Essays

In a series praised every year for its eclectic character, this year's collection is one of the most eclectic ever. Featuring an astonishing range of essay topics and types, here are vibrant pieces by America's finest prose writers like John McPhee, Jamaica Kincaid, and Stanley Elkin. Guest edited by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Soul of a New Machine.

Chosen by the American Society of Magazine Editors, the stories in this anthology include National Magazine Award-winning works of public interest, reporting, feature writing, and fiction. This year's selections include Pamela Colloff (Texas Monthly) on the agonizing, decades-long struggle by a convicted murderer to prove his innocence; Dexter Filkins (The New Yorker) on the emotional effort by an Iraq War veteran to make amends for the role he played in the deaths of innocent Iraqis; Chris Jones (Esquire) on Robert A. Caro's epic, ongoing investigation into the life and work of Lyndon Johnson; Charles C. Mann (Orion) on the odds of human beings' survival as a species; and Roger Angell (The New Yorker) on aging, dying, and loss. The former infantryman Brian Mockenhaupt (Byliner) describes modern combat in Afghanistan and its ability both to forge and challenge friendships; Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Atlantic) reflects on the complex racial terrain traversed by Barack Obama; Frank Rich (New York) assesses Mitt Romney's ambiguous candidacy; and Dahlia Lithwick (Slate) looks at the current and future implications of an eventful year in Supreme Court history. The volume also includes an interview on the art of screenwriting with Terry Southern from The Paris Review and an award-winning short story by Stephen King published in Harper's magazine.

For almost 100 years, Coney Island was the most popular seaside destination in the United States. Eachyear, millions escaped the heat of New York City to savor the thrills of the Cyclone roller coaster and Wonder Wheel at the Astroland amusement park. They came to sample an original Nathan's Famous hot dog, witness the first demolition derby, or to take a chance at a game of three-card Monte on the legendary boardwalk. The advent of air-conditioning, concerns about Coney's "tawdry" entertainment, and faster transportation to other beaches hastened the demise of what had become a uniquely American icon of entertainment and a defining terminus of New York at the water's edge.

In an effort to revitalize the area, the Van Alen Institute, in concert with the Coney Island Development Corporation, held the Parachute Pavilion Competition, a contest to design a year-round pavilion in the shadow of the Parachute Jump, a landmark built for the 1939 World's Fair. Coney Island: The Parachute Pavilion Competition presents all 864 submissionsfrom the feasible to the fantasticreceived from around the world. The winning design by London-based Carmody Groarke Hardie is a mesmerizing attraction in its own right, composed of two provocative trapezoids illuminated by thousands of colored light bulbs. The design respects the historic icon under which it is located but also promises to become an icon in its own right and bring the fun-loving spirit of Coney Island into the twenty-first century. Featuring essays, photographic documentation, and jury comments, Coney Island: The Parachute Pavilion Competition is a critical resource for students, designers, city officials, and anyone interested in Coney Island and the reinvention of the historic recreation sites of our cities.

This in-depth collection represents 8 essential twentieth-century essayists, with 3-5 pieces by each author. Included are Virginia Woolf, George Owell, E. B. White, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, James McConkey, Cynthia Ozick, and Alice Walker.

Faced with the prospect of moving to another place, Bowers finds herself thinking about the familiar world in new and unfamiliar ways. Through her eyes, too, we see how an interest in nature and the outdoors developed from early childhood and how simple curiosity has led her to the most surprising discoveries. "Science is my eyes, my fingers, my ears ... my window on the world, " she says. At odd and unexpected moments, her work also seems to bring new insights into herself and her life as a writer, a wife, and a mother. These pages promise a new adventure at every turn in the trail. For sheer terror, there's a climb up the face of Baboquivari for laughs, there's the great bagworm caper; and for some quiet truths, there are themes of gain and loss, of connection and reconciliation. Crunching through winter snow or sweating under summer sun, we know we're in the hands of an experienced guide.

How do American girls see themselves and their lives today? What are their dreams? Jenny, Laura, and Martha McPhee take readers into the world of girls today, in this beautiful book of original photographs and life stories culled from the sisters' interviews with girls across America.

Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?" is the crucial question with which renowned literary critic Harold Bloom begins this impassioned book on the pleasures and benefits of reading well. For more than forty years, Bloom has transformed college students into lifelong readers with his unrivaled love for literature. Now, at a time when faster and easier electronic media threatens to eclipse the practice of reading, Bloom draws on his experience as critic, teacher, and prolific reader to plumb the great books for their sustaining wisdom.
Shedding all polemic, Bloom addresses the solitary reader, who, he urges, should read for the purest of all reasons: to discover and augment the self. His ultimate faith in the restorative power of literature resonates on every page of this infinitely rewarding and important book.

Poetry. Translated from the Turkish by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk. This is the first complete English translation of Hikmet's 1935 book that denounced the imminent Italian invasion of Ethiopia. It is this book that let the Turkish military to begin persecuting Hikmet for his anti-Fascist views. Three years later, the military would sentence him to 28 years in prison for his politics.

From the author of Jazz Cleopatra comes a fresh, eclectic collection of essays that charts one woman's journeys, from New York to France to New England, to that place within us where understanding meets the human heart. Here, armed with humor and irreverence, she explores such themes as youth and motherhood, loneliness and self-discovery, memory and creation, decline and loss.

Have we become beauty-blind? For two decades or more in the humanities, various political arguments have been put forward against beauty: that it distracts us from more important issues; that it is the handmaiden of privilege; and that it masks political interests. In On Beauty and Being Just Elaine Scarry not only defends beauty from the political arguments against it but also argues that beauty does indeed press us toward a greater concern for justice. Taking inspiration from writers and thinkers as diverse as Homer, Plato, Marcel Proust, Simone Weil, and Iris Murdoch as well as her own experiences, Scarry offers up an elegant, passionate manifesto for the revival of beauty in our intellectual work as well as our homes, museums, and classrooms.

Scarry argues that our responses to beauty are perceptual events of profound significance for the individual and for society. Presenting us with a rare and exceptional opportunity to witness fairness, beauty assists us in our attention to justice. The beautiful object renders fairness, an abstract concept, concrete by making it directly available to our sensory perceptions. With its direct appeal to the senses, beauty stops us, transfixes us, fills us with a "surfeit of aliveness." In so doing, it takes the individual away from the center of his or her self-preoccupation and thus prompts a distribution of attention outward toward others and, ultimately, she contends, toward ethical fairness.

Scarry, author of the landmark The Body in Pain and one of our bravest and most creative thinkers, offers us here philosophical critique written with clarity and conviction as well as a passionate plea that we change the way we think about beauty.

Interviews with more than 150 parents and care givers inform a probing examination of the anxieties and conflicts that arise in situations in which middle-class parents and their children's care givers have different cultural backgrounds.

Lia Purpura's essays are full of joy in the act of intense observation; they're also deliciously subversive and alert to the ways language gets locked and loaded by culture. These elegant, conversational excursions refuse to let a reader slide over anything, from the tiniest shards of beach glass to barren big-box wastelands. They detonate distractedness, superficiality, artificiality. In the process, Purpura inhabits many stances: metaphysician and biologist, sensualist and witness--all in service of illuminating that which Virginia Woolf called "moments of being"--previously unworded but palpably felt states of existence and knowing. "Rough Likeness" finds worlds in the minute, and crafts monuments to beauty and strangeness.

Shoreline is an anthology of selected short fiction, non-fiction, poetry & prose from The Association of Rhode Island Authors.

The Best American Series(R)
First, Best, and Best-Selling

The Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. Each volume's series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind.

The Best American Essays 2012 includes

Marcia Angell, Miah Arnold, Mark Doty, Joseph Epstein, Jonathan Franzen,
Malcolm Gladwell, Francine Prose, Lauren Slater,
Sandra Tsing Loh, Jose Antonio Vargas, and others

The Hundredth Monkey takes its title from philosopher Ron Amundson's expose of the "Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon," a claim about collective consciousness. Forty-three essays by thirty-nine authors, including Isaac Asmov, Martin Gardner, Carl Sagan, Ray Hyman, Paul Kurtz, and James Randi, examine aspects of paranormal and fringe-science beliefs from an authoritative, scientific point of view. The penetrating and entertaining essays, many with timely postscripts, are grouped into nine categories: - Understanding Human Need - Examining Popular Claims - Encouraging Critical Thinking - Medical Controversies - Evaluating the Anomalous Experience - Astrology - Considering Parapsychology - Crashed Saucer Claims - Controversies Within Science Scientists and scholars discuss the burden of skepticism and the delicate balance between a creative openness to new ideas and the relentless scrutiny of new claims. A classic source book for scientifically responsible explanations of controversies, hoaxes, bizarre mysteries, and popular cultural myths.

With their call for "simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!," for self-honesty, and for harmony with nature, the writings of Henry David Thoreau are perhaps the most influential philosophical works in all American literature. The selections in this volume represent Thoreau at his best. Included in their entirety are Walden, his indisputable masterpiece, and his two great arguments for nonconformity, Civil Disobedience and Life Without Principle. A lifetime of brilliant observation of nature--and of himself--is recorded in selections from A Week On The Concord And Merrimack Rivers, Cape Cod, The Maine Woods and The Journal.

A few years ago poet Stephen Dunn discovered an inclination to be an essayist, "a person who believes there's value in being overheard clarifying things for himself." As he turned to prose writing and the collection grew, Dunn found himself blending thoughts about poetry with musings about his own early experience. Five essays explore the mysteries of composition, the problems and latitudes the poet faces, and the ways in which poetry confers value. The rest are essay-memoirs, touching upon such diverse subjects as basketball, gambling, storytelling, and silence. Though anecdotal, each memoir relates to the poetic mentality. How one walks in a dangerous neighborhood can be analogous to how one moves in a poem. And if one survives the silence of shyness, Dunn convinces us, it can be a storehouse of the unspoken. The title is derived from William Meredith's "Crossing Over." Meredith's speaker, on an ice floe in the middle of a river, says, "I love this fool's walk./ The thing we have to learn is how to walk light."