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The Best American Essays 2008

The Best American Essays 2008
From Mariner Books

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Product Description

Here you will find the finest essays “judiciously selected from countless publications” (Chicago Tribune), ranging from The New Yorker and Harper’s to Swink and Pinch. In his introduction to this year’s edition, Adam Gopnik finds that great essays have “text and inner text, personal story and larger point, the thing you’re supposed to be paying attention to and some other thing you’re really interested in.” David Sedaris’s quirky, hilarious account of a childhood spent yearning for a home where history was properly respected is also a poignant rumination on surviving the passage of time. In “The Ecstasy of Influence,” Jonathan Lethem ponders the intriguing phenomenon of cryptomnesia: a person believes herself to be creating something new but is really recalling similar, previously encountered work. Ariel Levy writes in “The Lesbian Bride’s Handbook” of her efforts to plan a party that accurately reflects her lifestyle (which she notes is “not black-tie!”) as she confronts head-on what it means to be married. And Lauren Slater is off to “Tripp Lake,” recounting the one summer she spent at camp—a summer of color wars, horseback riding, and the “wild sadness” that settled in her when she was away from home.
In the end, Gopnik believes that the only real ambition of an essayist is to be a master of our common life. This latest installment of The Best American Essays is full of writing that reveals, in Gopnik’s words, “the breath of things as they are.”

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #354723 in Books
  • Published on: 2008-10-08
  • Format: Bargain Price
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 320 pages

Editorial Reviews

Review
"Reliable and yet still surprising--the best of the best." (Kirkus Reviews )

About the Author
ADAM GOPNIK has won the National Magazine Award for essay and criticism and the George Polk Award for magazine reporting. He wrote the article on the culture of the United States in the last two editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Since the inception of The Best American Essays in 1986 as a trade book title, Robert Atwan has been series editor. He has published reviews and essays in a range of periodicals and edited a number of other literature anthologies. Atwan most recently edited two collections of poetry with a Biblical theme, Chapters into Verse by Oxford University Press and Divine Inspiration by Oxford University Press.

Customer Reviews

Disappointing.2
I thought this was a pretty disappointing effort this year. Adam Gopnik's meandering, pretentious introduction is a painful reminder of just how much David Foster Wallace's brilliance, wit, and low tolerance for BS will be missed (DFW was last year's editor).

Really slim pickings this year. I'd break it down roughly as follows.

Brilliant essays:
Anthony Lane on the Leica camera;
Hugh Raffles on cricket fighting in Shanghai

Engaging:
Atul Gawande on geriatric medicine;
Emily Grosholz on necklaces

Moving personal reminiscence:
Separate essays by Patricia Brieschke and Bernard Cooper, though be warned that each documents the horrific suffering of a terminally ill child and life-partner respectively.

Personal reminiscences that were only mildly amusing:
Ariel Levy ("The lesbian bride's handbook");
David Sedaris mining his adolescence for yuks according to his standard formula (if you've read any of his previous books, you probably could have written the essay yourself).

There were also two personal reminiscences that came across as just whiny and self-indulgent.

A number of "quirky" essays just didn't succeed - the author simply failed to transmit his own enthusiasm to the reader:
Albert Goldbarth on science-fiction comics of the 1950's;
Sam Shaw on trying to attain transcendence through extreme long-distance running;
John Updike (?!) on dinosaurs (it's only my admiration for Updike as a critic that is keeping this out of the "embarrassing" category).

Three essays had a reasonable idea, but were poorly executed, marred by excessive cleverness, smugness, or implied condescension (the 'elite writing for the elite' tone):
Jonathan Lethem on plagiarism (some interesting points, buried in 30 pages of undisciplined prose);
Louis Menand ("Notable Quotables");
Ander Monson ("Solipsism" - a thin idea, pushed way too far)

Cringeworthy, embarrassing, annoying, and/or just plain stupid:
Rick Moody "On Celestial Music".
Rich Cohen on how his neighbors reacted when he grew a Hitler moustache
Joe Wenderoth on -- well, it's hard to know what it was about, actually. Something to do with a strip club; largely incoherent.

The remaining two essays, by Jamal Mahjoub and Charles Simic were inoffensive, but also completely unmemorable.

I am annoyed at Adam Gopnik for this subpar selection. He forces me to be mean in public.

Give this one a miss. 2 out of 21 home runs is pathetic. You may think I'm being unduly harsh. But there was very little joy in reading this book. Life is short. We have a right to expect more joy than is provided by this sorry collection.

Now, here's the good news. Probably right next to this volume, on the same shelf in the bookstore, you are likely to find a book called "The Best American Magazine Writing 2008". It's roughly twice the length of the Gopnik disappointment, and is introduced by Jacob Weisberg. It might cost you a few bucks more. No matter. Buy it!

A return to normalcy: a merit-based selection of the year's best essays5
Wow - I am stunned to see that the first five reviewers gave this volume only two stars, whereas I am awarding it five. Last year it was just the opposite: the most popular rating applied to the volume edited by the late David Foster Wallace was five stars, whereas I gave it two. I think this is more than coincidence. Last year's volume was heavy on grim politically charged essays, whereas this year's volume is void of politics and instead features essays on topics such as cameras, a road race, and dinosaurs. Guest editor Adam Gopnik no doubt has political viewpoints, but he took his job much more seriously than David Foster Wallace, and selected essays on the basis of their merits as work of literature. But this is just my opinion; perhaps all this proves is that, in art and literature, quality truly is subjective.

Here are quick takes on the essays that I enjoyed the most:

-- Jonathan Lethem's "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism": an incredibly well-researched essay exploring the nature of originality in thought, plagiarism, and the way all creative thinkers build upon the works of others; it works on two levels, because Lethem himself openly steals almost all the thoughts in the essay from other sources (which are attributed), thus illustrating his main point.

-- Patricia Brieschke's "Cracking Open": a touching first person essay about the challenges a poor young mother goes through after giving bearing a child with a serious birth defect.

-- Bernard Cooper's "The Constant Gardener": another very touching first person essay, about a man tending to his sick partner and dealing with the physical and emotional issues of a terminal illness.

There was just one complete miss in this volume, Jamal Mahjoub's "Salamanca", which didn't register any impression on me other than having taken up space in the book and my time in reading it. There were a few other essays that caused me to question their inclusion, but on balance, I found 2008's volume to be a return to the normal standards of this series, and a serious attempt by Adam Gopnik to assemble the year's best essays.

Not the best in this series2
The Best American Essays series usually provides funny, insightful, poignant, incisive, (or all of the above) reading suitable for snatching on the bus or on a lazy afternoon. Although there are usually a few duds, the batting average is quite high. However, past Jonathan Lethem's polemic on plagiarism and a few others, I found this edition basically unreadable. I doubt it was really "a bad year for essays" so the selection had to be subpar.