The Best American Essays 1998 features a captivating mix of people and prose, as guest editor Cynthia Ozick shapes a volume around the intricacies of human memory. The reflections and recollections of Saul Bellow, John Updike, Jamaica Kincaid, John McPhee, and Andre Dubus join company with many voices new to the series, as an astonishing variety of writers share their deepest thought on ecstasy and injury, ambition and failure, privacy and notoriety.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
This is the sort of collection series editor Robert Atwan undoubtedly had in mind when he started this series 10 years ago: accessible and informative essays that cover everything from history to current events, from nature to pop culture. James Fenton writes that Michelangelo was so paranoid about competition that he "surrounded himself deliberately with no-hopers"; Adam Gopnik reveals that Queen Victoria's son Leopold wanted to marry the girl who inspired Alice in Wonderland; Julie Baumgold notes that Elvis Presley's colon was "two feet too long, and twisted"; and, according to Gordon Grice, a black widow's web is designed to let its creator discern, at a distance, the difference "between a raindrop or leaf and viable prey." Unlike past editions, some themes echo in Ward's choices: Joan Acocella's piece on Willa Cather and Gerald Early's on Afrocentrism both warn of the danger of manipulating facts to suit an agenda, while William Cronon and Jonathan Raban muse on the yuppification of nature. As Cronon puts it, "celebrating wilderness has been an activity mainly for well-to-do city folks" who never "had to work the land" for a living. Meanwhile Raban leaves the comfortable city to freeze his fingers on a winter fly-fishing expedition. The beauty of this collection is that while each essay was created independently, together they create a picture of what's relevant in North America as the 20th century comes to a close. As a collection, they more than live up to the superlative in the title.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Thanks to the wide-ranging interests of guest editor Ward, a columnist for American Heritage and the author of histories (e.g., The West, LJ 8/96), there are some memorable moments in this tenth edition of Robert Atwan's best essays series. James Alan McPherson's "Crabcakes," a stunning transcendental meditation on returning to the author's former home in Baltimore on the death of his tenant, is one essay (originally published in Doubletake) that most readers will not have seen before. Gordon Grice's "Black Widow" (High Plains Literary Review) is a chilling excursus on the author's fascination with the spider, while Julie Baumgold's "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Elvis" (Esquire) tenderly puts to rest America's adulation of the rocker. Gerald Early's "Understanding Afrocentrism" (Civilization) and Darryl Pinckney's "Slouching Toward Washington" (New York Review of Books) take on some hard-hitting issues in the African American community. Numerous essays from the New Yorker are represented, notably Nicholson Baker's much-discussed "Books as Furniture." Essential for literature collections.?Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A collection of brilliance -- the best art form,
By Meagan Taylor (llightfields@hotmail.com) (Los Angeles, California) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Best American Essays 1998 (Paperback)
Being of a younger generation, my acquaintances are generally surprised to find me reading a collection of essays. This provides me with a golden opportunity to share the wealth I have found in this book. Not only have the essayists here provoked thought and surprising emotion from me, but this art has pushed me in a new direction. Witnessing all of the unexpected beauty pouring from this book has made me want to write essays. I cannot wait to get my hands on the rest of this series. Fiction has been moved to the back burner. I am forever grateful.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A treasury for the reader's imagination,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Best American Essays 1998 (Paperback)
I found this series a couple of years ago, and each issue is a treasure to enjoy. I often find myself reading about things outside my experience, outside what I expect to be interested in - and every time I learn and think and imagine and am given pleasure in the reading. The essay form, in the hands of these writers, is a grand and various opportunity for thought and exploration of grand themes and of the minutiae of human life.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Genre-bending a Mistake,
By
This review is from: The Best American Essays 1998 (Paperback)
This collection of essays is interesting and many of them are excellent, but the inclusion of Coetzee's piece confounds me. His "essay" describes the trip of a famous Australian writer, Elizabeth Costello, who goes with her son to receive an award and makes a speech about Realism and Kafka. "Oh good," I thought, "an author to explore. Her novel sounds interesting." My mind began to waver when the prose followed her son in a sexual experience at the conference. "Wow," I thought. "Coetzee must do quite an interview to elicit this kind of frank material." At the end of the piece, her son is looking down into the sleeping writer's nose and throat and thinking about where he came from. Clearly, this is not an essay.
This is not entirely Coetzee's fault, though he must have given permission to have this chapter from his novel (titled Elizabeth Costello) included as an essay. It's not an essay. It's fiction. And though there is a lot of heady intellectualizing, it's done by a fictional character, not by the author speaking for himself. It might go better into an anthology of short fiction, for example. This genre-bending seems like a big mistake to me. It makes me wonder if Hoagland really has a farm, or if he just writes about someone who does. As a teacher and practitioner of creative nonfiction, I am quite certain that the contract between essay writer and reader is that the writer will not make things up. The writer will tell the truth of his or her lived experience. If that contract is broken, all bets are off. My two cents on this. I realize that 1998 was a while ago, and I'm ready to let by-gones be by-gones and move on. But honestly! --LA Abraham
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