The Best American Essays 2004 [Hardcover]

Louis Menand (Editor), Robert Atwan (Editor)

Book Description

Series: Best American Essays | Publication Date: October 14, 2004

Since 1986, The Best American Essays has gathered the best nonfiction writing of the year, establishing itself as the best-selling anthology of its kind.
In this year's edition Louis Menand writes, "Most of the essays in this volume were picked by ear. I was searching for voices. Some are cool and some are anti-cool. I like both. There are many subjects here -- for the subject, to a point, doesn't matter. Still, as a reader, my favorite kind of essay is the one that makes a lost time present -- the essay that tells me how it was in New York City in the 1970s, or on a Manhattan bus in the 1940s, or at a midwestern high school, or during a summer on Cape Cod." Selfishly -- and why shouldn't an editor be selfish? -- I like to read stories about my own times. I never get tired of it. I feel as though I could do it forever, and I probably will." Jonathan Franzen remembers emblematic late nights on the high school roof, Wayne Koestenbaum revisits his own literary coming of age in the 1980s, and Rick Moody's exegesis of cool is set against the disclaimer that "I was and am an interloper. I am, in fact, uncool." This volume opens with an extraordinary find from Oxford American: a previously unpublished work by James Agee, the author of A Death in the Family and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. "America, Look at Your Shame!," discovered misfiled with Agee's poetry manuscripts, underscores a searing personal awakening that feels as essential now as it did when it was first written sixty years ago.

Editorial Reviews

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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; None edition (October 14, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618357068
• ISBN-13: 978-0618357062
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,396,486 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Strong Collection Worthy of Title's Name, October 11, 2004

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M. JEFFREY MCMAHON "herculodge" (Torrance, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Best American Essays 2004 (The Best American Series) (Paperback)

Seven of the twenty-two essays collected here are from The New Yorker, no big surprise, but overall this is, in terms of subject matter, style, and tone, a diverse collection. Here are some highlights:

1. "Envy" by Kathryn Chetkovich. In this autobiographical essay, Chetkovich, an obscure short story writer, chronicles her romance to Jonathan Franzen who with his novel The Corrections becomes a publishing phenon, making her consumed with guilt for experiencing, against her own will, envy. She combines narrative with a sharp analysis of the causes and effects of envy in her life and shows how the condition is a universal one.

2. "Caught" by Jonathan Franzan. Franzan writes about his high school years as a misfit trying to find belonging among the hipsters by challenging authority and the icons of authority. An amazing feat, he writes a comical narrative combined with a penetrating analysis of the pitfalls of adolescence.

3. "A Sudden Illness" by Laura Hillenbrand. The author of the famous nonfiction book Seabiscuit which was made into a hit film, the author traces the origins of a consuming fatigue disease for which no real specific diagnosis can be found. The result is a lack of sympathy from others and a heroic struggle for which she somehow, as a sort of miracle, wrote Seabiscuit.

4. "The Last Americans" by Jared Diamond. Diamond compares our piggish, consumer-obsessed country with other fallen empires and refutes the fallacies and misconceptions that afflict us: our dismissal of the environment as a crucial part of our survival; our blind faith in technlogy to cure all our woes; our tendency to demonize environmentalists as extremist crackpots who are overstating their catastrophic predictions.

5. "Against Cool" by Rick Moody. Denying that he is cool, Moody, in a sneaky rhetorical technique, proves just how cool he is by giving us a thorough, definitive, and historical definition of cool.

6. "Arrow and Wound" by Mark Slouka. Somehow Slouka takes an ambitious, philosophical theme of human suffering, mortality, and our intuitive ability to prepare for our agony and makes the theme both accessible and readable, quoting Kafka, Dostoesvsky, and the poet Jaroslav Seifert and weaves their philosphical ruminations into a frightening and bizarre narrative he experienced.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 22 tasty, nourishing servings of brain food, December 31, 2004

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cs211 "cs211" (United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Best American Essays 2004 (The Best American Series) (Paperback)

"The Best American Short Stories" may be more popular, but "The Best American Essays" anthology is an even better choice for readers seeking the utmost in nourishment for the brain. The twenty-two selections chosen by Louis Menand, which cover a wide variety of topics, are all exceedingly well written, mind expanding, and, to a high degree, personal, in that they reveal something about the author as well as the subject matter. In spite of the two minor flaws of Menand's selections (discussed below), this collection will definitely reward the reader seeking substantive reading material.

The two most powerful essays in the book are two of the most personal. Kathryn Chetkovich's "Envy" pulls no punches in her analysis of how she reacted to the success experienced by her boyfriend and fellow writer, Jonathan Franzen, who rocketed to literary stardom in 2001 with "The Corrections". Interestingly, Chetkovich doesn't name Franzen, but Menand chose also to include an essay by him ("Caught"), which, although interesting, doesn't have the same emotional depth or power as Chetkovich's essay. The other extraordinary essay in the collection is Laura Hillenbrand's "A Sudden Illness", which describes her incredible struggle with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Her personal story is every bit as poignant as the story of the racehorse Seabiscuit, which she chronicled in her best-selling book.

Other essays of note, I feel, include Luc Sante's "My Lost City", which actually celebrates the crime-ridden, graffiti-covered, anarchic, decaying, pre-Rudy Giuliani New York of the 1980s, and Oliver Sacks' "The Mind's Eye", which describes differences in the extent to which several blind people use visualization techniques, thereby illustrating the power of (and structural differences among) human brains.

As for the minor complaints: Menand openly admits, "I like to read stories about my own times." This bias shows up most obviously in the inclusion of an essay by a CUNY colleague of Menand's: Wayne Koestenbaum's "My `80s" will likely not at all resemble your `80s unless you are a NYC opera buff who kept up with the cutting edge of male homosexual intelligentsia literature. The other complaint is that a small number of essays exhibit the stereotypical upper West side salon superior-than-though attitude which sneers at red state values and culture (e.g. Fox News). Of course, if you are of a similar opinion, this won't bother you a bit. However, one essay takes this attitude to completely illogical extremes: Jared Diamond's "The Last Americans", which somehow claims a linkage between Enron's financial shenanigans and global warming (hey, it's all George Bush's fault, right?). Diamond's essay will leave some readers fuming and others shaking their heads, while still others applaud, but it will cause all readers to think, as do all the essays in this collection. Thus, Menand has created a collection well worth spending the time to read and ponder.

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Writing That Makes You Think, December 28, 2004

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takingadayoff "takingadayoff" (Las Vegas, Nevada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Best American Essays 2004 (The Best American Series) (Paperback)

As a longtime fan of the Best American Series, I have a few suggestions for the editors: 1) Change "American" to "English Language" so that you can include the outstanding essays that appear in Canada, Australia, Great Britain, and beyond; and 2) Don't forget to consider the great essays that appear in online publications such as Slate.com and Salon.com.

In spite of these omissions, the 2004 issue of Best American Essays is excellent. The range is broad - these essays are all over the place, from Susan Orleans's amusing visit to a taxidermy convention to Kathryn Chetkovich's confession of jealousy of her boyfriend's (the never-named Jonathan Franzen) success as a writer.

Two of the essays were written decades ago, one by Tennessee Williams and one by James Agee, but newly rediscovered in 2004. Jared Diamond and Oliver Sacks are informative yet readable as usual and well worth your time. One of my favorites was an off-the-wall essay about knitting from the Harvard Review by Kyoko Mori. I have never knitted and would not have thought that an essay about yarn could be so entertaining.