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posted: January 24, 2025
tl;dr: A decent collection with a noteworthy forward by longtime series editor Robert Atwan...
Imagine having the same job for thirty-eight years. I can’t. Especially when that job involves voluminous reading and critiquing of other authors’ work. I don’t think such a long tenure is even possible in the field of technology, which changes too fast. Thirty-eight years ago, which was six companies ago, I was in my first job out of college working on a product that doesn’t exist any more for a company that doesn’t exist any more. Yet that is when Best American Essays series editor Robert Atwan started reading and, with the help of a guest editor, assembling an annual collection of essays.
In his forward to The Best American Essays 2023, Robert Atwan declares that the essay is alive and well, having gained in importance and recognition during his tenure. That’s not too surprising. In most essays, the author features himself/herself prominently, and there is no shortage of narcissism in today’s world. Periodical publishing is transitioning online, and there are still places that readers can seek out quality works.
More importantly, Atwan uses his final forward to make a passionate plea for freedom of speech. Purely because of his position he can be said to be a member of the intellectual elite, yet he rails about the attacks on free speech by many of his brethren. He provides examples from historical written works about how this forces writers to create allusions and use symbology in order to communicate disfavored and disallowed viewpoints. Readers are forced to read between the lines. Atwan would prefer a world in which writers are freer to explicitly say what they want to say, and readers can either agree or disagree. As a free speech advocate myself, I commend him for this.
Here are my favorite essays in The Best American Essays 2023:
“Bidders of the Din” by Erik Borsuk: A first-person account of prison life from a former student who made a bad decision to rob artwork from a university. This exposed him to a much rougher crowd of fellow inmates, and to the seemingly arbitrary punishments meted out to the incarcerated.
“Ms. Daylily” by Xujun Eberlein: A multi-generational account of the impact that Mao’s and the Chinese Communist Party’s lies and anti-human policies had on a family and their interpersonal relationships. It’s one thing to review the statistics from those eras, but this essay poignantly demonstrates just how devastating those lies and policies were.
“Eat Prey Love” by Kathryn Schulz: The author takes what may be considered dry subject matter, namely the latest translation of the book that inspired the famous Disney movie Bambi, and turns it into a compelling exploration of the meaning of the work and the life and views of the original book’s author. As this essay proves, there is a lot more behind Bambi than what is shown to the Disney movie audience.