The Best American Essays 1991 - Softcover

3.73

59 ratings by Goodreads

9780899199283: The Best American Essays 1991

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0899199283 ISBN 13: 9780899199283

Publisher: Ticknor & Fields, 1991

Selected by Oates ( Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart ) , this year's best-essay picks offer up a mixture of blather, self-indulgent and/or unfocused scribbling and incisive writing. Piquing our interest, Mario Vargas Llosa asks how it was possible for the powerful, sophisticated ancient Mexicans and Peruvians to have succumbed to small bands of Spanish adventurers and why the postcolonial republics of the Americas have failed to improve the lives of their Indian citizens. With avowed contempt for the white liberal intellectual's romance with Native American culture, Diana Hume George in a sterling piece describes her marriage to an illiterate, hard-drinking, impoverished Indian eventually convicted of raping white women. Preaching to the converted, Joy Williams blasts hunters and the "pogrom" promulgated against wild animals. Marianna De Marco Torgovnick deciphers Bensonhurst Italian Americans; Margaret Atwood and John Updike focus on the female body; Gerald Early rambles on about how his wifei've stetted some/pk , a black, wants no part in closing down the Miss America competition now that black women are winning; Woody Allen confesses a crush on the biblical Lot's wife; and, visiting the Buffalo Bill Museum, Jane Tompkins wonders if "museums are a form of cannibalism made safe for polite society."

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

JOYCE CAROL OATES -- novelist, essayist, critic, poet, playwright, teacher, and short story writer -- is one of the preeminent literary figures and social critics of the twentieth century. Her honors include an NEA grant, a Guggenheim fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Lifetime Achievement Award, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Lifetime Achievement in American Literature. She is also a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The Falls is her most recent novel.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Oates, in her introduction, defines the essay, ... la Randall Jarrell, as ``prose works of certain lengths that have many more things right about them than wrong.'' Montaigne, Hazlitt, Mandelstam would roll in their graves! Only Richard Rodriguez's ``Late Victorians''--domestic architecture as sexuality in gay San Francisco--brings a remarkable voice to bear on an idea worthy of the great essay masters. From most everybody else here, the essay seems to be something that (1) can't quite be fiction and (2) must be too long (or, if short, smug). Gerald Early's intriguing piece about black female self-image overshoots the runway and travels on and on and on...forever. Likewise Mark Rudman's at first genial piece about walking. Ditto pieces by Reg Saner, Jane Tompkins, Garrett Hongo. On the short, smug side, Elizabeth Hardwick's impressions of New York's desuetude must be the most pretentious thing she's ever written, Gretel Ehrlich's contribution the same. Intellectual and stylistic mediocrity is the province here of Woody Allen, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Frank Conroy, Dorien Ross, Amy Tan, and Joy Williams. A few modest personal pieces do hold their own, powered by self-analysis--by Diana Hume George, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Marianna De Marco Torgovnick; and Margaret Atwood's ``The Female Body'' is vinegary fun. Overall, though, not the essay's finest outing. -- Copyright �1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.