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Essays
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
What is at stake in literature? Can we identify the fire that our stories have lost, but that they strive, at all costs, to rediscover? And what is the philosopher's stone that writers, with the passion of alchemists, struggle to forge in their word furnaces? For Giorgio Agamben, who suggests that the parable is the secret model of all narrative, every act of creation tenaciously resists creation, thereby giving each work its strength and grace. The ten essays brought together here cover works by figures ranging from Aristotle to Paul Klee and illustrate what urgently drives Agamben's current research. As is often the case with his writings, their especial focus is the mystery of literature, of reading and writing, and of language as a laboratory for conceiving an ethico-political perspective that places us beyond sovereign power.
Moving, bold, and funny, this collection of essays by Elizabeth Rau captures the poignancy of ordinary life through the voices of everyday people--children, friends, neighbors, and even the mail carrier. In vivid and lyrical prose, she chronicles her childhood in the Midwest, her many years as a newspaper reporter, and, above all, her plunge into motherhood in middle age. At a time when some writers tend to grouse about raising children, Rau revels in her good fortune and the day-to-day: teaching her younger son how to read using "Garfield" comic books; encouraging her older son to design his grandmother's gravestone; observing the motley crew of boys who patronize "the yellow house" for years, bringing their wit, charm, and stuff, from yo-yos to baseball gloves. Along the way we meet characters in her neighborhood, like Ed the mailman whose true passion is growing and selling daylilies because they are "beautiful and resilient and won't die on you." Engaging, yet never indulgent, the collection elevates moments we take for granted into luminous stories about the experience of home.
Moving, bold, and funny, this collection of essays by Elizabeth Rau captures the poignancy of ordinary life through the voices of everyday people--children, friends, neighbors, and even the mail carrier. In vivid and lyrical prose, she chronicles her childhood in the Midwest, her many years as a newspaper reporter, and, above all, her plunge into motherhood in middle age. At a time when some writers tend to grouse about raising children, Rau revels in her good fortune and the day-to-day: teaching her younger son how to read using "Garfield" comic books; encouraging her older son to design his grandmother's gravestone; observing the motley crew of boys who patronize "the yellow house" for years, bringing their wit, charm, and stuff, from yo-yos to baseball gloves. Along the way we meet characters in her neighborhood, like Ed the mailman whose true passion is growing and selling daylilies because they are "beautiful and resilient and won't die on you." Engaging, yet never indulgent, the collection elevates moments we take for granted into luminous stories about the experience of home.
