The Best American Essays 2015
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
“22 contributors explore a wide range of experiences” in this “illuminating, invaluable” anthology edited by the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs (Publishers Weekly).
Writing an essay is like catching a wave, posits guest editor Ariel Levy. To catch a wave, you need skill and nerve, not just moving water. The writers featured in this volume are certainly full of nerve, and have crafted a wide range of pieces awash in a diversity of moods, voices, and stances.
Leaving an abusive marriage, parting with a younger self, losing your sanity to Fitbit, and even saying goodbye to a beloved pair of pants are just some of the experience probed by essays that are unified in the daring of their creation. As Levy notes, Writing around an idea you think is worthwhile—an idea you suspect is an insight—requires real audacity.”
The Best American Essays 2015 includes entries by Hilton Als, Roger Angell, Justin Cronin, Meghan Daum, Anthony Doerr, Margo Jefferson, David Sedaris, Zadie Smith, Rebecca Solnit and others.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Assembled by New Yorker staff writer Levy (Female Chauvinist Pigs), the 30th Best American Essays collection maintains the series' standards of excellence. The 22 contributors explore a wide range of experiences, with the theme of aging taking an especially prominent part. Ninety-three-year-old Roger Angell's "This Old Man," about the trials of old age, is poignant, funny, and surprisingly reassuring. Mark Jacobson's (mostly) humorous observations in "Sixty-Five: Learning to Love Middle Old Age" have a similar effect. It is a sheer pleasure to read David Sedaris, still funny but less excitable, describe a life-affirming relationship with his Fitbit in "Stepping Out." Also worth noting is Malcolm Gladwell's "The Crooked Ladder," a novel take on capitalism and institutional racism as seen through a comparison of Italian-American and African-American criminal enterprises. Novelist Justin Cronin covers the aftermath of his wife and daughter's near-fatal car accident, Anthony Doerr imagines the lives of the first family to settle in his hometown of Boise, Idaho, and Kelly Sundberg writes movingly about living through domestic violence. These and many of the other selections offer illuminating, invaluable glimpses into lives that might otherwise remain outside the reader's ken.
