The Best American Essays 2015 Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Foreword: Of Essays and Essayists

  Introduction

  Hilton Als, Islands

  Roger Angell, This Old Man

  Kendra Atleework, Charade

  Isaiah Berlin, A Message to the Twenty-First Century

  Sven Birkerts, Strange Days

  Tiffany Briere, Vision

  Justin Cronin, My Daughter and God

  Meghan Daum, Difference Maker

  Anthony Doerr, Thing with Feathers That Perches in the Soul

  Malcolm Gladwell, The Crooked Ladder

  Mark Jacobson, 65

  Margo Jefferson, Scenes from a Life in Negroland

  Philip Kennicott, Smuggler

  Tim Kreider, A Man and His Cat

  Kate Lebo, The Loudproof Room

  John Reed, My Grandma the Poisoner

  Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, Reflections on Indexing My Lynching Book

  David Sedaris, Stepping Out

  Zadie Smith, Find Your Beach

  Rebecca Solnit, Arrival Gates

  Cheryl Strayed, My Uniform

  Kelly Sundberg, It Will Look Like a Sunset

  Contributors’ Notes

  Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction of 2014

  Read More from The Best American Series®

  About the Editors

  Copyright © 2015 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

  Introduction copyright © 2015 by Ariel Levy

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  The Best American Series® and The Best American Essays® are registered trademarks of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

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  ISSN 0888-3742

  ISBN 978-0-544-56962-1

  Cover design by Christopher Moisan © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  eISBN 978-0-544-57921-7

  v1.1015

  “Islands” by Hilton Als. First published in Transition, no. 113. Copyright © 2014 by Hilton Als. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC.

  “This Old Man” by Roger Angell. First published in The New Yorker, February 17 and 24, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Roger Angell. Reprinted by permission of Roger Angell.

  “Charade” by Kendra Atleework. First published in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Fall/Winter 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Kendra Atleework. Reprinted by permission of Kendra Atleework.

  “A Message to the Twenty-First Century” by Isaiah Berlin. First published in the New York Review of Books, October 23, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Isaiah Berlin. Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust.

  “Strange Days” by Sven Birkerts. First published in Lapham’s Quarterly, Fall 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Sven Birkerts. Reprinted by permission of Sven Birkerts.

  “Vision” by Tiffany Briere. First published in Tin House, vol. 15, no. 3, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Tiffany Briere. Reprinted by permission of Tiffany Briere.

  “My Daughter and God” by Justin Cronin. First published in Narrative, Spring 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Justin Cronin. From When I First Held You edited by Brian Gresko, Penguin 2014. Reprinted by permission of Trident Media Group.

  “Difference Maker” by Meghan Daum. First published in The New Yorker, September 29, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Meghan Daum. Reprinted by permission of Meghan Daum.

  “Thing with Feathers That Perches in the Soul” by Anthony Doerr. First published in Granta (Issue 128), Summer 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Anthony Doerr. Reprinted by permission of Anthony Doerr. The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

  “The Crooked Ladder” by Malcolm Gladwell. First published in The New Yorker, August 11 and 18, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Malcolm Gladwell. Reprinted by permission of Malcolm Gladwell.

  “65” by Mark Jacobson. First published in New York, April 7–20, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Mark Jacobson. Reprinted by permission of New York.

  “Scenes from a Life in Negroland” by Margo Jefferson. First published in Guernica, June 16, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Margo Jefferson. Reprinted by permission of Margo Jefferson.

  “Smuggler” by Philip Kennicott. First published in Virginia Quarterly Review, Fall 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Philip Kennicott. Reprinted by permission of Philip Kennicott.

  “A Man and His Cat” by Tim Kreider. First published in the New York Times, August 3, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Tim Kreider. Reprinted by permission of Tim Kreider.

  “The Loudproof Room” by Kate Lebo. First published in New England Review, vol. 35, no. 2, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Kate Lebo. Reprinted by permission of Kate Lebo.

  “My Grandma the Poisoner” by John Reed. First published in Vice, October 2014. Copyright © 2014 by John Reed. Reprinted by permission of John Reed.

  “Reflections on Indexing My Lynching Book” by Ashraf H. A. Rushdy. First published in Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 53, issue 2, Spring 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Ashraf Rushdy. Reprinted by permission of Ashraf Rushdy.

  “Stepping Out” by David Sedaris. First published in The New Yorker, June 30, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by David Sedaris. Reprinted by permission of David Sedaris.

  “Find Your Beach” by Zadie Smith. First published in the New York Review of Books, October 23, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Zadie Smith. Reprinted by permission of Rogers, Coleridge & White.

  “Arrival Gates” by Rebecca Solnit. First published in Granta, no. 127, Spring 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Rebecca Solnit. Reprinted by permission of Granta and Trinity University Press.

  “My Uniform” by Cheryl Strayed. First published in Tin House, vol. 15, no. 3, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Cheryl Strayed. Reprinted by permission of Cheryl Strayed.

  “It Will Look Like a Sunset” by Kelly Sundberg. First published in Guernica, April 1, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Kelly Sundberg. Reprinted by permission of Kelly Sundberg and Guernica.

  Foreword: Of Essays and Essayists

  WHEN I STARTED to write the first “Foreword” to this series, now in its thirtieth year, I remember thinking that it would be appropriate, perhaps necessary, to define what I meant by an essay. Here was a new series of books calling attention to a genre that at the time the literary world did not take very seriously. It was hard to forget that just a few years before we launched the series, America’s most renowned essayist, E. B. White, acknowledged that “the essayist, unlike the novelist, the poet, and the playwright, must be content in his self-imposed role of second-class citizen.” If, as White suggested, essays would not win anyone a Nobel Prize, how substandard were they? What exactly was the literary production that this new series would showcase and celebrate?

  Thirty years later and I’m still asking myself that question. I think it’s clear that the s
tatus of the essay has improved over that time (the longevity of this series being a part of the evidence), but a solid, tight definition of the genre featured thus far throughout thirty volumes continues to elude me. I would, of course, happily use another’s definition if I could find one I thought satisfactory. With so many different types of essays being published year after year, it seems impossible to identify a few essential features that characterize the genre and encompass all its forms. But perhaps one way into the matter of definition is to ask not what essays are but what essayists do. What do they do differently from what the generally more respected writers in other genres do? And where else to begin but with Michel de Montaigne?

  It’s well known that the origin of the modern essay is usually traced to one writer who began composing odd prose pieces in the 1570s. At first he had no literary category to describe what he was doing, nor did he appear even to possess conventional rhetorical aims. In nearly all previous prose compositions, the act of writing remained in the background; Montaigne is perhaps the first to foreground the writing process. In his prose, he refused to adopt, as did his contemporaries, a professional, scholarly, clerical, or judicial authority. He allowed himself no authoritative posture—only that of being an author. As his pieces accumulated, Montaigne settled on the word essai to characterize his literary efforts.

  The word was an ordinary term that at the time had no literary resonance. Like most common words, it carried a broad range of connotations. The etymology of essai can be traced to the late Latin exagium, which meant to weigh or a weight. By the fourth century the term had spread to the Romance languages with the additional and modern meaning of “to attempt” or “to try.” (For a fascinating exploration of the word, see John Jeremiah Sullivan’s introduction to Essays 2014.) Though we normally translate the title of Montaigne’s book as Essays, suggesting only the genre, we should remember that in his time the term suggested no literary genre and would be read as “attempts” or “trials,” or, since the verb essayer had a wide spectrum of synonyms, it could also suggest to sample, taste, practice, take a risk, to experiment, to improvise, to try out, to sound—and these are only a few ways we might understand the term. As Hugo Friedrich says in his splendid study of Montaigne’s life and works, the word also implied modest beginnings and a learner’s first attempts. The word essay, then, served as a caution not to take the work too seriously; these weren’t, after all, airtight arguments or conclusive treatises but represented a unique style of prose with an apparently unfinished quality.

  Montaigne deliberately pursued an anti-systematic and anti-rhetorical method of composition. He purposefully defied the formal conventions of classification, division, and logical progression that had long characterized serious prose. And he thus established an ironic authorial posture: the art of his essays would be grounded in the illusion of their artlessness. His essays would reflect the mind in process. The writer will not worry about main points and thesis statements, as digressions lead to further digressions and his thematic destination disappears. A practicing Catholic, he doesn’t even try to avoid the intellectual mortal sin of inconsistency. For Montaigne, the essay essentially came to represent a compositional challenge to the established rhetorical order, as his fluid thoughts appear to be generated solely from the act of writing and not from a preconceived plan. From this brief description of Montaigne’s method we can see how far first-year college writing courses, with their emphasis on clarity, coherence, and distinct rhetorical patterns, have distanced themselves from the original meaning of an essay.

  Back in the 1930s, the multitalented J. B. Priestley succinctly and amusingly claimed that an essay is the kind of composition produced by an essayist. In that case, as so many writers have testified, including Virginia Woolf and E. B. White, Montaigne can be regarded as the quintessential essayist: skeptical, ironic, looking at a subject one way and then another while he forms a position that he will undoubtedly qualify, if not completely undermine. Many readers today seem to appreciate writers who aspire to be “subversive”—the word, like disruptive, has acquired a positive spin. But Montaigne perfected a manner of self-subversion, and therein lies much of the quality of his intellectual liveliness and enduring appeal, what Virginia Woolf called his “irrepressible vivacity.” She cites his own description of his temperament: “bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal.”

  Surely one of Montaigne’s great achievements consists of the magical way he unites his unique compositional process with his infectious and mercurial personality. As he says in “Of Giving the Lie”: “I have no more made my book than my book has made me—a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life.” He seems to want this notion of consubstantiality to be read as more than a metaphor. At least one of Montaigne’s great students and supporters appeared to take him literally. In his brilliant essay on Montaigne, Emerson writes: “The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.”

  If the origin of the essay as a genre is French, the origin of the essayist is English. As Jean Starobinski, the author of what I consider the finest study of Montaigne (Montaigne in Motion), points out, essayist had a “pejorative nuance” when first used around the beginning of the seventeenth century. He cites the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson’s complaint: “Mere essayists, a few loose sentences, and that’s all!” So we are back to White’s second-class citizens. From the experts of Montaigne’s day to the specialists of ours—those whose work consists of original research, investigative fact-finding, and the formation of incontestable arguments—essays may seem slight and the essayist superficial. Known as an outstanding scholar, Starobinski admits that if someone declared him an essayist, he would feel “slightly hurt” and “take it as a reproach.”

  So the essayist appears to pursue a paradoxical career. The quintessential essayist parades an enormous ego and yet does so in a modest setting, that is, within a genre widely acknowledged to be unequal to fiction, poetry, and drama. E. B. White was very aware of this and felt the public somewhat justified in regarding the essay as “the last resort of the egoist,” and said of himself, “I have always been aware that I am by nature self-absorbed and egoistical; to write of myself to the extent I have done indicates a too great attention to my own life, not enough to the lives of others.” A few decades earlier, the Saturday Review of Literature critic Elizabeth Drew argued more positively for the essayist’s ego, regarding the “pure” or “perfect” essayist—writers such as Montaigne, Lamb, and Haz­litt—as someone who possesses the “secret of the essayist,” which she termed “creative egotism” as distinguished from a “trivial” egotism, which produces not great essays but recognizably mannered ones. Although she doesn’t consider what I find paradoxical, Drew does recognize the peculiarity of major egos choosing to express themselves in a minor form. But it may be that the essay is the only form suitable for such expression.

  You can teach someone many things about writing essays, but I wonder if you can teach anyone how to be an essayist. An essayist at heart, I mean. It may be that just as there are born poets and born storytellers, there are born essayists. This doesn’t mean that they discover their genre early; in fact, I would guess that essayists recognize their special talents much later than do poets, novelists, and playwrights, a recognition that comes perhaps only after attempting the other genres. Then, too, there are the poets and novelists who also excel at essays and whose work frequently winds up in these books. That is why the series is called The Best American Essays and not The Best American Essayists. But that is a discussion for another time.

  The Best American Essays features a selection of the year’s outstanding essays, essays of literary a
chievement that show an awareness of craft and forcefulness of thought. Hundreds of essays are gathered annually from a wide assortment of national and regional publications. These essays are then screened, and approximately one hundred are turned over to a distinguished guest editor, who may add a few personal discoveries and who makes the final selections. The list of notable essays appearing in the back of the book is drawn from a final comprehensive list that includes not only all of the essays submitted to the guest editor but also many that were not submitted.

  To qualify for the 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.

  Magazine editors who want to be sure their contributors will be considered each year should submit issues or subscriptions to The Best American Essays, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 222 Berkeley Street, Boston, MA 02116. Writers and editors are welcome to submit published essays from any American periodical for consideration; unpublished work does not qualify for the series and cannot be reviewed or evaluated. Also ineligible are essays that have been published in book form—such as a contribution to a collection—but have never appeared in a periodical. All submissions must be directly from the publication and not in manuscript or printout format. Editors of online magazines and literary bloggers should not assume that appropriate work will be seen; they are invited to submit printed copies of the essays to the address above. Please note: because of the increasing number of submissions from online sources, material that does not include a full citation (name of publication, date, author contact information, etc.) will no longer be considered.