A cornucopia of essays sure to lead to conversations with one another that will inform, puzzle, and surprise.
Take one daily and call me every morning. That’s the website header for Essay Daily, the source for this anthology.
Founded by Monson (Creative Writing/Univ. of Arizona; Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries, 2015, etc.) as a sort of rival to a number of popular poetry daily websites, Essay Daily has been publishing an essay per day (almost) since 2010. In his introduction, Monson quotes Edward Hoagland: “Essays are how we speak to one another in print.” Monson and Reinbold, the former Essay Daily managing editor, provide a series of eclectic essays, many of which demonstrate that an essay can be a number of things. Marcia Aldrich, in her discussion of Bernard Cooper’s “The Fine Art of Sighing,” notes its “concise and lyrical prose, its brevity…[and] the constructed undertow of its associative method.” In a terrific and highly informative essay by Robert Atwan, longtime editor of the Best American Essays series, he wonders why the essay suffered “diminished literary status” for much of the 20th century, why it was relegated to a “minor or even subliterary genre.” He points his finger at John Crowe Ransom, noting even E.B. White once called the essayist a “second-class citizen.” No more. This book clearly demonstrates the essay is alive and well, kicking and evolving, grappling with its place in literature. Here one will encounter the “long-lyric essay,” a couple essays about book-long essays, and a piece about a lady who wrote only one piece, an essay. There’s also a piece on Phillip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay and one by Lopate himself on a little-known “gem” by Max Beerbohm, And Even Now. Other contributors include John D’Agata, Albert Goldbarth, Elena Passarello, and V.V. Ganeshananthan.
A cornucopia of essays sure to lead to conversations with one another that will inform, puzzle, and surprise.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-56689-457-9
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
