The Best American Essays 2001

by Atwan, Bob

• ISBN13: 9780618153589
• ISBN10: 0618153586
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-10-10
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads hundreds of pieces from dozens of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind.From The New Yorker to The Georgia Review, from Esquire to The American Scholar, the editors of THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS have scoured hundreds of the country's best periodicals in search of the most artful and powerful writing around. This thoughtful, provocative collection is the result of their search.

Table of Contents

Foreword	x
Robert Atwan
Introduction: Stories Around a Fire	xiv
Kathleen Norris
In the Memory Mines	1	(13)
Diane Ackerman
from Michigan Quarterly Review
How to Pray: Reverence, Stories, and the Rebbe's Dream	14	(16)
Ben Birnbaum
from Image
The Bone Garden of Desire	30	(16)
Charles Bowden
from Esquire
Travels with R.L.S	46	(4)
James Campbell
from The New York Times Book Review
Mail	50	(10)
Anne Fadiman
from The American Scholar
The Work of Mourning	60	(13)
Francine Du Plessix Gray
from The American Scholar
Vin Laforge	73	(9)
Jeffrey Heiman
from The Massachusetts Review
Calliope Times	82	(12)
Edward Hoagland
from The New Yorker
India's American Imports	94	(12)
Adam Hochschild
from The American Scholar
Refugium	106	(14)
Barbara Hurd
from The Georgia Review
On Impact	120	(12)
Stephen King
from The New Yorker
Blue Machinery of Summer	132	(9)
Yusef Komunyakaa
from The Washington Post Magazine
The Midnight Tour	141	(11)
Marcus Laffey
from The New Yorker
Facing the Village	152	(13)
Lenore Look
from Manoa
Book Marks	165	(16)
Rebecca McClanahan
from The Southern Review
Trouble in the Tribe	181	(12)
Daphne Merkin
from The New Yorker
Provincetown	193	(15)
David Michaelis
from The American Scholar
Brain-Cell Memories	208	(10)
Spencer Nadler
from Harper's Magazine
Dust	218	(3)
Mary Oliver
from Shenandoah
Dear Harper: A Letter to a Godchild About God	221	(14)
Reynolds Price
from Forbes ASAP
The Fineness of Things	235	(11)
Tim Robinson
from The Recorder
Cut Time	246	(15)
Carlo Rotella
from The American Scholar
Exquisite Corpse	261	(9)
Ashraf Rushdy
from Transition
The Last Word	270	(14)
Earl Shorris
from Harper's Magazine
On Being Breathless	284	(12)
Bert O. States
from The Gettysburg Review
Upside Down and Backward	296	(7)
William T. Vollmann
from Forbes ASAP
Biographical Notes	303	(6)
Notable Essays of 2000	309

Excerpts

ForewordWhile teaching college writing courses years ago, I remember hearing a syllogism that may, it strikes me now, help explain the enormous popularity of the personal memoir. It went something like this: "You write best when you write about what you know; what you know best is yourself; therefore, you write best when you write about yourself." As a syllogism, this seemed valid: the conclusion followed logically from its premises, no? So why didnt I then receive better essays when I assigned personal topics? As anyone can see, the conclusion rests on dubious assumptions. The premises sound reasonable, but they raise some fundamental questions. Do people really write best about the subjects they know best? We see evidence all the time of experts not being able to communicate the basic concepts of their professions, which explains why so many technical books are written by both an expert and a writer. There are brilliant academics so committed to their vast research that they cant bear to part with any detail and thus clog up their sentences with an excess of information. If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, too much can sometimes be an impediment to clear and robust expression. The Shakespeareans do not always write the best books on Shakespeare. And can we also safely conclude that we know ourselves best of all? If so, then why do so many of us spend so much time in psychotherapy or counseling sessions? Surely, the pursuit of the self -- especially the "hidden" self -- has been a major twentieth- century industry. Self-knowledge, of course, confronts us with another logical problem: how can the self be at the same time the knower and the known? Thats why biographies can be so much more revealing than autobiographies. As Dostoyevsky said in his Notes from Underground: "A true autobiography is almost an impossibility... man is bound to lie about himself." Yet the illusion that we do know ourselves best must serve as both comfort and inspiration to the new wave of memoirists who seem to write with one finger glued to the shift key and another to the letter I, which on the keyboard looks nothing like it does on the page, thus appropriately symbolizing the relationship between that character and the "self" it presumes to represent. Todays writers market is flooded with autobiography -- now more likely to be labeled "memoir" in the singular, as though the more fashionable literary label promises something grander. Memoirs (the term was almost always used in the plural) were customarily written by public figures who recorded their participation in historical events and their encounters with other prominent individuals. General Ulysses S. Grants two-volume Personal Memoirs (1885-86) were bestsellers. The old memoirs were penned by well-established individuals in the twilight of their careers; the new memoir is frequently the work of an emerging writer aspiring to be well established. The memoir is easily abused by th

---

Excerpted from The Best American Essays 2001
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.