1. South and West by Joan Didion
(6 Rave, 12 Positive, 2 Mixed, 1 Pan)
“South and West’s evocative, elliptical narrative of rejected details and paths not taken shed light on the often impossible-to-articulate act of writing, and show us Didion the writer in pursuit of her story. It also contains sentences as precise and brilliantly rendered as those in her finished books … It’s a rare and valuable gift to witness a writer of Didion’s talents at the height of her powers allowing herself to drift, however briefly—to acknowledge that she’s ‘underwater,’ overwhelmed by possibilities, not yet lodged in the clear comfort of having discovered the shape of a story, or having found her own place in it.”
–Rebecca Bengal (Vogue)
*
2. We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates
(10 Rave, 2 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“We Were Eight Years in Poweris more than a ‘loose memoir’; it’s Coates giving himself a deep read, and inviting us to join him in this look at his intellectual journey. And by showcasing a range of essays—some his strongest work, others deeply flawed—he asks his readers to consider him as a writer, nothing more and nothing less.”
–Jamelle Bouie (Slate)
*
3. Abandon Me by Melissa Febos
(9 Rave, 4 Positive, 2 Mixed, 1 Pan)
“It’s easy to fall in love with Melissa Febos’ gorgeous new memoir of short essays, Abandon Me. Over the course of the eight pieces contained within, Febos brings a relentless curiosity and startling intimacy to the page … Abandon Me is brutal both in its honest portrayal of human need and of the things we do for love, for recognition, for safety … Abandon Me is a fierce exploration of love and obsession, but it is something else as well—the story of woman who is unafraid to explore the harsh truths and choices that shape our lives.”
–Sarah Rauch (Lambda Literary)
*
4. Draft No. 4 by John McPhee
(6 Rave, 6 Positive, 2 Mixed)
“Its combination of shop talk, war stories, slices of autobiography, and priceless insights and lessons suggests what it must be like to occupy a seat in the McPhee classroom (but at a significantly lower sticker price) … Assent, demur or file away for future reflection, Mr. McPhee’s observations about writing are always invigorating to engage with. And Draft No. 4 belongs on the short shelf of essential books about the craft.”
–Ben Yagoda (The Wall Street Journal)
*
5. The River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks
(8 Rave, 3 Positive)
“Reading a book published after its author’s death, especially if he is as prodigiously alive on every page as Oliver Sacks, as curious, avid and thrillingly fluent, brings both the joy of hearing from him again, and the regret of knowing it will likely be the last time … To fill oneself with the consciousness of others, and then to forget deeply enough, and long enough, that the collective world can be welded to what is unique and original to oneself — this is as precise and moving a definition of creativity as I have come across. On page after page in this collection, drawing on the rich history of ideas he absorbed over a lifetime, Sacks illustrates how it is done.”
–Nicole Krauss (The New York Times Book Review)
*
6. Blind Spot by Teju Cole
(8 Rave, 1 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“Blind Spot features the same quality of Cole’s luminous prose, but if his earlier works, including his PEN/Hemingway-winning debut novel Open City, favored longer sentences flavored with Proustian digression, the writing here is tighter, more condensed. Like the images, the writing here is often dramatically cropped, offering fragments in lieu of extended arguments and reveries … Blind Spot uses the interplay of visual information and textual information, creating connective threads that span the individual locations, multiplying their resonances … Teju Cole has succeeded in shredding experience into tiny fragments, all of which add up to much more than the sum of their parts.”
–Colin DIckey (The Los Angeles Times)
*
7. No Time to Spare by Ursula K. Le Guin
(6 Rave, 3 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“The pleasures of No Time to Spare are small-scale. None of the entries feel tossed off, nor do any feel labored. The best quickly capture the voice we’ve come to identify as Le Guin’s: wry, measured, insightful, accepting of life’s messiness while determined to act as morally as possible … It is good to see Le Guin receive the appreciation she so deeply deserves. As No Time to Spare demonstrates, she is a genuine American Master, one who offers hope and wisdom in dark times.”
–Michael Berry (The San Francisco Chronicle)
Read an excerpt from No Time to Spare here
*
8. Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li
(5 Rave, 5 Positive)
“…this account of her journey back to equilibrium, assisted by her closest companion, literature, is as powerful as any of her award-winning fiction, with the dark fixture of her Beijing past at its centre … Though billed as a consolation for ‘like-minded readers,’ the book does not neatly fall within such a narrow definition. As with Li’s fiction, her struggle to admit life over death is at times traumatic to read, all the more so because there is a barely concealed agony in the scrupulousness of its measured words … Plangent and precise, this is Li’s personal anatomy of melancholy.”
–Catherine Taylor (The Financial Times)
*
9. The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, selected by Darryl Pinckney
(7 Rave, 1 Positive)
“Hardwick could do more in six words than any Hemingway type, including Hemingway. Her feats of compression were exactly that, special, not habitual, because she was not really laconic and liked words better than she liked choosing between them … It was because she could traipse and trip up and take a second to recover, then seem only to have feinted and come arcing unusually back, that her performances on the page are so captivating. She wrote more best sentences than can possibly be good for the ego.”
–Sarah Nicole Prickett (Bookforum)
Read an excerpt form The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick here
*
10. Sunshine State by Sarah Gerrard
(6 Rave, 4 Positive, 1 Pan)
“Sunshine State embodies Florida’s unpredictability in the best sense. The essays are structurally intricate and ultraprecise in their depictions of both the physical and human worlds. Always intimate and never insular … Sunshine State is utterly without sentiment or the Dave Barry wackiness so often ascribed to Florida. Instead Gerard pierces the sunshine and shows us the storm.”
–Laura van den Berg (BOMB)
*
