The Best American Essays 2010

The magazine has a wonderful sense of place about it, and it conveys Alaska without being parochial. There's no coterie of writers made up of the editor's friends.

The magazine has a wonderful sense of place about it, and it conveys Alaska without being parochial. There's no coterie of writers made up of the editor's friends. Selected and introduced by Cheryl Strayed, the New York Times best-selling author of Wild and the writer of the celebrated column "Dear Sugar," this collection is a treasure trove of fine writing and thought-provoking essays.Guest editor Orlean shakes some dust off this valuable 20-year-old series, serving up a tasty sampler of the year’s more ruminative writing.

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Good fiction shows us the inside of things--a community, a job, a relationship, the human heart.

Great fiction can sometimes show all of these things working together; it lifts us briefly above the event horizon of our own day-to-day existences and gives us a dreamlike (and godlike) sense of understanding what life itself is about.

In “The Sea of Information” (from the Kenyon Review), Andrea Barrett details research for a historical novel, funded by a fellowship that began in New York City on September 10, 2001.

In “Consider the Lobster,” originally published in Gourmet, David Foster Wallace travels to the Maine Lobster Festival and vigorously shakes until all the lies drop right out of the lobster, and ultimately the meat industry.

Toni Bentley danced with Balanchine’s New York City Ballet for ten years and is author of five books, all named New York Times Notable Books.

The Best American Essays 2010

Her essay “The Bad Lion” appeared in Best American Essays 2010 edited by Christopher Hitchens and she is a Guggenheim Fellow.I commend it and its contributors for its many achievements, and I know members of the U. Senate join me in wishing it continued literary success.When all is said and done, Ronald Spatz and his crack team of editors put together one hell of a magazine.ROBERT ATWAN, the series editor of The Best American Essays since its inception in 1986, has published on a wide variety of subjects, from American advertising and early photography to ancient divination and Shakespeare.His criticism, essays, humor, poetry, and fiction have appeared in numerous periodicals nationwide.A true essay is “something hazarded, not definitive, not authoritative; something ventured on the basis of the author’s personal experience and subjectivity,” writes guest editor Jonathan Franzen in his introduction.However, his main criterion for selecting The Best American Essays 2016 was, in a word, risk.The one-woman play adaptation of her erotic memoir, “The Surrender,” will premiere this August at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.We’re so thrilled to announce that Masters Review author Traci Cox and her essay “Missed,” which was published in our second volume was selected as a Notable Mention in this year’s Best American Essays.Whether the risks involved championing an unpopular opinion, the possibility of ruining a professional career, or irrevocably offending family, for Franzen, “the writer has to be like the firefighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames, is to run straight into them.”JONATHAN FRANZEN, guest editor, is the author of five novels, most recently Purity, and five works of nonfiction and translation, including Farther Away and The Kraus Project.08/29/2016In choosing the essays for this thought-provoking volume, guest editor Franzen (Purity) used risk as his main criterion: specifically, did the author take one?