100 best essays century
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The Top 10 Essays Since 1950
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Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Robert Atwan Editor. Joyce Carol Oates has collected a group of works that are both intimate and important, essays that move from personal experience to larger significance without severing the connection between speaker and audience. Get A Copy. Paperback , pages. Published October 10th by Mariner Books first published September 1st More Details Original Title.
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I really want to incorporate the essays from this collection into my classroom, most particularly 'Of the Coming of John' by W. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Mar 19, Richard Kramer rated it it was amazing. What did I think?
What didn't I think? Every essay in this beautifully curated collection is a home run, and most of them were from writers I didn't know. John Muir? Sure, Muir woods, all that. But how would I in my lifetime have learned that he is a sublime writer, pure humor, pure soul, and that he had written the best thing I've ever read about a man's relationship with a dog?
And I could go on. But you should take my place, and get this book. If any part of your life is available to be changed, to whatever degree, you will find something in this book that will change it. View 1 comment. Nov 22, Les added it. I'll cop to only having read 15 or 16 of these essays. They're pretty damn good - as the title of the collection would imply. I stuck mostly to essays written by or that were about women, though I enjoyed Robert's Frost's famous essay on poetic form once I started to understand it a couple of paragraphs in and appreciated John Updike's take on the penis and all the utilitarian maleness that it springs from and is.
What stuck most with me was reading Zora Hurston's essay on a form of self-acc I'll cop to only having read 15 or 16 of these essays. What stuck most with me was reading Zora Hurston's essay on a form of self-acceptance and agony, then reading Alice Walker's moving essay on locating and honoring Zora's forgotten grave.
Due to the choice of authors, there are several one-liners in each of the essays I read that blew me away. Cynthia Ozick took the prize with an essay that was sound, solid and not particularly moving, until the final paragraph which broke open my mind and heart and silenced me for several long moments.
This made me want to read and write more essays and of course - read more by these authors and then re-read some of the essays.
Jul 13, Megan rated it it was amazing. This is the kind of book you pick up every once in a while to read an essay here, an essay there. What I have read so far has been thrilling. Mark Twain's "Corn-Pone Opinions" is a sardonic and hilarious look at what following sheep we humans are, and how impossible it is to form a unique opinion. The genius lies in his own inability to discern why this is; after all, Twain is human too, and he humbly confines himself to the masses. John Muir's "Stickeen" will keep you on the edge of your seat-- h This is the kind of book you pick up every once in a while to read an essay here, an essay there.
John Muir's "Stickeen" will keep you on the edge of your seat-- has anyone ever described a storm so beautifully? I can't say I've ever been a huge fan of Hemingway's dry, self-righteous style, but his "Pamplona in July" is certainly a unique look at a world I knew nothing about, in a country I yearn to visit.
For these examples alone, the book is worth owning, but as I flip through the essays that still lie ahead-- Fitzgerald, E. Mar 07, Ellen rated it really liked it Shelves: essays.
Obviously, this stuff is good. I discovered some new writers and some new favorites by old writers The Crack Up, by Fitzgerald. However, Joyce Carol Oates made these selections and she definitely did so with a historical sense. The collection could just as well have been called "Best Essays about America in the 20th Century. May 20, Jennifer Hughes rated it really liked it. When I couldn't get ahold of Gretel Erlich's The Solace of Open Spaces at the library, I did the next best thing: I found that namesake essay in this lovely book of essays and enjoyed not only it but many others besides.
Compilations can be tricky and uneven, but editor Joyce Carol Oates has done an excellent job curating truly some of the finest short essays of and about the 20th century. And by the way: The Solace of Open Spaces was an excellent piece, beautifully and poetically written, an When I couldn't get ahold of Gretel Erlich's The Solace of Open Spaces at the library, I did the next best thing: I found that namesake essay in this lovely book of essays and enjoyed not only it but many others besides.
And by the way: The Solace of Open Spaces was an excellent piece, beautifully and poetically written, and I think her full book would be worth buying. I don't get into podcasts, but this book fills what is probably that same kind of void for me. It's like listening to one of the long-form-story NPR programs, only I get to READ these wonderful essays myself, taking my time discovering, sampling, and digesting.
When my husband and I were first married, we vowed to not buy a TV for a year so we would spend that time with each other instead of lost in a screen. I remember that year with great fondness. We would talk or listen to the radio and discuss what we heard. We'd read the newspaper or books aloud to each other and have lively conversations. As I read this, it took me back to that simpler time.
I thought, this would be a good book to have on the coffee table for a quiet night when there's a fire in the fireplace, the TV's off, and the ever-present smartphones are set aside. Maybe if we had this book handy, we would feel inspired to read aloud to each other--as people did for enjoyment for many years before screens--at least from time to time.
Sounds so lovely to me. It's worth a try! Mar 02, Vince Darcangelo rated it really liked it Shelves: anthology , nonfiction , best-american , joyce-carol-oates , essays. Mencken: "The Hills of Zion" F. Feb 24, Matt rated it it was amazing Shelves: collection , non-fiction , five-stars.
With relatively few exceptions, there wasn't anything in here I didn't enjoy Oates did a solid job of selecting not only the best essays, but also essays from a wide breadth of American life. Plenty of women, plenty of writers of color, articles on war, articles on poverty, articles on immigration, articles on culture, articles on science, articles on the environment, and all while staying pretty geographically diverse.
There are, of course, the less impressive articles, the ones that hit me With relatively few exceptions, there wasn't anything in here I didn't enjoy There are, of course, the less impressive articles, the ones that hit me the wrong way or struck me as pretentious, but for every one of those, there were three or four that were brilliant.
Aug 01, Caitlin rated it liked it Shelves: book-riot. Many of these essays have heavy themes, and several are very similar--racism, violence I would have liked it better if I could have spaced out the reading more, but as it is, the essays felt important, but like an anchor dragging my mood down.
Dec 07, Briannesha rated it it was amazing Shelves: essays. An essay is such a rich treasure; I had forgotten how much I enjoy to read and write them.
I have been struggling with writer's block, but now I remember why it is I love to write. I was moved to tears, to anger. And with some I read the last sentence and looked up at the wall, struggling to believe the writer hadn't reached out and physically sucker punched me. Not everyone writ An essay is such a rich treasure; I had forgotten how much I enjoy to read and write them. Not everyone writes the same; we all shouldn't even strive to write the same. My art and your art are as unique as our fingerprints.
Some good essays here, but a number of boring ones as well, if they had years of essays to choose from, I'm suprised this was the best they could come up. took on the daunting task of tracing that ever-shifting process through the previous years for The Best American Essays of the Century.
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Actually, constructing a canon of any kind is a little weird at the moment, when so much of how we measure cultural value is in flux.
Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama This remarkably candid memoir revealed not only a literary talent, but a force that would change the face of US politics for ever. The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe Tom Wolfe raised reportage to dazzling new levels in his quest to discover what makes a man fly to the moon. Orientalism by Edward Said This polemical masterpiece challenging western attitudes to the east is as topical today as it was on publication.
A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Canon
Robert Atwan, the founder of The Best American Essays series, picks the 10 best essays of the postwar period. Links to the essays are provided when available. So to make my list of the top ten essays since less impossible, I decided to exclude all the great examples of New Journalism--Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Michael Herr, and many others can be reserved for another list. I also decided to include only American writers, so such outstanding English-language essayists as Chris Arthur and Tim Robinson are missing, though they have appeared in The Best American Essays series. And I selected essays , not essayists. A list of the top ten essayists since would feature some different writers.
The 100 best books of the 21st century
We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between and The following books were chosen after much debate and several rounds of voting by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move a memoir , The River of Consciousness a hybrid intellectual history , and Hallucinations a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations. But in , he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death , Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us.
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Robert Atwan's favorite literary genre is the essay. As editor and founder of The Best American Essays series, Atwan has read thousands of examples of the remarkably flexible form.
