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"There is no happiness where there is no wisdom;
No wisdom but in submission to the gods.
Big words are always punished,
And proud men in old age learn to be wise."
- Sophocles
(495 BC - 406 BC),
Antigone
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ZIN Product Number: 10166674
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| | | |  | | | Product Details
 Format: Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
ISBN: 0618049312
Release Date: Jan 12, 2002
Average Reader Review:   (Based on 1 review.)
| |  | | | From The Publisher
Since its inception in 1015, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind.
From The New Yorker to the Georgia Review, from Esquire to the American Scholar, the editors of The Best American Essays have scoured hundreds of the country's best periodicals in search of the most artful and powerful writing around. This thoughtful, provocative collection is the result of their search.
| | | | Foreword
Stories Around a FireWriting is done in solitude, and without much hope of gaining worldly fortune. But the culture of celebrity that permeates American life on the cusp of the twenty-first century has in the last decade trickled down so that even lowly writers can indulge in the illusion that, at least while we are promoting a book, we are somebody. The first time I landed at an airport on a book tour, I assumed that the person greeting me at the gate was a volunteer or an employee of the store where I was to read that night. When I said it was kind of her to offer to carry my garment bag, she insisted, "But this is my job." I had encountered my first "author schlepper," known to the trade as a "media" or "literary" escort, to distinguish them from the other kind. As we made our way to her car, I stood a bit taller. I had a handler; I had arrived. A few years later, I spent three days in San Francisco with an escort whose previous employment had been in public television, and during traffic jams we sang songs from The Muppet Show. She knew all the words; I did the best I could. The book I was promoting was about the two years that my husband had spent living on the grounds of a Benedictine monastery in Minnesota, and was full of stories about discoveries I had made: the fact that monks have a unique, home- grown sense of humor, that celibate people can make good friends, developing a remarkable capacity for listening, and that their wise understanding of human relations had helped me to better understand and appreciate my own marriage. I would not have thought this was bestseller material, but people were buying the book, and I was glad to read from it in stores. Sharing the stories made the people come alive for me again — the elderly monks in the monastery nursing home who were an inspiration, and the beleaguered young nuns who bravely struggled with the uncomfortable emotions raised by the cursing psalms. On our last day together, my escort said to me, "I think I get it. You're a real writer." Surprised, I asked her what she meant. "I mean," she replied, "you didn't write a book in order to get a radio talk show." Her experience to date in the Book Biz had been with self-proclaimed counselors and spiritual gurus who regarded their books as steppingstones to greater things. And the escort quickly realized that she was merely one of the "little people" they would use and discard on their climb to the top. Authors screamed at her over trivial matters; one writer of a book on relationships banished her from a bookstore because she was "giving off negative energy," and then appeared a few minutes later preening and smiling before the audience, a model of calm assurance. A psychic phoned her at 3 a.m. to see how many copies of her book were in the stores they were to visit the next day. Because she wanted to keep her job, the woman did not respond by saying that if she were truly a psychic, she would already know. It is safe to say that none of the writers in this book are struggling to put words on paper because they want a radio talk show or a syndicated column in the daily newspaper. They don't want anything at all other than to tell a story, to explore an idea or situation through the act of writing. Unable to escape the sense that this story must be told, the writer of literature more or less reluctantly concludes, I am the person who must tell it. Or try to tell it. An essay, after all, is merely an attempt. It has no presumption of success and no ulterior or utilitarian purpose, which makes it unique, a welcome open space in the crowded, busy landscape of American life. A place to relax and take a breather. Human storytelling was once all breath, the sacred act of telling family stories and tribal histories around a fire. Now a writer must attempt to breathe life into the words on a page, in the hope that the reader will discover something that resonates with his or her own experience. A genuine essay feels less like a monologue than a dialogue between writer and reader. This is a story I need, we conclude after reading the opening paragraph. It will tell me something about the world that I didn't know before, something I sensed but could not articulate. An essay that is doing its job feels right. And resonance is the key. To be resonant, the dictionary informs us, is to be "strong and deep in tone, resounding." And to resound means to be filled to the depth with a sound that is sent back to its source. An essay that works is similar; it gives back to the reader a thought, a memory, an emotion made richer by the experience of another. Such an essay may confirm the reader's sense of things, or it may contradict it. But always, and in glorious, mysterious ways that the author cannot control, it begins to belong to the reader. And the reader finds that what might have been the author's self-absorption has been transformed into hospitality. Detail that could seem merely personal and trivial instead becomes essential and personal in the truest, deepest sense, as it inspires us to take in this story, recognizing in it something greater than the sum of its parts. It is our story too, the human story of work and rest, love and loneliness, grief and joy. In the essays in this book we are invited to take time to notice how the world goes on, and how often it is the simple things — a student's letter, the memory of a first job, the markings left in a library book, an old friend's recipe for yellow pepper soup, or a glimpse of night sky — that allow us to dwell on the issues of life and death that concern us all. Kathleen Norris The Best AMERICAN ESSAYS 2001 Copyright © 2001 by Houghton Mifflin Company Introduction copyright © 2001 by Kathleen Norris All rights reserved
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 | | | | | Number of Reviews: 1 Average Rating:
doesn't disappoint
-- A reviewer, February 19, 2002
| |  | | | | Foreword | x | | Introduction: Stories Around a Fire | xiv | | In the Memory Mines (from Michigan Quarterly Review) | 1 | | How to Pray: Reverence, Stories, and the Rebbe's Dream (from Image) | 14 | | The Bone Garden of Desire (from Esquire) | 30 | | Travels with R.L.S. (from The New York Times Book Review) | 46 | | Mail (from The American Scholar) | 50 | | The Work of Mourning (from The American Scholar) | 60 | | Vin Laforge (from The Massachusetts Review) | 73 | | Calliope Times (from The New Yorker) | 82 | | India's American Imports (from The American Scholar) | 94 | | Refugium (from The Georgia Review) | 106 | | On Impact (from The New Yorker) | 120 | | Blue Machinery of Summer (from The Washington Post Magazine) | 132 | | The Midnight Tour (from The New Yorker) | 141 | | Facing the Village (from Manoa) | 152 | | Book Marks (from The Southern Review) | 165 | | Trouble in the Tribe (from The New Yorker) | 181 | | Provincetown (from The American Scholar) | 193 | | Brain-Cell Memories (from Harper's Magazine) | 208 | | Dust (from Shenandoah) | 218 | | Dear Harper: A Letter to a Godchild About God (from Forbes ASAP) | 221 | | The Fineness of Things (from The Recorder) | 235 | | Cut Time (from The American Scholar) | 246 | | Exquisite Corpse (from Transition) | 261 | | The Last Word (from Harper's Magazine) | 270 | | On Being Breathless (from The Gettysburg Review) | 284 | | Upside Down and Backward (from Forbes ASAP) | 296 | | Biographical Notes | 303 | | Notable Essays of 2000 | 309 |
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Biography/Autobiography, Literature - Classics / Criticism, Literary Collections, Essays, General, Biography & Autobiography
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