Title: The Best American Essays 2010Editor: Christopher Hitchens
Maybe my perspective on what constitutes an essay has changed since I started my creative nonfiction seminar six week ago, but it felt like there was a whole lot of nonfiction but not very many essays in Best American Essays this year. I wonder if this is because Hitchens is not known as an essayist-- he's written multiple works of nonfiction (and recently published his memoir). I'm not sure if the BAE people considered that the 2010 edition would likely be Hitchen's last opportunity to edit a collection for them, and while I hate the disparage a dying man, I'm not sure that Hitchens was the best editor for a collection of essays. More than half of the works included in the book feel like magazine articles or retrospectives rather than essays or personal narratives.
Genre considerations aside, there is some great writing in BAE. I loved Jane Churchon's "The Dead Book," and John Gamel's "The Elegant Eyeball." In fact, all of my favorite essays dealt with the intersection of writing and medicine or science. I wonder if that was a particular area of interest for Hitchens, or if I have a particular interest in these intersections because it represents the collisions of my area of interest with Eddie's. While I'd use the term "essay" lightly in the categorization of the works included in this book, I can't quibble with the fact that the writing is good.
1 comment:
sometime i'm going to have to find out the differences between Articles, Retrospectives, Essays, and Personal Narratives. That's a gaping hole in my awareness.
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