The Best American Essays 2023
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic observations of the world around them. From an inmate struggling to find purpose during his prison sentence to a doctor coping with the unpredictable nature of her patient, to a widow wishing for just a little more time with her late husband, these narratives—and the others featured in this anthology—celebrate the endurance of the human spirit.
The Best American Essays 2023 includes Ciara Alfaro • Jillian Barnet • Sylvie Baumgartel • Eric Borsuk • Chris Dennis • Xujun Eberlein • Sandra Hager Eliason • George Estreich • Merrill Joan Gerber • Debra Gwartney • Edward Hoagland • Laura Kipnis • Phillip Lopate • Celeste Marcus • Sam Meekings • Sigrid Nunez • Kathryn Schulz • Anthony Siegel • Scott Spencer • Angelique Stevens • David Treuer
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this solid entry in the long-running anthology series, editor Gornick (Taking a Long Look) brings together pieces that share the "strong, clear sound of a narrating voice that, in and of itself, is the organizing principle behind the essay." Reflecting Gornick's background as a memoirist and critic, the selections largely consist of personal narratives and cultural commentary. In the former camp, standouts include Eric Borsuk's "Bidders of the Din," which traces the author's efforts to find "purpose" and "redemption" by writing a memoir during his seven-year stint in federal prison for stealing rare manuscripts from a university library, and Merrill Joan Gerber's masterful "Revelation at the Food Bank," about the indignities of aging and the small resentments that accumulated over her 62 years of marriage to her husband. In the latter category, Kathryn Schulz's discerning analysis of James Salten's novel Bambi studies how the Disney adaptation softened the original's vision of life as a brutal dog-eat-dog competition for survival, and Phillip Lopate's critique of the haughty intellectuals represented in a 1960 Partisan Review issue lambasts the snobbish tone of such writers as Lionel Abel, Leslie Fiedler, and Richard Wollheim. It's an eclectic, accomplished collection rich in variety and talent.
