2024 the best 2023 review
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In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic observations of the world around them. From an inmate struggling to find purpose during his prison sentence to a doctor coping with the unpredictable nature of her patient, to a widow wishing for just a little more time with her late husband, these narratives—and the others featured in this anthology—celebrate the endurance of the human spirit.
The Best American Essays 2023 includes Ciara Alfaro • Jillian Barnet • Sylvie Baumgartel • Eric Borsuk • Chris Dennis • Xujun Eberlein • Sandra Hager Eliason • George Estreich • Merrill Joan Gerber • Debra Gwartney • Edward Hoagland • Laura Kipnis • Phillip Lopate • Celeste Marcus • Sam Meekings • Sigrid Nunez • Kathryn Schulz • Anthony Siegel • Scott Spencer • Angelique Stevens • David Treuer
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Publisher : Mariner Books (October 17, 2023)
Language : English
Paperback : 288 pages
ISBN-10 : 0063288842
ISBN-13 : 978-0063288843
Item Weight : 8.8 ounces
Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.65 x 8.25 inches
Reviewer: Irene Grumman
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Think About It
Review: I used this product to entertain myself, and to expand my understanding. Suddenly I'm bingeing on essay collections. Such a variety of well written, deeply reflective, often personal and funny writings.
Reviewer: Seven Kitties
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: A step in a good direction
Review: I'd really given up on this series. The last few years, this collection has been basically unreadable and made me question if this really were the best of the crop of essays for the year...then maybe the essay should die.Last year's collection, edited by Chee, was an affront to taste and a blatant attempt to be 'woke' in the term the political right uses (for the record I'm a centrist libertarian)...in all the wrong ways and for all the wrong reasons.So I was somewhat hopeful when Gornick was the editor, because her Situation and the Story is a classic in any creative nonfiction course. I expected essays that had attention to craft, not just shock value (like Chee's selections).There are a number of very good essays in this collection. "Fat Man and LIttle Boy" is an interesting version of the essay of place, "The Americas They Left Me" is a lovely study of identity, and "Fist of Muscle" was a powerful, raw and vulnerable memoir that left me wanting more, but that's not a critcism.There are others that are also really quite good--"Bidders of the Din" and "Mrs Daylily" take marginalized situations and bring them to the fore. "Care Credit" is at once an expose of the American vision of success, and the shame that so often tangles itself in it.But there are at least two absolute clunkers in here and I don't mean 'clunkers' because I disagree wtih Gornick's choice at putting them in here. They're clunkers because they're just...not good and reveal blindspots in Gornick's vision."Rough Ride" is just awful. If your doctor likes this essay, find another doctor. But Gornick, a white affluent woman, and Eliason, another white affluent woman, somehow have survived to 2023 with this, well it's not even Sowell's 'Soft bigotry of low expectations', it is actually a harmful bigotry. If you take (mild spoiler) 'never call the police on a Black person' (spoken by your bipolar unmedicated patient) as the new law of the heart, well, you're going to see a lot more dead Black people.I was so pissed by this essay I wrote my own response in my dumb substack, but I'll just give you the lowdown here: If you think it's never okay to call 911 to help a Black person...you want dead Black people. Black people, just like white people and Latinx people...overdose, get abused by spouses, get kidnapped, assaulted, sexually assaulted, Black children just like white children, get abused....you name it. Grow up.Also, if Eliason wanted to help Serena, her patient, she, as a doctor, could have instigated an investigation. In the US in 2023, it's hard to find a police precinct where they don't have bodycams and all of them have cameras in transport vehicles. If Serena had been beaten up by the cops, there would be hours and hours of footage, and Eliason could have started the process of getting justice. But she doesn't. Why get Serena justice and maybe put a stop to an abusive police department so they can't harm any other Black people? Why didn't you do that ,Eliason? Oh, because it's just so much easier to sit there and feel virtuous that you have been taught by a Black person.The other essay that just stunk was "Gender: a Melee." And it wasn't so much that this essay was bad (it was, because the writer was ranting, and while ranting is cathartic, to polish a rant into an essay requires stepping back and whipping it into coherent shape and something that humanizes it, brings it to the heart, not just the brain, which this author never did), it is that while it full throatedly bashes feminism as the domain of white college educated soccer moms, literally two essays after it is "A Thousand Gentle Smotherings"--a classic feminist essay in the very vein of feminism that Kipnis clearly despises. (Kipnis ends her essay with a paragraph guaranteed to set off a lot of people: "To those who fear trans women in the ladies' room: make sure to pee before you leave the house".)What gives, Gornick? Did you feel pressure to put some sort of token trans-friendly essay into your piece and then snuck in one you actually vibed with? Are white affluent feminists evil or nah?A lot of the essays share a theme that perhaps befits Atwan's last volume as chief editor--the theme of aging, changes, and mortality. These are all beautifully written and strike at the heart and are exactly what the genre is capable of--humanizing the realities of the world. Even the essay about the author of Bambi, the book upon which the Disney movie is based, challenges, provokes and prods the reader. I love an essay where I learn something new, or feel and see experiences I've never had before, or even have someone, like the author of "When We Were Boys" take experiences I remember, and cast them up into art. And there's plenty of that in this collection.Just, maybe, skip those two essays.
Reviewer: Sue M
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: A so-so collection of short stories
Review: Most if not all of the stories are depressing or boring. Pass this one if youâre looking for entertaining, pleasurable writing.
Reviewer: Luna
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Awesome book
Review: Got this for English class. It was pretty good.
Reviewer: psusanh
Rating: 2.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Very memoir heavy
Review: I was disappointed in this collection because the essay sub genre and âvoiceâ across the essays, albeit as applied to a range of subjects, is basically memoir and personal essay, largely without the more outward facing perspective, and ballast, of context, light research, reportage, or incisive socialCommentary and critique. Instead, the last appears, if at all, nestled into densely observed pieces about the self, with a few exceptions, including the reliably brilliant Kipnisâ selectionâ¦. In addition to the monotone of the memoir essay generically, Iâm struck that these collections rarely draw much on other inflections and modalities of the essay as a genre, including humor.This volume would have us believe that âessayâ is all but synonymous with âmemoir,â the dense, sometimes suffocating, self-rumination. The genre contains multitudes. You just wonât find them in this edition if BAE.I hope that next year the editors draw on a broader range of modesâhumor, in particularâ as well as a broader range of essay sun-genres.
Reviewer: Kelevilin Kimathi
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Best american essays 2023
Review: This is the best essay collection I have read in a long time..The essays are autobiographical in nature dealing with peoples lives in different circumstances..it makes you also meditate on yours also.
Reviewer: M. Cohen
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Interesting and diversified subjects
Review: Book group discussion.
Reviewer: Reviewer
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: College course
Review: I bought this book for a college quote and I didnât learn much about what makes a good easy