The Best American Essays 2019

The Best American Essays 2019 PDF Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Mariner Books
ISBN: 1328465802
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
A collection of the year's best essays selected by Robert Atwan and guest editor Rebecca Solnit. Award-winning writer, cultural critic, and activist, Rebecca Solnit, an "unparalleled high priestess of nuance and intelligent contemplation" (Maria Popova), selects the best essays of the year from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites.

The Best American Essays 2019

The Best American Essays 2019 PDF Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Mariner Books
ISBN: 1328465802
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
A collection of the year's best essays selected by Robert Atwan and guest editor Rebecca Solnit. Award-winning writer, cultural critic, and activist, Rebecca Solnit, an "unparalleled high priestess of nuance and intelligent contemplation" (Maria Popova), selects the best essays of the year from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites.

The Best American Essays 2020

The Best American Essays 2020 PDF Author: Andr Aciman
Publisher: Mariner Books
ISBN: 0358359910
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Compiles the best literary essays of the year 2019 which were originally published in American periodicals.

The Best American Essays 2015

The Best American Essays 2015 PDF Author: Robert Atwan
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544569628
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Presents an anthology of the best literary essays published in 2014, selected from American periodicals.

The Best American Essays 2016

The Best American Essays 2016 PDF Author: Jonathan Franzen
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544812174
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
The National Book Award–winning author compiles a “thought-provoking volume” of essays by Joyce Carol Oates, Oliver Sacks, Jaquira Diaz and others (Publishers Weekly). As Jonathan Franzen writes in his introduction, his main criterion for selecting The Best American Essays 2016 “was whether an author had taken a risk.” The resulting volume showcases authorial risk in a variety of forms, from championing an unpopular opinion to the possibility of ruining a professional career, or irrevocably alienating one’s family. What’s gained are essential insights into aspects of the human condition that would otherwise remain concealed—from questions of queer identity, to the experience of a sibling’s autism and relationships between students and college professors. The Best American Essays 2016 includes entries by Alexander Chee, Paul Crenshaw, Jaquira Diaz, Laura Kipnis, Amitava Kaumar, Sebastian Junger, Joyce Carol Oates, Oliver Sacks, George Steiner, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and others.

The Best American Essays 2021

The Best American Essays 2021 PDF Author: Robert Atwan
Publisher: Mariner Books
ISBN: 0358381754
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
A collection of the year's best essays, selected by award-winning journalist and New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz "The world is abundant even in bad times,"guest editor Kathryn Schulz writes in her introduction, "it is lush with interestingness, and always, somewhere, offering up consolation or beauty or humor or happiness, or at least the hope of future happiness."The essays Schulz selected are a powerful time capsule of 2020, showcasing that even if our lives as we knew them stopped, the beauty to be found in them flourished. From an intimate account of nursing a loved one in the early days of the pandemic, to a masterful portrait of grieving the loss of a husband as the country grieved the loss of George Floyd, this collection brilliantly shapes the grief, hardship, and hope of a singular year. The Best American Essays 2021 includes ELIZABETH ALEXANDER - HILTON ALS - GABRIELLE HAMILTON - RUCHIR JOSHI - PATRICIA LOCKWOOD- CLAIRE MESSUD - WESLEY MORRIS - BETH NGUYEN - JESMYN WARD and others

The Cambridge History of the American Essay

The Cambridge History of the American Essay PDF Author: Christy Wampole
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009080415
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 836

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Book Description
From the country's beginning, essayists in the United States have used their prose to articulate the many ways their individuality has been shaped by the politics, social life, and culture of this place. The Cambridge History of the American Essay offers the fullest account to date of this diverse and complex history. From Puritan writings to essays by Indigenous authors, from Transcendentalist and Pragmatist texts to Harlem Renaissance essays, from New Criticism to New Journalism: The story of the American essay is told here, beginning in the early eighteenth century and ending with the vibrant, heterogeneous scene of contemporary essayistic writing. The essay in the US has taken many forms: nature writing, travel writing, the genteel tradition, literary criticism, hybrid genres such as the essay film and the photo essay. Across genres and identities, this volume offers a stirring account of American essayism into the twenty-first century.

The Best American Essays

The Best American Essays PDF Author: Robert Atwan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780395716663
Category : American essays
Languages : en
Pages : 471

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Book Description
For this special edition, [the editor] has chosen thirty-five essays from the popular Best American Essays series. The selections are arranged thematically, with alternative tables of contents for flexibility, and are accompanied by headnotes and writing assignments. -Back cover. This edition is designed for college students and classroom use. -Pref.

Written in the Sky

Written in the Sky PDF Author: Patricia Foster
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817360964
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
"Written in the Sky: Lessons of a Southern Daughter is a double portrait of place and family, a collection of essays that interrogates the legacy of racial tension in the South and the way race, caste, and privilege are entwined in Patricia Foster's family story from the Depression era through the present day. After returning to Alabama to visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Foster writes her five-year-old great-niece, "How can we teach you to love our country if we don't also explain our country's oppressive history, its duplicity and sin, its guilt and blood?" It is a fact that the South has often been a place of danger and fury, a place where civil rights activists were beaten and whipped, fire-hosed and bombed, where predominantly Black (and some white) activists and communities demanded the right to justice, equity, and respect. And yet, in Foster's white, striving, class-conscious family in small-town south Alabama in the 1950s and 1960s, calls for racial progress were mostly ignored, relegated to the nightly news where visceral images of violence and protest were surely seen but rarely discussed. As a result, she came to her knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement--so prominent in Montgomery, Selma, Anniston, and Birmingham--largely in retrospect. It is this silence that Foster seeks to interrogate. As a college student at Vanderbilt University, she grew to recognize that indifference, alongside silence, could be an ideological space; only after a shameful event occurring the night of Martin Luther King Jr.'s murder would she awaken to the unearned privileges of whiteness. A few years later, working as a caseworker in western Tennessee, she discovered that her belief in good intentions and easy solutions was irrelevant, given the southern caste system that affected poor whites and all Blacks. Written in the Sky is a book of essays that contends not only with the mythologies about race and class but also with the shadow stories beneath these mythologies, the more complicated and illuminating narratives Foster must excavate. To do so, she must learn to listen, to extend herself beyond her white middle-class life. The real story of place, Foster discovers, comes from wrestling with a culture's irreconcilable ideas. Foster's exploration of this struggle is organized in three interconnected parts--"Family Lessons," "History Lessons," and "Lessons of Legacy and Loss"--bookended by "Reckonings," two essays about the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery. In the first, "Written in the Sky," Foster considers how the memorial might be seen as a secular afterlife where the dead can speak, imagining what all those men, women, and children who had been lynched would say to her. In the essays in "Family Lessons," Foster wrestles with her family mythology: its class hierarchies, parental traumas, and the lasting insecurity about caste that pervades her family's psyche. In "History Lessons," she physically moves outside of white culture into the town of Tuskegee, where, in various visits, she teaches, interviews girls, talks to librarians and townspeople, and assesses the political zeitgeist of the 2016 election in this small southern town. In other essays, she explores the traumas and successes of women in the Civil Rights Movement. Foster shifts back to her family in "Lessons of Legacy and Loss" to portray the difficult, compelling relationships that preceded the deaths of a father, a sister, and a mother: moments of love and enmeshment, resentment and restitution that reveal how an excavated story allows for closeness and, in some sense, closure. In closure, she returns to the frame of "Reckonings," the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. This time, in "Archives of the Dead," she focuses on the tableau of stories that detail specific acts of domestic terrorism in short declarative sentences. Realizing that the psychology of racism haunts both the dead and the living, Foster is alert to the understanding that what is unconnected and sacred in her must not merely read the words but write about this legacy with an unflinching gaze"--

The Essay At the Limits

The Essay At the Limits PDF Author: Mario Aquilina
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135013449X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
In the hands of such writers as Rebecca Solnit, Claudia Rankine, David Shields, Zadie Smith and many others, the essay has re-emerged as a powerful literary form for tackling a fractious 21st-century culture. The Essay at the Limits brings together leading scholars to explore the theory, the poetics and the future of the form. The book links the formal innovations and new voices that have emerged in the 21st-century essay to the history and theory of the essay. In so doing, it surveys the essay from its origins to its relation to contemporary cultural forms, from the novel to poetry, film to music, and from political articles to intimate lyrical expressions. The book examines work by writers such as: Theodor W. Adorno, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Annie Dillard, Brian Dillon, Jean Genet, William Hazlitt, Samuel Johnson, Karl Ove Knaussgaard, Ben Lerner, Audre Lorde, Oscar Wilde, Michel de Montaigne, Zadie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Wallace Stevens, Eliot Weinberger and Virginia Woolf.

Delusions of Grandeur

Delusions of Grandeur PDF Author: Joey Franklin
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496224744
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
In Delusions of Grandeur Joey Franklin examines the dreams and delusions of America’s most persistent mythologies—including the beliefs in white supremacy and rugged individualism and the problems of toxic masculinity and religious extremism—as they reveal themselves in the life of a husband and father fast approaching forty. With prose steeped in research and a playful, lyric attention to language, Franklin asks candid questions about what it takes to see clearly as a citizen, a parent, a child, a neighbor, and a human being. How should a white father from the suburbs talk with his sons about the death of Trayvon Martin? What do video games like Fortnite and Minecraft reveal about our appetites for destruction? Is it possible for Americans to celebrate bootstrap pioneer history while also lamenting the slavery that made it possible? How does the American tradition of exploiting cheap labor create a link between coal mining and plasma donation in southeast Ohio? Part cultural critique, part parental confessional, Delusions of Grandeur embraces the notion that the personal is always political, and reveals important, if sometimes uncomfortable, truths about our American obsessions with race, class, religion, and family.