The Best Spiritual Writing 2010 - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143116762 ISBN 13: 9780143116769

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2010

Synopsis

The renowned nonfiction annual makes its Penguin debut

For more than a decade, Philip Zaleski has collected into a single volume the best spiritual essays and poetry of the year. The Best Spiritual Writing 2010, featuring essays by John Updike and Diane Ackerman, poems from Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney and Pulitzer Prize-winner Louise Glück, and personal reflections by Richard Rodriguez and Leon Wieseltier, is sure to expand on the series' already wide recognition and reach the growing audience of readers searching for unsurpassed spiritual writing.

Contributors include:

Mary Jo Bang, Jane Hirshfield, Melissa Range, Rick Bass, Paula Huston, Pattiann Rogers, David Berlinski, Pico Iyer, Amanda Shaw, Joseph Bottum, Charles Johnson, Master Sheng Yen, Nicholas Carr, Jon D. Levenson, Floyd Skloot, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Philip Levine, Meir Soloveichik, Billy Collins, Wilfred M. McClay, Richard Wilbur, Chrisi Cox, Richard John Neuhaus, Seamus Heaney, Robert Pinsky

About this title

About the Author

Philip Zaleski is the founding editor of the Best Spiritual Writing series and the co-author, most recently, of Prayer: A History.
Pico Iyer is the author of several books about faith and crossing cultures in the modern world. His most recent book is The Open Road.

Reviews

Starred Review. It can be easy to dismiss the word best on the cover of anything these days. The term has been devalued, slapped on too many CD covers and kitchen appliances, erasing its former profound linguistic value. Zaleski's compilation of spiritual writings, however, restores best to its rightful exceptional place. The book's selections range from poetry and short fiction to memoir and essay, hailing from a variety of authorial and cultural sources. Just as literary form varies, Zaleski wisely recognizes, too, that spirituality can be defined almost infinitely, encompassing a vast range of belief and even nonbelief. Poems from the Atlantic or the New Yorker command attention in addition to longer treatises on The God of the Gaps and Buddhist enlightenment. John Updike sits next to Orthodox Judaism while the Dalai Lama spends the night in suburban New York. A Kazakh healer chats with Seamus Heaney, and secularization theory is next in line. It is a curious literary party at first glance, but the diverse forms, voices, topics gradually coalesce into something bigger and more elegant, something spiritual and extraordinary: the Best. (Jan. 26)
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*Starred Review* Among the highlights of the latest, reliably bracing volume in editor Zaleski’s not exactly annual series are Diane Ackerman’s comments about two Jews, a pediatrician and a Hasidic rabbi, who chose to stay in the Warsaw ghetto and, despite the horror surrounding them, maintain Judaic meditation and mysticism; Seamus Heaney’s brief but lovely paean to the birch tree; Jon D. Levenson on the idea of the chosen people; the late Richard John Neuhaus on secularization theory; and Leon Wieseltier on the ineffable beauty of church bells. Some essays are spiritual in the broadest sense of the word. Nicholas Carr wonders whether Google is making us stupid (“The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle”). Google’s founders, he reminds us, say their goal is to turn the search engine into an artificial intelligence surpassing the HAL computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey and, presumably, take a big chunk of our humanity from us in the process. Finally, the late John Updike is represented by a poignant essay on the writer in winter. In addition, quite a few poets’ work appears, including Mary Jo Bang’s translation of the first canto of Dante’s Inferno and poems by Billy Collins, Louise Glück, Jane Hirshfield, Philip Levine, Robert Pinsky, Melissa Range, Floyd Skloot, and Richard Wilbur. --June Sawyers

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0143116762
• ISBN 13: 9780143116769
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272
• Editor: Zaleski Philip