{"product_id":"the-best-american-essays-9780618709274","title":"The Best American Essays","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe twenty-two essays in this powerful collection -- perhaps the most diverse in the entire series -- come from a wide variety of periodicals, ranging from n + 1 and PMS to the New Republic and The New Yorker, and showcase a remarkable range of forms. Read on for narrative -- in first and third person -- opinion, memoir, argument, the essay-review, confession, reportage, even a dispatch from Iraq. The philosopher Peter Singer makes a case for philanthropy; the poet Molly Peacock constructs a mosaic tribute to a little-known but remarkable eighteenth-century woman artist; the novelist Marilynne Robinson explores what has happened to holiness in contemporary Christianity; the essayist Richard Rodriguez wonders if California has anything left to say to America; and the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson attempts to find common ground with the evangelical community. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn his introduction, David Foster Wallace makes the spirited case that \"many of these essays are valuable simply as exhibits of what a first-rate artistic mind can make of particular fact-sets -- whether these involve the 17-kHz ring tones of some kids' cell phones, the language of movement as parsed by dogs, the near-infinity of ways to experience and describe an earthquake, the existential synecdoche of stagefright, or the revelation that most of what you've believed and revered turns out to be self-indulgent crap.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eAtwan, Robert:\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e - ROBERT ATWAN has been the series editor of \u003ci\u003eThe Best American Essays\u003c\/i\u003e since its inception in 1986. He has edited numerous literary anthologies and written essays and reviews for periodicals nationwide.","brand":"Houghton Mifflin","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50491843445010,"sku":"9780618709274","price":14.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_5bb0663e-3983-4341-b271-0390dc43a16b.jpg?v=1730559088","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/the-best-american-essays-9780618709274","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}