Contents
ANDER MONSON: Here’s How You Use the Lion Mints: An Introduction to How We Speak to One Another
MARCIA ALDRICH: Invisible Engineering: The Fine Art of Revising “The Fine Art of Sighing”
KRISTEN RADTKE on Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil
Majestic Ruins: ROBIN HEMLEY on the Work of James Agee
ROBERT ATWAN: The Assault on Prose: John Crowe Ransom, New Criticism, and the Status of the Essay
MATT DUBE on Joan Didion, Repo Man, and a ’76 Malibu
AISHA SABATINI SLOAN on Collage, Chris Kraus, and Misremembered Didion
T CLUTCH FLEISCHMANN: Looking for Samuel Delany
RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ: Observations about Writing Memoir in My Twenties, Thirties, and Forties
KATHERINE E. STANDEFER on the Mysterious Leslie Ryan and the Structure of a Trauma Narrative
Living within the Ellipses: CÉSAR DÍAZ on Ilan Stavans’s On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language
EMILY DEPRANG on Joan Didion, on the Morning After My Twenties
DANICA NOVGORODOFF on Losing Yourself
KEN CHEN: Is the Essay at the End of Time?
PETER GRANDBOIS on the Essential Art of Failing
ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING: Julian Barnes Brings Light to a Thanatophobe’s Conundrum
STEVEN CHURCH on Tom Junod’s “The Falling Man”
Movie Quotes as Misery: DAVID LEGAULT on Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
JONI TEVIS: A Paperback Cabinet of Wonder: Unlocking the Long Lyric Essay
JOHN D’AGATA: The Essays of Ansel Adams: An Allegory
MEEHAN CRIST: 10 Thoughts on Elision
THOMAS MIRA Y LOPEZ on Donald Hall’s “Out the Window”
DANIELLE CADENA DEULEN on the Virtues of Drowning: Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water
JOHN T. PRICE on Hoagland, Animal Obsession, and the Courage of Simile
MAYA L. KAPOOR on David Quammen and Writing Trout
CHELSEA BIONDOLILLO on Long Winters, Short Essays, and a Sky That Stretches Forever
MEGAN KIMBLE on Wendell Berry and Why I’m Not Going to Buy a Smartphone
BRIAN DOYLE: It Is a Shaggy World, Studded with Gardens
NICOLE WALKER: Nonfiction Like a Brick
BRIAN OLIU on The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker
PAM HOUSTON on Rick Reilly’s “Need a Fourth?” from Sports Illustrated, March 31, 1997
DAVE MONDY on Jim Bouton’s Ball Four
PHILLIP LOPATE on a Little-Known Gem by Max Beerbohm
AMY BENSON on Eliot Weinberger’s “Wrens”
PATRICK MADDEN on Charles Lamb’s “New Year’s Eve”
ELENA PASSARELLO on the Book of Days
ERIN ZWIENER on the False Glint of Fool’s Gold and Cliché
The Present of Our Past: PATRICIA VIGDERMAN on Alexander Stille
A Fat Man Story: ANDER MONSON on H. L. Mencken’s “A Neglected Anniversary”
RYAN VAN METER on Endings: All in All, It Was a Really Weird Summer