The Next American Essay

Rating:
Summary: Foolish reviewers...
Review: ...make me laugh. This is the best anthology of essays that anyone's even tried to produce in the past two decades. On top of that it's one of the most inovative anthologies of any genre category that I know of. What's missing is something of David Foster Wallace's more wilder side. Needs something from Ben Marcus, Harry Matthews, Joanne Beard, Susan Howe, and Lynn Hejinian.

Rating:
Summary: Mr. Can't Leave it Alone
Review: Apparently it wasn't enough that D'Agata "redefined the essay"--as Annie Dillard put it--in his first book Halls of Fame. Now he's somehow redefined the anthology. Next he tries his hand at cookbooks.

Rating:
Summary: Not your conventional essays
Review: Call me old-fashioned, but the selections in this volume aren't my idea of essays, certainly not in the traditional sense of the term. There's no one here like Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb, Montaigne, or even Evelyn Waugh or Russell Baker. Few of these pieces appealed to me.

One that did, in a mild way, was "Country Cooking from Central France," by Harry Mathews, a parody of painstakingly detailed recipes and cooking methods with descriptions of the scenery thrown in for culinary snobs. Mathews's recipe is for roast boned rolled stuffed shoulder of lamb (farce double). Farce, indeed. I wouldn't recommend trying it.

Another essay that was at least comprehensible was by a man belittling the glitter and excesses of the Indiana State Fair, which he seemed to view as tawdry. It sounded like sour grapes to me. There's something rather marvelous about the gaudy display of almost everything once a year at a really big state fair. My reference is the Ohio State Fair, one of the largest in the country. A visit to the state fair is a rich experience.

However, many of the pieces are more like prose poems than the essays I'm familiar with. One, by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Erato Love Poetry, was deconstructed to the point of rubble, which I wasn't able to reconstruct into any kind of sense.

Rating:
Summary: RGM
Review: Next American Essay will really make you think about the genre-
What is the essay? How do we define it and why? What are our expectations and do they matter?
If you are looking for a traditional anthology this book is not for you, but if you are interested in exploring the possibilities of the essay, this book is a find! Next American Essay offers the reader a lot, but most of it is not on the surface. This is not an anthology that is easy to skim through, but it's definitely worth a serious read.

Rating:
Summary: wanna snaggle your mind?
Review: The anthology is made up of about 30 essays by biggies like McPhee and Joan Didion and David Foster Wallace. Essays that everyone's read before. So it's not an anthology you turn to because you want to figure out what's new out there. Really it's anthology you turn to for the sake of the sensibility behind it, John D'Agata's own voice that somehow manages to creep into the anthology and carry the entire 500 pages through on a whimiscal story about why he loves essays. It's got to be the most charming anthology I've ever read. At times bold (many of the essays aren't traditinally thought of as essays), at times funny, sentimental, outright smart, the anthology is trying to show what the essay has in its potential. It's a huge success. But what makes it especially thrilling are the 30 extra essay we get from D'Agata himself, introductions that stand on their own like jewels embedded in the history of a genre.

Rating:
Summary: Definning the "Essay"
Review: The essays in this anthology defy genre catagories. You've got the story that Jamaica Kincaid wrote about growing up in Antigua, and the story that takes the form of a recipe by the awesome Harry Mathews, and a poem by James Wright for heck's sake. Everything according to this anthology is an essay, I mean. What the anthology argues is a little far fetched, but this is the kind of experimenting that we need more of, I think. What unites the selections of "ESSAYS" are the introductions to each of them by John D'Agata, an experimentalist if ever there was one. Sometimes his own whimsies overtake the essays and actually seem more interesting than the selections, but in general this is a book that itself defies genre definition by rewriting the idea of an anthology.

Rating:
Summary: Foolish reviewers...
Review: This book is just awful. And though some of the essay's I'd read before, ie. Didion, Sontag, are accessible and well written, most of them are not essays at all. I'm not even sure it's writing, like I'm not sure if rap music is music or poetry or just a low grade fever.