals with stage fright, and has this telling quotation about Carly Simon:

  Simon has found that physical pain often trumps psychological terror. "If you have something that's hurting you physically, the pain is the hierarchy [sic]," she said. To that end, she has been known to take the stage in tight boots, to jab her hand with clutched safety pins, and even, just before going on, to ask band members to spank her.

• Elaine Scarry's "Rules of Engagement" (25 pp.) from Boston Review, about the U.S.A.'s resort to treachery, torture, and other "neo-absolutist practices".

• Philosopher Roger Scruton's "A Carnivore's Credo" (7 pp.) from Harper's Magazine explores the issue of whether to eat animals, which occurs in Environmental Ethics:

  The moral life, I believe, rests on three pillars: value, virtue, and duty. Some hold that all the weight can be made to rest on only one of them: value, according to utilitarians; duty, according to their deontological opponents. Whether or not any such reductions can be successfully carried out. we cannot give a coherent account of the moral life without doing justice to all the conceptions that support it -- to value, virtue, and duty -- and showing their place, for human beings, in the good life. ... That which distinguishes us from animals -- our predicament as self-conscious and judging creatures -- ... comes immediately to life when we consider the question of eating. Whether or not we think eating people is wrong, we do not think it is on a par with eating other animals.   ... I would suggest that it is not only permissible for those who care about animals to eat meat; they have a duty to do so. If meat eating should ever become confined to those who do not care about animal suffering, then compassionate farming would cease. Where there are conscientious carnivores, there is a motive to raise animals kindly. Moreover, conscientious carnivores show their depraved [sic] contemporaries that there is a right and a wrong way to eat. Duty requires us, therefore, to eat our friends.

• Bioethicist Peter Singer's "What Should a Billionaire Give -- and what should you" (15 pp.) from The New York Times Magazine, which ends:

  More important than questions about motives are questions about whether there is an obligation for the rich to give, and if so how much should they give.

  More at Environmental Ethics Blog.

The Best American Essays 1996

Includes the essay "Owls" by Mary Oliver, also available in two of her collections:

• Blue Pastures (1995).
• Owls and Other Fantasies (2003).

Places of first publication before essay appeared in
The Best American Essays

Journal of first publication	2009	2008	2007
AARP MAgazine	2009
The American Scholar	2009		2007
Boston Review			2007
California			2007
Condé Naste Portfolio	2009
Ecotone	2009
Granta			2007
Harvard Review	2009
Harper's Magazine	2009	2008	2007
Georgia Review, The		2008
The Gettysburg Review	2009
Granta		2008
The Iowa Review	2009		2007
Lapham's Quarterly	2009
The Literary Review	2009
Los Angeles		2008
The Missouri Review	2009
Mid-American Review	2009
n + 1			2007
National Geographic	2009	2008
New Republic, The			2007
New York		2008
New York Times Book Review, The			2007
New York Times Magazine, The			2007
New York Review of Books, The		2008	2007
New Yorker, The		2008	2007
Northwest Review			2007
Open City		2008
Orion	2009
PEN America	2009
Pinch		2008
PMS		2008	2007
Portland	2009
Prarie Schooner		2008
A Public Space	2009
Salmagundi		2008
Southern Humanities Review		2008
StoryQuarterly			2007
The Sun	2009
Swink		2008
Threepenny Review, The			2007
Tin House			2007
Transition		2008
TriQuarterly			2007
Vanity Fair		2008
The Virginia Quarterly Review	2009

Loved it: decoder ring

I marked with a star an essay that I liked particularly, and with more than one star if I loved it. Approximate ratings (your kilometerage may vary):

• Amazingly brilliant. 9/10 on the Blog-ometer.
• Loved it. 8/10 on the Blog-ometer.
• Pretty good. 7/10 on the Blog-ometer.
• Not very good. 6/10 or under on the Blog-ometer.

Links and Books

Links and Books.

• Laureate: the Poets Laureate of Britain
• Laureate: the Poets Laureate of the U.S.A.
• Best Poems by the Best Poets - Some Lists of Winners.
• Other Books of Poetry Form.

Related pages: Books of Poetry Form. Alphabetic list of poetry forms, etc. Poetry Home. How to Write Poetry.

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