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The Best American Essays 2017

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1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
This anthology edited by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Empathy Exams offers “essays that are challenging, passionate, sobering, and clever” (Publishers Weekly).
 
“The essay is political—and politically useful, by which I mean humanizing and provocative—because of its commitment to nuance, its explorations of contingency, its spirit of unrest, its glee at overturned assumptions; because of the double helix of awe and distrust—faith and doubt—that structures its DNA,” writes guest editor Leslie Jamison in her introduction to this volume. The essays she has compiled in The Best American Essays 2017 “thrill toward complexity.”
 
From the Iraqi desert to an East Jerusalem refugee camp, and from the beginnings of the universe to the aftermath of a suicide attempt, these essays bring us, time and again, to the thorny intersection of personal experience and public discourse.  
 
The Best American Essays 2017 includes entries by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Lawrence Jackson, Rachel Kushner, Alan Lightman, Bernard Farai Matambo, Wesley Morris, Heather Sellers, Andrea Stuart, and others.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      August 28, 2017
      The personal is political in this long-running series’ latest installment, in which guest editor Jamison (The Empathy Exams) argues that the intimate voice of the personal essay allows for more nuanced public discourse. This is evident in former marine Jason Arment’s dispatch from Iraq, “Two Shallow Graves” which vividly depicts war as a series of banalities punctuated by horror, and in essays that variously touch on the opioid epidemic, rape culture, and broken-windows civic policies that result in police brutality. In “Cost of Living,” an essay teeming with subtle irony, Emily Maloney shares her experience shouldering her own massive medical debt while working in a hospital’s billing department. In “Sparrow Needy,” a piece redolent with metaphor and longing, Kenneth A. McClane mourns a brother lost to alcoholism against the backdrop of 1950s Harlem. June Thunderstorm’s “Revenge of the Mouthbreathers” is a delightfully shrill polemic about anti-smoking ordinances as a tool of oppression against the working class. In one of the lighter pieces, Megan O’Gieblyn extols the virtues of the Midwest, with its unflappable citizenry, unpretentious food (conveyed by a rapturous description of a “wedge salad”), and idyllic landscapes (“the great oblivion of corn”). Jamison has done an exceptional job curating this volume, selecting essayists who are diverse in ideas and experiences, and essays that are challenging, passionate, sobering, and clever.

    • Library Journal

      Starred review from October 15, 2017

      Jamison, author of the award-winning essay collection The Empathy Exams, demonstrates both her mastery of the form and her merit as an editor of this year's "Best American" essays. At first, the anthology's greatness seems the result of chance. After all, 2016 was an exceptional year in America. What happened that wasn't compelling to write about? But Jamison reveals her curatorial talents with her keen eye for specificity and "telling details." Each essay raises important political questions--about war, race, gender, and disparity--yet the universal is revealed subtly and powerfully through the personal. Still, Jamison understands that the best personal essays are compelling not only because of their subject matter but because of the writer's willingness to take risks, to think provisionally, to tolerate ambiguity, to be contradictory or even wrong. VERDICT In the face of such a polarized political climate, these essays model much-needed tolerance and humility. In their haunting vulnerability, they also offer hope. So this year's selections are timely, yes, but they are also timeless.--Meagan Lacy, Guttman Community Coll., CUNY

      Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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