The Best American Essays 2004

by Atwan, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780618357062
• ISBN10: 0618357068
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-10-14
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

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 This volume opens with an extraordinary find from Oxford American: a previously unpublished work by James Agee, the author of A Death in the Family and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.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.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. ix
Introduction	p. xiv
America, Look at Your Shame! from Oxford American	p. 1
Envy from Granta	p. 9
The Last Americans from Harper's Magazine	p. 30
The Arctic Hedonist from The American Scholar	p. 48
Caught from The New Yorker	p. 61
The Unreal Thing from The New Yorker	p. 86
A Sudden Illness from The New Yorker	p. 96
Passover in Baghdad from Granta	p. 114
My '80s from Artforum	p. 128
My Yiddish from The Threepenny Review	p. 138
Bix and Flannery from Raritan	p. 152
Against Cool from Gingko Tree Review	p. 160
Yarn from Harvard Review	p. 194
Lifelike from The New Yorker	p. 203
Rock 101 from The New Yorker	p. 213
The Mind's Eye from The New Yorker	p. 225
My Lost City from The New York Review of Books	p. 246
Arrow and Wound from Harper's Magazine	p. 257
My Father Is a Book from The Threepenny Review	p. 269
Bullet in My Neck from The Georgia Review	p. 277
Amor Perdida from Michigan Quarterly Review	p. 287
An Enlarged Heart from The New Yorker	p. 293
Biographical Notes	p. 311
Notable Essays of 2003	p. 316
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Introduction: VoicesYou cannot taste a work of prose. It has no color and it makes no sound. Its shape is without signicance. When people talk about writing, though, they often use adjectives borrowed from activities whose products make a more direct appeal to the senses - painting, sculpture, music, cuisine. People say, "The writing is colorful," or "pungent," or "shapeless," or "lyrical," and no one asks them where, exactly, they perceive those qualities. Discussions of "tone" and "texture" are carried on in the complete ontological absence of such things. (You could say that so are discussions of "meaning," but thats another philosophical problem.) Writing is a verbal artifact that, as it is being decoded, stimulates sensations that are unique to writing but that, for some reason, often have to be described in terms of nonverbal experiences.One of the most mysterious of writings immaterial properties is what people call its "voice." Editors sometimes refer to it, in a phrase that underscores the paradox at the heart of the idea, as the "voice on the page." Many editors think that a voice is what makes great writing great. Most writers do, too. Prose can show many virtues, including originality, without having a voice. It may be packed solid with intellectual nutrients; upon its import, much may seem to depend. It may avoid clich, radiate conviction, be grammatically so clean that your grandmother could eat off it. But none of this has anything to do with this elusive entity, a "voice." There are probably all kinds of literary sins that prevent a piece of writing from having a voice, but there seems to be no guaranteed technique for creating one."Voice" is sometimes associated with "style," but they are not always the same. Writing can be stylish and still be voiceless, and this is as true of the plain, "just the facts" style as it is of the style of high guration. Ingenuity, wit, sarcasm, euphony, frequent outbreaks of the rst-person singular - any of these can enliven prose without giving it a voice. Of all the intangibles of good writing, voice is probably the most transcendental. You can set the stage as elaborately as you like, but either the phantom appears or it doesnt.When it does make an appearance, the subject matter is often irrelevant. "I do not care for movies very much and I rarely see them," W. H. Auden wrote to the editors of The Nation in 1944; "further, I am suspicious of criticism as the literary genre which, more than any other, recruits epigones, pedants without insight, intellectuals without love. I am all the more surprised, therefore, to nd myself not only reading Mr. Agee before I read anyone else in The Nation but also consciously looking forward all week to reading him again." A lot of the movies James Agee reviewed between 1942 and 1948, when he was The Nations lm critic, were negligible then and are forgotten now. Auden was not merely being a curmudgeon.But you can still read those colum

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Excerpted from The Best American Essays 2004
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