The Best American Essays

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Index:

• The Best American Essays by year
• Winners of Man Booker Prize
• The Man Booker International Prize.

The Best American Essays by year

Robert Atwan, series editor.

• 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007
• 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999

The Best American Essays 2007

Edited and with an introduction by David Foster Wallace; Robert Atwan, series editor.

Atwan [p. xi] summarizes criteria for an essay's inclusion, ending:

To qualify for this volume, the essay must be a work of respectable literary quality, intended as a fully developed, independent essay on a subject of general interest (not specialized scholarship), originally written in English (or translated by the author) for publication in an American periodical during the calendar year. Today's essay is a highly flexible and shifting form, however, so these criteria are not carved in stone.

Be sure to read David Forster Wallace's Introduction: Deciderization 2007 -- A Special Report. :

I think it's unlikely that anyone is reading this as an introduction. Most of the people I know treat Best American Essays like Whitman Samplers. They skip around, pick and choose ... Which means that the reader has more freedom of choice, which of course is part of what this country is all about. ... The guest editor's intro is last, if at all. ... your guest editor is not really even the main sub-subcontractor on this job. The real Decider, in terms of processing info and reducing entropy, is Mr. Robert Atwan, the BAE series editor ... he's really the one doing the full-time reading and culling. Given the amount of quiet, behind-the-scenes power he wields over these prize collections, you're entitled to ask about Mr. Atwan's standard's for inclusion and forwarding; [ Here Wallace gives us the footnote for this page; he displays affection for peppered and peppery footnotes: I believe this is what is known in the nonfiction industry as a transition. We are starting to poke tentatively at 'Best', which is the most obviously fraught and bias-prone word on the cover. J.Z.] but he's far too experienced and cagey to encourage these sorts of questions. ... I, on the other hand, have a strict term limit. After this, I go forever back to being an ordinary civilian and BAE reader (except for the introductions). I therefore feel free here to try for at least partial transparency about my Decidering criteria, some of which are obviously -- let's be grownups and just admit it -- subjective. ... But it is possible for something to be both a quantum of information and a vector of meaning.

Of the essays themselves, favorites are:

• Ian Buruma's "The Freedom to Offend" (6 pp.) from The New Republic, which ends:

  It certainly was necessary to educate the mainstream of democratic societies to respect the rights of minorities, but now immigrants and their offspring must learn that to be offended is the price we all must pay for our freedom of speech and freedom of thought. Since many immigrants come from places where such freedom does not exist, they should be the first to appreciate its benefits.

• Mark Danner's "Iraq: The War of the Imagination" (34 pp.) from The New York Review of Books.

• George Gessert's "An Orgy of Power" (13 pp.) from Northwest Review, which includes:

  Documents surfaced, such as the so-called torture memo of August 1, 2002, showing that very close associates of President Bush, apparently with his full approval, had encouraged torture. Lions and hyenas kill swiftly. Housecats play with their victims, but only to practice pouncing, not to cause pain. Tapeworms and the shingles virus keep their victims alive as sources of sustenance, not to cause pain. Only humans torture. ... The deeper our society descends into militarism, one-party rule, and rule by a single branch of government, the more embedded the practice of torture will become in American life.

• Malcolm Gladwell's "What the Dog Saw" (17 pp.) from The New Yorker, about Cesar Millan, bringer of discipline to undisciplined, biting dogs:

  "She's not apologizing. ... If she was sorry," Cesar said softly, "she wouldn't do it in the first place."

• Garret Keizer's "Loaded" (7 pp.) from Harper's Magazine, which ends:

  Give me some people with very fanatical ideas about the sanctity of habeas corpus and the length of time an African American or any other American ought to wait in line to vote. Give me some people who are not so evolved that they have forgotten what it is to stand firm under fire or even to squat near the fire in a cave. Give me an accountant who can still throw a rock.

• John Lahr's "Petrified" (11 pp.), also from The New Yorker, which deals with stage fright, and has this telling quotation about Carly Simon:

  Simon has found that physical pain often trumps psychological terror. "If you have something that's hurting you physically, the pain is the hierarchy [sic]," she said. To that end, she has been known to take the stage in tight boots, to jab her hand with clutched safety pins, and even, just before going on, to ask band members to spank her.

• Elaine Scarry's "Rules of Engagement" (25 pp.) from Boston Review, about the U.S.A.'s resort to treachery, torture, and other "neo-absolutist practices".

• Philosopher Roger Scruton's "A Carnivore's Credo" (7 pp.) from Harper's Magazine explores the issue of whether to eat animals, which occurs in Environmental Ethics:

  The moral life, I believe, rests on three pillars: value, virtue, and duty. Some hold that all the weight can be made to rest on only one of them: value, according to utilitarians; duty, according to their deontological opponents. Whether or not any such reductions can be successfully carried out. we cannot give a coherent account of the moral life without doing justice to all the conceptions that support it -- to value, virtue, and duty -- and showing their place, for human beings, in the good life. ... That which distinguishes us from animals -- our predicament as self-conscious and judging creatures -- ... comes immediately to life when we consider the question of eating. Whether or not we think eating people is wrong, we do not think it is on a par with eating other animals. ... I would suggest that it is not only permissible for those who care about animals to eat meat; they have a duty to do so. If meat eating should ever become confined to those who do not care about animal suffering, then compassionate farming would cease. Where there are conscientious carnivores, there is a motive to raise animals kindly. Moreover, conscientious carnivores show their depraved [sic] contemporaries that there is a right and a wrong way to eat. Duty requires us, therefore, to eat our friends.

• Bioethicist Peter Singer's "What Should a Billionaire Give -- and what should you" (15 pp.) from The New York Times Magazine, which ends:

  More important than questions about motives are questions about whether there is an obligation for the rich to give, and if so how much should they give.

  More at Environmental Ethics Blog.

Where the essays first appeared:

Number of essays:	22
First published in:	American Scholar, The Boston Review California Granta Harper's Magazine [2] Iowa Review, The n + 1 New Republic, The [2] New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The [3] Northwest Review PMS StoryQuarterly Threepenny Review, The Tin House TriQuarterly

The Best American Essays 2006

The Best American Essays 2005

The Best American Essays 2004

The Best American Essays 2003

The Best American Essays 2002

The Best American Essays 2001

The Best American Essays 2000

The Best American Essays 1999

The Best American Essays 1998

The Best American Essays 1997

The Best American Essays 1996

Includes the essay "Owls" by Mary Oliver, also available in two of her collections:

• Blue Pastures (1995)
• Owls and Other Fantasies (2003).

The Best American Essays 1995

The Best American Essays 1994

The Best American Essays 1993

The Best American Essays 1992

The Best American Essays 1991

The Best American Essays 1990

Loved it: decoder ring

I marked with a star an essay that I liked particularly, and with more than one star if I loved it. Approximate ratings (your kilometerage may vary):

• Amazingly brilliant. 9/10 on the Blog-ometer.
• Loved it. 8/10 on the Blog-ometer.
• Pretty good. 7/10 on the Blog-ometer.
• Not very good. 6/10 or under on the Blog-ometer.

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