The Best American Essays 2016 by Robert Atwan

The Best American Essays 2016 by Robert Atwan

A true essay is "something hazarded, not definitive, not authoritative; something ventured on the basis of the author's personal experience and subjectivity," writes guest editor Jonathan Franzen in his introduction. However, his main criterion for selecting The Best American Essays 2016 was, in a word, risk. Whether the risks involved championing an unpopular opinion, the possibility of ruining a professional career, or irrevocably offending family, for Franzen, "the writer has to be like the firefighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames, is to run straight into them."



The Best American Essays 2016 includes ALEXANDER CHEE, PAUL CRENSHAW, JAQUIRA DÍAZ, LAURA KIPNIS, AMITAVA KUMAR, SEBASTIAN JUNGER,

JOYCE CAROL OATES, OLIVER SACKS, THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS and others

 

JONATHAN FRANZEN, guest editor, is the author of five novels, most recently Purity, and five works of nonfiction and translation, including Farther Away and The Kraus Project. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the German Akademie der Künste, and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

 

ROBERT ATWAN, the series editor of The Best American Essays since its inception in 1986, has published on a wide variety of subjects, from American advertising and early photography to ancient divination and Shakespeare. His criticism, essays, humor, poetry, and fiction have appeared in numerous periodicals nationwide.

Robert Atwan is director of The Blue Hills Writing Institute at Curry College and the series editor of the annual Best American Essays, which he founded in 1985. His essays, reviews, and critical articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Iowa Review, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, River Teeth, and many other publications. For Bedford/St. Martin s, he has also edited Ten on Ten: Major Essayists on Recurring Themes (1992); Our Times (1998); and Convergences (2009). He has coedited (with Jon Roberts) Left, Right, and Center: Voices from Across the Political Spectrum (1996), and is coeditor with Donald McQuade of The Writer s Presence (2009).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780544812109
ISBN 10	0544812107
Title	The Best American Essays 2016
Author	Robert Atwan
Series	Best American
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Mariner Books
Year published	2016-10-04
Number of pages	352
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.