The Best American Essays 2006

by Atwan, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780618705313
• ISBN10: 0618705317
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-10-11
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

"The essays in this volume are powerful, plainspoken meditations on birthing, dying, and all the business in between," writes Lauren Slater in her introduction to the 2006 edition. "They reflect the best of what we, as a singular species, have to offer, which is reflection in a context of kindness. The essays tell hard-won tales wrestled sometimes from great pain." The twenty powerful essays in this volume are culled from periodicals ranging from The Sun to The New Yorker, from Crab Orchard Review to Vanity Fair. In "Missing Bellow," Scott Turow reflects on the death of an author he never met, but one who "overpowered me in a way no other writer had." Adam Gopnik confronts a different kind of death, that of his five-year-old daughter's pet fish -- a demise that churns up nothing less than "the problem of consciousness and the plotline of Hitchock's Vertigo." A pet is center stage as well in Susan Orlean's witty and compassionate saga of a successful hunt for a stolen border collie. Poe Ballantine chronicles a raw-nerved pilgrimage in search of salvation, solace, and a pretty brunette, and Laurie Abraham, in "Kinsey and Me," journeys after the man who dared to plumb the mysteries of human desire. Marjorie Williams gives a harrowing yet luminous account of her life with cancer, and Michele Morano muses on the grammar of the subjunctive mood while proving that "in language, as in life, moods are complicated, but at least in language there are only two."

Table of Contents

Foreword	ix
Robert Atwan
Introduction	xv
Lauren Slater
Kinsey and Me
Laurie Abraham
from Elle	1	(10)
501 Minutes to Christ
Poe Ballantine
from The Sun	11	(14)
Teaching the N-Word
Emily Bernard
from The American Scholar	25	(18)
City Out of Breath
Ken Chen
from Manoa	43	(5)
Beginning Dialogues
Toi Derricotte
from Creative Nonfiction	48	(6)
The Culture of Celebrity
Joseph Epstein
from The Weekly Standard	54	(16)
Whistling in the Dark
Eugene Goodheart
from The Sewanee Review	70	(15)
Death of a Fish
Adam Gopnik
from The New Yorker	85	(11)
Relief
Kim Dana Kupperman
from Hotel Amerika	96	(11)
Grammar Lessons: The Subjunctive Mood
Michele Morano
from Crab Orchard Review	107	(15)
Lost Dog
Susan Orlean
from The New Yorker	122	(11)
George
Sam Pickering
from Southwest Review	133	(20)
Shame
Robert Polito
from Black Clock	153	(6)
Illness as More Than Metaphor
David Rieff
from The New York Times Magazine	159	(13)
Recalled to Life
Oliver Sacks
from The New Yorker	172	(13)
Confessions of a Left-Handed Man
Peter Selgin
from The Literary Review	185	(12)
Why Write?
Alan Shapiro
from The Cincinnati Review	197	(11)
Group Grief
Lily Tuck
from The Hudson Review	208	(17)
Missing Bellow
Scott Turow
from The Atlantic Monthly	225	(13)
A Matter of Life and Death
Marjorie Williams
from Vanity Fair	238	(27)
Biographical Notes	265	(5)
Notable Essays of 2005	270

Excerpts

Introduction Early on in my writing career I traveled to the Bread Loaf Writers'Conference. I dutifully lugged several short stories carefully typed on onionskin, the watermark visible when held to the slanting sunlight. I don't recall the stories'titles, but something about their spirit stays with me - fiction told in the voices of people on the periphery, a serial killer speaking from the shower, a foster child somewhere on a snowy road in Utah. At Bread Loaf, I expected a Published Writer would critique my work, a man with a gold pen and a pipe, a man who hunted geese, perhaps, drank ocher-colored alcohol from a crystal decanter, and knew something about how to sail. Bread Loaf was a beautiful place filled, it seemed to me, with beautiful people, parties, poetry, and dances held in haylofts. I felt awkward there, put off in part by the nature of the pursuit - writing fiction - and in part by the culture that sprang from the pursuit. The famous writers at Bread Loaf knew they were celebrities in this small space, and after dinner they congregated in a special lounge reserved for them, a lounge we Little Leaguers could only peek inside, standing at the windows in the field, Queen Anne's lace blowing hip-high and fragrant. Editors milled about the grounds, the smoky smell of their wood-paneled New York offices still clinging to their clothes. I, of course, was determined to succeed, and spent my Bread Loaf days and many days thereafter laboring away on my Smith Corona, and then my first computer, words blinking up on the black screen and then daisy- wheeled into pale print. But whatever I wrote seemed wrong, seemed strained, seemed more intent on flashing its cleverness and gaining entry to the country club than on truly transcribing the content inside my admittedly mediocre head. My earliest attempts at fiction were rather tortured "show, don't tell" affairs, all thought and feeling crammed into action and gesture, so my characters were constantly wringing their hands or tilting their heads, as though they had a chronic case of swimmer's ear. The number one rule in those Bread Loaf days was to never, ever directly say what a character felt or thought. That was the stuff of expository writing, of college essays, the stuff of the middling masses who could hope to do not much more than pass their course in freshman comp. The "show, don't tell" rule that dominated the pedagogy of fiction back then, and perhaps still does, has given rise to some fantastic work, and it remains a useful guide to writing a certain kind of story. For me, as a fledgling writer, it was a bit of a disaster. I longed to be able just to say something straight, to be able to ask on paper the sorts of questions that consumed me then and still do today, questions such as: What is a moral stance? Can despair be redemptive? Is the urge to make meaning a misguided human coping mechanism that gives a false shape to our existence? How best to live? To die? Eventually I gave up on fiction, gave up in frank despair because I simply could not find a way to explore these questions through character. This was years after Bread Loaf; I was twenty-five then, and when I set down my pen a silence entered my room, a silence in which I was forced to sit, and sweat, and wait, and watch. A year went by. I worked as a literacy instructor and spent my free time in the library of the Harvard Divinity School, a place that would be soothing even to the most troubled soul, the stacks crammed with books whose titles promised revelation. In those days I was reading William James, Thomas Merton, and Paul Tillich, drinking down the pages, propelled by an intellectual thirst that I have