- 269 pages
- English
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The Best American Series
About This Book
The acclaimed author of Pulphead collects "21 of the year's most urgent and at times painfully truthful pieces of nonfiction published in the U.S." ( Publishers Weekly, starred review). In our age of trigger warnings and jeopardized free expression, The Best American Essays 2014 does not shy away from shocking extremes, ambiguities, or dualities. As guest editor John Jeremiah Sullivan notes, the essay assumes many two-sided forms, and these diverse pieces capture all the conceptions of what an essay can be: the loose and the strict, the flourish and the finished, the try and the trial. Sullivan's choices embrace the high and the low, the memoirist's confession and the journalist s reportage, and all the gray area in between. From a hotel in Mongolia to a Clockwork Orange like Baltimore, from a Rome emergency room to Burning Man, these diverse pieces surprise and entertain, inform and titillate. The Best American Essays 2014 includes entries by Kristin Dombek, Dave Eggers, Leslie Jamison, Ariel Levy, Yiyun Li, Barry Lopez, Zadie Smith, Wells Tower, Emily Fox Gordon, James Wood, and others.
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Notable Essays of 2013
A Warm Spring Rain, Open 24 Hours.
Additional Tenses You Should Know, Apt, no. 3.
Dear Joshua, Wagâs Revue, Fall.
Barbecue Catharsis, Carolina Quarterly, Fall.
Howâs the Enemy? Literary Review, vol. 56, no. 1.
Rhumba, Tin House, Fall (no. 57).
Three Seconds, Perceptions: A Magazine of the Arts, May.
An Island Triptych, New Hibernia Review, Spring.
Wrong Answer, Harperâs Magazine, September.
The Tyranny of Paradise, The Sun, June.
The Miracle of My Freedom, Kenyon Review, Spring.
An Aristocratic Murder, 1966: A Journal of Creative Nonfiction, vol. 1, no. 1.
Picturing the Personal Essay: A Visual Guide, Creative Nonfiction, no. 49.
Zulu Love Story, Slice, no. 12.
The Thinness of the Soil, Ecotone, Spring.
Wind Dancers, New Letters, vol. 79, nos. 3 and 4.
My Inheritance, Salmagundi, Winter.
Disfiguring Abstraction, Critical Inquiry, Spring.
A Song for Molly, American Scholar, Winter.
âI Can Dream, Canât I?â Critical Inquiry, Autumn.
Memories of Okinawa, Sewanee Review, Winter.
A Complete Thought, Tampa Review, no. 45/46.
Phrenology: An Attempt, Haydenâs Ferry Review, Fall/Winter.
One More Artificial Organ, Indiana Review, Winter.
One Long Sentence, Threepenny Review, Summer.
Sentimental Medicine, Harperâs Magazine, January.
My Gucci Addiction, GQ, April.
The Machine and I, Southwest Review, vol. 98, no. 2.
The Ghost Writes Back, KROnline, January 16.
The Confessions of Innocent Men, The Atlantic, August.
Boredom, Yale Review, January.
The Ballad of JD, Southern Humanities Review, Fall.
Dead Last Is a Kind of Second Place, Georgia Review, Winter.
Islands of...
Table of contents
- Title Page
- Contents
- Copyright
- Foreword
- Introduction: The Ill-Defined Plot
- TIMOTHY AUBRY: A Matter of Life and Death
- WENDY BRENNER: Strange Beads
- JOHN H. CULVER: The Final Day in Rome
- KRISTIN DOMBEK: Letter from Williamsburg
- DAVE EGGERS: The Man at the River
- EMILY FOX GORDON: At Sixty-Five
- MARY GORDON: On Enmity
- VIVIAN GORNICK: Letter from Greenwich Village
- LAWRENCE JACKSON: Slickheads
- LESLIE JAMISON: The Devilâs Bait
- ARIEL LEVY: Thanksgiving in Mongolia
- YIYUN LI: Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life
- BARRY LOPEZ: Sliver of Sky
- CHRIS OFFUTT: Someone Else
- ZADIE SMITH: Joy
- ELIZABETH TALLENT: Little X
- WELLS TOWER: The Old Man at Burning Man
- JERALD WALKER: How to Make a Slave
- PAUL WEST: On Being Introduced
- JAMES WOOD: Becoming Them
- BARON WORMSER: Legend: Willem de Kooning
- Contributorsâ Notes
- Notable Essays of 2013
- Read More from The Best American SeriesÂŽ
- About the Editors
- Footnotes