Finished: 24.08.2019Genre: essays Rating: D-#TBR list 2018Conclusion:Not the best collection I've ever read! If you are looking for some great essays...I've added some suggestions in this review. My Thoughts

Maybe I'm just in a bad mood but dear god most of these were so boring.

A great edition--wide diversity--not too New York focused like others editions sometimes are. I teach this edition b/c of the quality.

Not a very exciting selection. I found one piece that was powerfully moving and innovative in form ("White Horse" by Eliese Colette Goldach), but other pieces were too academic, dry, or just not interesting or captivating. Kudos to Jamison, though, for not over-relying on New Yorker and Harper's for her selections.

This was originally published at The Scrying Orb.Bland. Forgettable. These are not engaging essays. At the midway point, the collection putters into its longest piece — The Book of the Dead — which I should like, given it explores the mining towns of West Virginia, the same topic as a great documentary I watched earlier this year. It was intolerable. I skipped the last several pages entirely. Things improved from there, but generally when picking this anthology up, I’m looking for a good deal mo...

A solid and fairly diverse collection. I found most of them pretty interesting, with my favorites being White Horse (a woman with a past riddled by sexual assault struggles to remember a key moment of her childhood), If I Only Had a Leg (a boy with cerebral palsy and a love of showbiz meets the last remaining Munchkin actress from The Wizard of Oz), and Haywire (a woman reflects on her father's complex gender expression). A lot of the essays in this collection brought me new and interesting pers...

Lots of great writing, with diverse topics and authors, but I can never summon love for anthologies; they feel more like duty.

Another excellent set of essays, drawn from publications in the US and Canada--standouts being Emily Maloney's haunting reflection on the cost of health care and her small powers to bend the rules as a billing coder, and Alia Volz's consideration of why she's harbored a lifelong fear of snakes--what if it was all a lie promulgated by her vastly untrustworthy and unreliable father?

Leslie Jamison wrote a timely, resonant intro to BAE 2017. She says that essays are, by definition, "committed to instability," "full of self-interrogation, suspicious of received narratives, and hospitable to contradiction" (xx). She describes this BAE volume's selections specifically as containing "the generative energy of refusal"—refusal to adhere to established notions, systems, structures, voicings. While I didn't love all of Jamison's selections, I admired the range of perspectives and to...

The essays are diverse which I find appealing and the editor didn't just head to Vanity Fair and the New Yorker for fodder, but overall I found the collection underwhelming.

Several brilliant lesser known women writers are featured in this edition, including Meghan O'Gieblyn, Eliese Colette Goldbach, and Sarah Resnick. Kenneth A. McClane's essay, Sparrow Needy, absolutely blew me away.

The political focus, while I understand it, left me a little disappointed. I read essays because they're largely personal in nature (yes yes, the personal is political etc.), and there can be a lot of diversity of topic and creativity in this Best American Series in particular. Not so much this time.That said, I find myself returning to Jamison's introduction. It communicates what I love about the form so perfectly.

The best American essays are a hit or miss in my opinion. This book is made up of several small essays maybe 10 pages each and the quality deeply depends on the author, I believe it was the third essay that I completely skipped because I was so uninterested but then you get to the fourth essay about a women's experience with rape, that was absolutely phenomenal, I could not take my eyes of the page, but that work was pressed with a essay from buzz-feed witch overall was fine, but it was from buz...

I'm in love with Leslie Jamison. I hope to teach her introduction to this collection someday in my own creative nonfiction class. And her taste—earnest, political, searching—pervades her curation. Her taste is my taste. Hard to even name standout essays, but I'm still haunted by Rachel Kushner's "'We Are Orphans Here.'" Greg Marshall's "If I Only Had a Leg" was charming. June Thunderstorm's "Revenge of the Mouthbreathers: A Smoker's Manifesto" was majorly provocative. Time travel back to 2016 (r...

A good selection on the whole, with "Sparrow Needy" by Kenneth A. McClane and "Snakebit" by Alia Volz especially standing out or making me think to look for more by the authors.

There really isn't anything more reliably filled with good writing than these Best American volumes. I'm a couple of years behind in the reading of them at the moment, but I always buy the Essays, the Short Stories, and recently added the Science Fiction & Fantasy volumes. Sometimes I add the Non-Required Reading, which can be a hoot.I found this particular volume to be a bit harder to work through than previous ones, and that's due entirely to the subject matter, not the quality of the writing....

A mixed bag of essays. Some, like "Snakebit," "H," "Sparrow Needy," and "White Horse" were wonderfully written and incredibly gripping to read but others...not so much. I guess that's the issue with anthologies. But I have some new authors to add to my must-read pile and that's definitely a plus.

My favorites: Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah -- The Weight of James Arthur BaldwinEliese Collette Goldbach -- White HorseAlan Lightman - What Came Before the Big Bang?Catherine Venable Moore -- The Book of the DeadMeghan O'Gieblyn -- Dispatch from Flyover CountryI respond to the essays that connect the personal and specific to a larger American story. That said, this is the one passage I highlighted during my reading. From What Came Before the Big Bang?:Does space go on forever, to infinity? Or is it fin...

I write essays professionally. So I gotta read "Best American Essays" every year as professional development. I feel the same about it most years: Some pieces are great. Some don't interest me. Usually depends a bit on the taste of the editor. But regardless, I usually average out at about 4 stars. Its more a guide to whom I should be reading in the future than a assessment of the book itself. For this one, pay special attention to Editor Leslie Jamison's introduction, on why the essay matters i...