By Micah McCrary

John D’Agata is the author of “About a Mountain” and “Halls of Fame,” and editor of “The Next American Essay” and “The Lost Origins of the Essay.”  He teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where he lives.

We spoke with D’Agata about his forthcoming collaborative work with fact-checker Jim Fingal, “The Lifespan of a Fact,” which chronicles the reproduction of an essay written by D’Agata alongside his and Fingal’s expansive correspondence.

To start off, I’d like to ask how you must’ve felt being approached by Jim Fingal, who at the time was The Believer’s resident intern and fact-checker.  As an essayist, rather than a journalist, what’s it like to corroborate facts? Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Harold K. Bush, Jr.’s “Lincoln in His Own Time” is a graceful, worthy addition to the already-massive wealth of Lincolniana. It brings a valuable perspective and literary flavor to a table already yawning with historical fare. At a well-organized just-under-300-pages, it is an accessible ying to the yang of Michael Burlingame’s recent exhaustive, 2000-page “Abraham Lincoln: A Life.”

Bush is an English professor at Saint Louis University, and his particular strength is in identifying and reproducing selections that, in addition to humanizing Lincoln, have literary interest. The collection includes several pieces almost lost to modern readers that are enhanced by the editor’s extensive introduction and knowledgeable prefatory notes. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Jeff Sharlet is searching for God, not by way of epiphany but by way of research. Subtitled “Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country In Between,” Sharlet assembles thirteen essays, each a case study on belief in America.  “I’m a religious voyeur,” he tells one of his subjects, a born-again Christian twenty-something who found Christ in Oklahoma and brought him back with her to her native Berlin. It’s a statement that’s only partially true. While Sharlet is no believer—“not her kind, anyway”—neither is he a cold-eyed observer, an ethnographer of faith. His quest is personal, and “Sweet Heaven” is richer for it: infused with both his searching and his skepticism, the collection is documentary journalism with a hint of poetry.  Read the rest of this entry »

What promises to be an interesting merger of critical theory, popular biography and memoir turns out to be little more than an expression of un-self-conscious, occasionally creepy fandom in Lila Azam Zanganeh’s “The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness”—a debut that feels three times as long as its 189 pages.

Nabokov—one of the most towering figures of twentieth-century literature—wrote profoundly complex, wildly smart novels. They were packed with human characters, treated by their creator humanely. In classics like “Lolita” and “Pale Fire,” he wove deeply felt stories into the complicated lattice of his structures and systems. And did so with an obsessive attention to detail, the kind that can only be achieved through a deep love of one’s craft.

It’s that love—of writing, of life—that Zanganeh sets out to document in her book. Unfortunately, she spends more time saying things like this: “Some days earlier, I had, in fact, had a dream. He was there. So close I could almost touch him.” Or this: “As I again sit at my desk, I realize that, for a while now, I’ve been ignoring a slight swerving. Like the onset of something; a mild vertigo, not altogether unpleasant.” Or, most cringe-inducing, this: “You’re about to begin the twelfth chapter of ‘The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness.’ Contentedly, you stack two pillows behind your head, curl up in your quilt and switch off the TV.” Read the rest of this entry »

“Rereading Women,” a collection of essays by renowned literary critic and feminist author Sandra Gilbert, serves as not only a critique, or rereading, of classic works by well-known women authors, but also Gilbert’s own journey to becoming a feminist scholar. Gilbert refers constantly to her literary mothers and grandmothers, frequently citing the likes of Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Adrienne Rich. These are no doubt some of the greatest authors in human history, but one can’t help but notice that the women in Gilbert’s sphere of influence are more often privileged, white and well-educated. Her collection (and message) would benefit from the inclusion of a wider variety of writers, a common criticism of second-wave feminists like Gilbert.

Because the essays span several decades of her work, the book lacks cohesive structure from beginning to end, but certain chapters stand out. “Reflections on a (Feminist) Discourse of Discourse, Or, Look, Ma, I’m Talking!”, an exploration of theoretical language surrounding feminism, is a linguistic introspection as important today as it was when she wrote it, over a decade ago. The casual reader may be turned off by the academic Gilbert, who asks, “Is there any way in which we can reject or revise the language of high theory without being anti-intellectual?”  Many feminists have forged new methods of communicating their thoughts while shaking off oppressive patriarchal precursors—the 1979 classic feminist book, “Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her,” by Susan Griffin springs to mind, as well as Joanna Russ’ immensely readable “How to Suppress Women’s Writing” (1983), just to name a couple. It’s vaguely amusing that in an essay addressing the accessibility of feminist discourse to the common (wo)man, Gilbert can’t avoid using phrases like “parler femme” and “écriture féminine,” not exactly the langue maternelle de tout le monde. Read the rest of this entry »

By Hugh Iglarsh

One of the benefits of growing up in Chicago in the 1970s and early eighties was the opportunity to read movie critic Dave Kehr on a weekly basis. His Chicago Reader columns were something new in film criticism, at least in my limited experience: they were themselves small works of art, executed with a rare eloquence and erudition.

I remember writing to him as a college student—a process involving a Smith-Corona typewriter, envelope and stamp—to invite him to speak to my winter-term film-criticism class. He declined politely, but even his brief note—typed no doubt on his Reader office Selectric—had for me a semi-mystical aura of sophistication and class.

Kehr moved to the Tribune and the rigors of deadline-driven journalism in the mid-eighties, and eventually hopped to the larger pond (and wider film-viewing opportunities) of New York in 1993. He settled first at the lowbrow Daily News, then moved up to the New York Times, where he remains to this day, writing a variety of reviews and film-oriented think pieces.

But it is his Reader gig from 1974 to 1986 that qualifies as the Golden Age of Kehr, when he had the space, time and editorial support to truly shine. It is this period that is captured in “When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade.” In his revealing introduction, Kehr returns us to that era, when the final work of old masters like Alfred Hitchcock, John Huston and Billy Wilder competed (for the most part unsuccessfully) for attention against the megaplex megahype of “Jaws” and “Star Wars.” It was a moment, notes Kehr, when the “wayward auteur was replaced with an almost fanatical adherence to the rules and regulations of juvenile genre filmmaking.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Surely one good measure of an essay’s strength is its staying power. In reading “Listening for Silence” in Mark Slouka’s collection “Essays from the Nick of Time” I was struck not only by its soundness and truth but its familiarity. It was unfolding almost as inevitably as if I had produced it myself.

Then I realized I had in fact read it before, in Harper’s in 1999, and now had to face up to the possibility that not only had I agreed with Slouka then but actually may have internalized his own argument. Now that’s power: By God, he reminded me of me.

The point of the essay is that quiet time and leisure—as opposed to “recreation”—are rare in the modern world yet are critical to the judgment and reason that allow us to ponder not just life but the way society, economics and politics attempt to shape us. Escapism is easy; thinking is hard. No wonder we try to flee it.

This is why essays are such a hard sell. We rightly resist the common offended, “there-oughta-be-a-law” variety. But the best essays should not be approached passively; if they are to be beneficial in any sense, they must not only be read but actively contemplated. If they’re good, and these are, they make us think. But we don’t want them to shake us up too much; heavens, they might impel us to change our mind. Read the rest of this entry »

“Few places can draw in as many diverse souls, then mark them as profoundly, as this city,” writes editor Penelope Rowlands in her introduction to “Paris Was Ours: Thirty-Two Writers Reflect on the City of Light.” The contributors range from very famous and oft-anthologized—Judith Thurman, David Sedaris and Edmund White, among others—to relatively unknown. Some essays have been published elsewhere; others appear here for the first time.

Diverse as Parisian souls may be, the vast majority of the pieces here can be classified into a few rough-cut categories. There are the “Beginning Expat” essays, characterized by charming accounts of misconjugated verbs and botched café visits. Next to these—related, but nonetheless distinct—are the “French vs. American” comparisons: sartorial habits, social graces and romantic gestures, female beauty, approaches to parenting, quality of bread. Of these, Veronique Vienne’s musing on the French attitude toward money is a standout, being not only stylish and witty but also genuinely interesting. (Opening her own essay on comparative mores, Diane Johnson writes, “I trusted that all I had heard about Frenchwomen… would turn out on closer inspection to be untrue…. Instead I learned that there’s a lot to these stereotypes.” An amusing premise, if not a particularly revelatory one.) Read the rest of this entry »

A former graffiti artist from Hyde Park, Billy Wimsatt is now a national community organizer. His first book,”Bomb the Suburbs: Graffiti, Race, Freight-Hopping and the Search for Hip-Hop’s Moral Center,” is perhaps the definitive work of hip-hop literature, structured like a sprawling mix-tape, filled with attitude, contradictions, goofball humor and acute self-awareness. More than fifteen years later, he follows it up with an equally playful but far more sober, evenhanded memoir-cum-manifesto, which lightheartedly retracts some of his youthful venom and takes a hard and well-informed but hopeful look at the sociopolitical terrain of the Obama era.

The book is an incredibly useful how-to for political activists, profiling such outliers as Van Jones and acknowledging hard truths about money and mental health. His examination of the cultural stagnation of the seventies, eighties and nineties is remarkably detailed, calling out segregationist radio guru Lee Abrams along with Reagan, Wall Street and other obvious cultural villains. He’s been called “the spiritual heir to Norman Mailer,” and, like Mailer, his favorite subject is himself, and he’s at his most interesting when he makes his politics personal. His writing really hops to life when he uses his own experiences as teaching tools, whether a personal history of electioneering or a horror story about having his youthful oversharing used against him in the New York Times. He earns his self-mythology. Read the rest of this entry »

One sensibly approaches a “theme” book with trepidation, especially a compendium of writers describing their “most cherished book”—and most especially one in which the author who has written the foreword is by far the best known. When you read how Ray Bradbury’s aunt introduced him to the literary imagination, you might suspect this is as good as it will get.

If so, you would be wrong. Not only do many of these essays go to the soul of how their writers found their calling, but the diversity of their experiences is totally unexpected. For example, one essayist’s most cherished volume is a massive new masterpiece by his own favorite author, but because of his diminishing eyesight, they are also the last pages he will ever read.

This volume also breaks its own rules by admitting a visual artist, the widow of David Foster Wallace. Her grief at her husband’s suicide is magnified for us by her encounter with the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office, where she faces the commodification of death in the sale of gift items with chalk-line logos. She does not talk about viewing her husband’s body; this is raw enough.

Refreshingly, this collection poignantly delivers even more than it promises. (Martin Northway)

“Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book”
Edited by Sean Manning; foreword by Ray Bradbury
Da Capo Press, 240 pages, paper, $15.95