No collection of essays can match the Best American series for the variety of subjects explored, the first-rate quality of pieces, and the eclectic approaches to the genre gathered in its pages each year. With characteristic flair, it provides that rare and refreshing opportunity for readers to take stock of the year's most distinguished and provocative nonfiction. Continuing the celebrated tradition, the 1995 edition dazzles and surprises with its inventive, colorful cornucopia of essays drawn from periodicals across the country. Showcased here are the preeminent pieces from the Los Angeles Times and The New Yorker, from Harper's Magazine and The Alaska Quarterly Review, written by some of today's finest prose stylists, including Edward Hoagland, Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, William Gass, John Edgar Wideman, and Joseph Brodsky. Guest editor Jamaica Kincaid, one of America's most illustrious storytellers and essayists, has culled her top twenty choices, assembling works of remarkable su
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Readers expecting Kincaid's choices for best American essays to reflect her own fiction style-i.e., taut and direct-are bound to be disappointed. There are some accessible pieces-Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s on African American hair and Maxine Kumin's on gardening stand out as the kind of engaging and illuminating essays that readers have come to expect from this annual collection. But these pieces-as well as memoirs by Grace Paley, John Edgar Wideman and Tobias Wolff-are overwhelmed by pedantic ramblings that uneasily straddle the line between intellectual and pretentious. Consider this: Josephine Foo's title, "Endou" had to be footnoted (it means "endow")-and the content's not much more accessible or Elaine Scarry's "Counting At Dusk (Why Poetry Matters When the Century Ends)" which includes convoluted prose like this: "Against this impossibility of experiential sequence is the poet's own act of lifting forward, making sensuously available, the phenomenon of sequence." Perhaps Kincaid appreciates this sort of writing. But this series isn't supposed to be a forum for abstruse musings-that's what academic specialty journals are for.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Guest editor Kincaid delivers a satisfying if wonderless selection in this year's Best. From Joseph Brodsky's weighty "Homage to Marcus Aurelius," which opens the collection, to Elaine Scarry's academic "Counting at Dusk (Why Poetry Matters When the Century Ends)," Kincaid has brought out the heavy guns. William H. Gass's "The Art of Self," a long-winded, solipsistic take on biography, is juxtaposed with Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s humorous childhood depiction of "good" and "bad" black hair in "In the Kitchen." Edward Hoagland offers bittersweet remembrances of cheating on his wife in "Strange Perfume" and Cynthia Ozick of her six days without pen or paper in Greenwich Village's Women's House of Detention. Maxine Kumin's "Jicama, Without Expectation," a diary of the growing season from her farm, punctuates the collection like a sudden, refreshing shower. The essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Artes, Harper's, the Threepenny Review, and others. For literature collections.?Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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The best American essays of 1995, need I say the more?,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Best American Essays 1995 (Paperback)
Essays are perhaps the greatest literary form in history;the good ones are always a pleasure to read, the best ones touch us, arouses something deep inside in our heart and mind, and all of them are short, usually under thirty minutes to read. So, when there is an annual anthology of the best American essays, how can one resist? The entries span a wide range, from Marcus Aurelius to homosexuality to gardening. And although there is no unifying theme, all of the authors showcase the power of pure, unrestrained writing, the brilliance often missing from today's commercial periodicals
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