If we are, as Adam Kirsch writes, in the midst of a golden age of essays, we might want to ask exactly which essays are proof of this golden age. His first three picks — My Heart is an Idiot, I Was Told There’d Be Cake and Pulphead — are unsurprising choices, but then it gets a bit more interesting when he looks at Sheila Heti’s latest novel. (You could also check out a few of our pieces on these books.)
I Feel Expository
Qiu Miaojin’s Survival Guide
Qiu Miaojin was a Taiwanese novelist and lesbian activist, and her short life has had a profound impact on queer literature since her suicide in 1995. Recently Bonnie Huie received a PEN translation grant so she could bring Miaojin’s best-known work, Notes of a Crocodile, to an English-speaking audience. You can read an excerpt of Huie’s translation on the Asian American Writers’ Workshop online publishing platform, The Margins.
Digital Publishing and Changes to Copy
“Just as the written word changed the spoken word and the printed word changed the written word, so too will the digital word change the printed word, supplementing but not replacing the earlier forms of information technology.”
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Joseph Roth’s Letters
"Among the 457 letters in Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, there is not one love letter," begins Stefany Anne Goldberg's review of the author's collected--and often outright misanthropic--correspondence.
“Cleaves closely to the forms of realism”
“Through such experiments, [he] seems preoccupied by the need to make this familiar form something different from what we think it is, so that it can more capably capture a reality that has fast been veering into the unreal. It’s not just that the world outside the novel has made this jump, but also that we cannot evade the world’s strangeness when the storytellers, and the characters into which they breathe life, increasingly come from such different perspectives.” On Year in Reading alum Chang-rae Lee’s new novel (which you can buy with a nifty 3D book cover).
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An American Writer
"And now An American Marriage, with its ruminations on masculinity, married life, and what constitutes marital debt, manages the trick of arriving at the right time while also feeling utterly untethered to just one era." BuzzFeed News profiled writer Tayari Jones about her life, oeuvre, and fourth novel, An American Marriage. Pair with: Jones's 2017 Year in Reading entry.
Merry Pranksters
"No drugs on the bus!" Take a road trip with poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy and some other really fantastic poets.
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A Golden Age of solipistic navel-gazing, perhaps.
Actually, Kirsch’s piece quite clearly contradicts the notion of a present “golden age” of essays. One must read beyond the intro. Paragraph 3 begins: “But all is not as it seems. … The resurrection of the essay is in large measure a mirage.” And he elaborates his case from there, along the way observing an important distinction: “What we now call an essayist used to be called a humorist.” The piece is well worth reading in its entirety.
Even if one only read the title: “The New Essayist, or the Decline of a Form?” one wouldn’t come to the conclusion that the author thinks we’re in a “golden age” of essays.
Anyway it’s a really good piece. Sedaris’ writing has always inexplicably bugged me, and Kirsh has managed to tell me why.
that’s *Adam* Kirsch, not Mike!