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A review by ctgt
The Best American Essays 2018 by Robert Atwan, Hilton Als
3.0
Like most collections some of these essays really struck a chord while others never moved me. I will say there was a nice variety of essays including art, fashion, wine, politics, fashion....life. Hopefully you will find something you enjoy.
Here were my favorites;
The Other Steve Harvey by Steven Harvey from Michigan Quarterly Review. An inner examination by the author of his attitudes toward race and race relations.
The March on Everywhere by Leslie Jameson from Harper's Magazine about the author's experiences in the Women's March.
But already, we were made of nerves and excitement. We were buzzed on coffee. We were breastfeeding babies. We were part of a creature with four million faces. We were a bunch of strangers intoxicated by our shared purpose, which is to say: we were a we.
There is no activism that isn't full of logistics and resentments and boring details. Commitment to anything larger than your own life often looks mythic in retrospect. But on the ground, it's all in-box pileup and childcare guilt; it's a lot of wondering if you're having the right feelings or the wrong ones, or confusion about which is which. It's messy and chaotic and imperfect-which isn't the flaw of it but the glory of it. It trades the perfect for the necessary, for the something, for the beginning and the spark.
Land of Darkness by Suki Kim from Lapham's Quarterly Suki Kim is the only known writer who lived undercover in North Korea. A short piece on fear and waiting.
It often seems to me that the desire to comprehend fear strikes at a mystery at the center of life. We breathe toward death; each moment alive is a clock tick toward not living any longer. There is no happy ending, and to help all this make sense to us, we repeat histories, fight needless wars, recite prayers, and fall in love, often more than once, with people who will break our hearts. Life is born from those blind spots, with each mishap, every accident.
Eat, Memory by David Wong Louie from Harper's Magazine. For all you foodies out there, imagine losing the capability to eat.
The Big Thing on His Mind by Thomas Powers from The New York Review of Books on Faulkner and his treatment of race in his novels.
Clothes That Don't Need You by David Salle from The New York Review of Books, listen I know absolutely nothing about fashion but I thought this was an interesting look at fashion and its intersection with art.
Losing Streak by Kathryn Schulz from The New Yorker this might be my favorite as it starts out humorous and fairly light about misplacing items but then turns more serious as it deals with the loss of a loved one.
Meanwhile, I had lost, along with everything else, all the motivation; day after day, I did as close as humanly possible to nothing. In part, this was because I dreaded getting farther away from the time when my father was still alive. But it was also because, after all the obvious tasks of mourning were completed-the service over, the bureaucratic side of death dispatched, the clothing donated, the thank-you cards written- I had no idea what else to do. Although I had spent a decade worrying about losing my father, I had never once thought about what would come next. Like a heart, my imagination had always stopped at the moment of death.
Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days.
6/10
Here were my favorites;
The Other Steve Harvey by Steven Harvey from Michigan Quarterly Review. An inner examination by the author of his attitudes toward race and race relations.
The March on Everywhere by Leslie Jameson from Harper's Magazine about the author's experiences in the Women's March.
But already, we were made of nerves and excitement. We were buzzed on coffee. We were breastfeeding babies. We were part of a creature with four million faces. We were a bunch of strangers intoxicated by our shared purpose, which is to say: we were a we.
There is no activism that isn't full of logistics and resentments and boring details. Commitment to anything larger than your own life often looks mythic in retrospect. But on the ground, it's all in-box pileup and childcare guilt; it's a lot of wondering if you're having the right feelings or the wrong ones, or confusion about which is which. It's messy and chaotic and imperfect-which isn't the flaw of it but the glory of it. It trades the perfect for the necessary, for the something, for the beginning and the spark.
Land of Darkness by Suki Kim from Lapham's Quarterly Suki Kim is the only known writer who lived undercover in North Korea. A short piece on fear and waiting.
It often seems to me that the desire to comprehend fear strikes at a mystery at the center of life. We breathe toward death; each moment alive is a clock tick toward not living any longer. There is no happy ending, and to help all this make sense to us, we repeat histories, fight needless wars, recite prayers, and fall in love, often more than once, with people who will break our hearts. Life is born from those blind spots, with each mishap, every accident.
Eat, Memory by David Wong Louie from Harper's Magazine. For all you foodies out there, imagine losing the capability to eat.
The Big Thing on His Mind by Thomas Powers from The New York Review of Books on Faulkner and his treatment of race in his novels.
Clothes That Don't Need You by David Salle from The New York Review of Books, listen I know absolutely nothing about fashion but I thought this was an interesting look at fashion and its intersection with art.
Losing Streak by Kathryn Schulz from The New Yorker this might be my favorite as it starts out humorous and fairly light about misplacing items but then turns more serious as it deals with the loss of a loved one.
Meanwhile, I had lost, along with everything else, all the motivation; day after day, I did as close as humanly possible to nothing. In part, this was because I dreaded getting farther away from the time when my father was still alive. But it was also because, after all the obvious tasks of mourning were completed-the service over, the bureaucratic side of death dispatched, the clothing donated, the thank-you cards written- I had no idea what else to do. Although I had spent a decade worrying about losing my father, I had never once thought about what would come next. Like a heart, my imagination had always stopped at the moment of death.
Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days.
6/10