The Best American Essays 1991 - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0899199283 ISBN 13: 9780899199283

Publisher: Ticknor & Fields, 1991

Synopsis

The 1991 volume of The Best American Essays marks the sixth year in this flourishing series. Consistently singled out as presenting the year's best short nonfiction, it has reawakened excitement for this remarkably versatile, often overlooked and occasionally maligned form. Includes works from Woody Allen, Stephen Jay Gould, Margaret Atwood and others.

Foreword / Robert Atwan --
Introduction / Joyce Carol Oates --
Random reflections of a second-rate mind / Woody Allen --
The female body / Margaret Atwood --
The female body / John Updike --
Silent dancing / Judith Ortiz Cofer --
Running the table / Frank Conroy --
Life with daughters : watching the Miss America Pageant / Gerald Early --
This autumn morning / Gretel Ehrlich --
Wounded Chevy at Wounded Knee / Diana Hume George --
Counters and cable cars / Stephen Jay Gould --
New York City : crash course / Elizabeth Hardwick --
Kubota / Garrett Hongo --
Maintenance / Naomi Shihab Nye --
Late Victorians / Richard Rodriguez --
Seeking home / Dorien Ross --
Mosaic on walking / Mark Rudman --
The ideal particle and the great unconformity / Reg Saner --
Mother Tongue / Amy Tan --
At the Buffalo Bill Museum --
June 1988 / Jane Tompkins --
On being white, female, and born in Bensonhurst / Marianna De Marco Torgovnick --
Questions of conquest / Mario Vargas Llosa --
The killing game / Joy Williams --
Biographical notes --
Notable essays of 1990

About this title

Reviews

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."
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ticknor & Fields
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0899199283
• ISBN 13: 9780899199283
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 279
• Editor: Robert Atwan