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The Best American Essays 2017 (The Best American Series) Kindle Edition

4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 123 ratings

This anthology edited by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Empathy Exams offers “essays that are challenging, passionate, sobering, and clever” (Publishers Weekly).
 
“The essay is political—and politically useful, by which I mean humanizing and provocative—because of its commitment to nuance, its explorations of contingency, its spirit of unrest, its glee at overturned assumptions; because of the double helix of awe and distrust—faith and doubt—that structures its DNA,” writes guest editor Leslie Jamison in her introduction to this volume. The essays she has compiled in
The Best American Essays 2017 “thrill toward complexity.”
 
From the Iraqi desert to an East Jerusalem refugee camp, and from the beginnings of the universe to the aftermath of a suicide attempt, these essays bring us, time and again, to the thorny intersection of personal experience and public discourse.  
 
The Best American Essays 2017 includes entries by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Lawrence Jackson, Rachel Kushner, Alan Lightman, Bernard Farai Matambo, Wesley Morris, Heather Sellers, Andrea Stuart, and others.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Jamison has done an exceptional job curating this volume, selecting essayists who are diverse in ideas and experiences, and essays that are challenging, passionate, sobering, and clever."
--
Publishers Weekly
 

About the Author

ROBERT ATWAN has been the series editor of The Best American Essays since its inception in 1986. He has edited numerous literary anthologies and written essays and reviews for periodicals nationwide.

LESLIE JAMISON is the author of
The Empathy Exams, a New York Times bestselling essay collection. She lives in Brooklyn and is an assistant professor at Columbia University.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01NBKE4VV
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Illustrated edition (October 3, 2017)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 3, 2017
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 6.1 MB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 409 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 123 ratings

About the author

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Leslie Jamison
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Leslie Jamison is the author of the essay collection The Empathy Exams, a New York Times bestseller, and the novel The Gin Closet, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's and the Oxford American, among others, and she is a columnist for the New York Times Book Review. She teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

To learn more about Leslie: visit her website, www.lesliejamison.com and follow her on Twitter @lsjamison.

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
123 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find the book has good essays and stories worth reading. They appreciate the variety of topics and styles, and find the price reasonable. However, some readers feel the content is not great, depressing, hopeless, and uncaring.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

11 customers mention "Reading value"11 positive0 negative

Customers find the book engaging with lighthearted and thought-provoking essays. They find the stories inspiring and enlightening, though some readers were looking for more personal essays. Overall, they consider it a great collection of non-fiction writings.

"...It's a good read, if you have a large vocabulary or google on the ready...." Read more

"...The essays are incredible to read, and the book itself has a sleek design which looks nice on any shelf...." Read more

"...A bit too political at times, but expected given the genre. Worth a read if you like non-fiction." Read more

"...There were other great essays, though they were sometimes hard to read: "White Horse" about rape, and "Adventures in Pornland"..." Read more

3 customers mention "Selection"3 positive0 negative

Customers find the book has a variety of topics and styles, some of which are good and others too academic. They find the selections thought-provoking.

"A couple good selections, but some pieces in here are too academic, or just boring." Read more

"An array of topics and styles, all of them enlightening and thought-provoking. Great compendium!" Read more

"Great selection, love the format..." Read more

3 customers mention "Value for money"3 positive0 negative

Customers like the book's price.

"...It was also way cheaper than my college bookstore!" Read more

"...But price was good and came as expected" Read more

"...However, the price was not too high." Read more

3 customers mention "Content quality"0 positive3 negative

Customers are dissatisfied with the content quality. They find the collection depressing, hopeless, and uncaring. Overall, it's a disappointing year for the Best series.

"...All in all, this has been a disappointing year for the Best series: honestly, next year I'm going to wait a while and see if it's worth it...." Read more

"...The 2017 best essays is absolutely the worst collection. I have not read the 2018 series, I hope the guest does a better job." Read more

"...from front to back, but the essays that I did read were depressing, hopeless, and at times uncaring...." Read more

Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2018
    I bought this book for my class and was actually pleasantly surprised about how much I liked the essays in it. It's a good read, if you have a large vocabulary or google on the ready. Overall, I would go back and read the essays that we didn't go over in class. It was also way cheaper than my college bookstore!
  • Reviewed in the United States on October 30, 2018
    (Paperback) This book was one of my textbooks for a writing class. The essays are incredible to read, and the book itself has a sleek design which looks nice on any shelf. I highly recommend this collection of essays to any person looking for thought-provoking arguments on topics relevant to today.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2017
    A nice variety of perspectives that speak to modern problems. I love that the book includes a list of other great essays, even entire issues to check out. A bit too political at times, but expected given the genre. Worth a read if you like non-fiction.
    5 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on December 20, 2017
    What I've learned about Leslie Jamison from this collection: she does love a beautiful turn of phrase, she's politically left wing, and she sometimes thinks that shock value and edginess are to be valued se ipse.

    Sadly for the 'Best American Science and Nature Writing' (which was execrable this year), the best science essay of the year is in this volume, about the study of cosmogony and the Big Bang. There were other great essays, though they were sometimes hard to read: "White Horse" about rape, and "Adventures in Pornland" which describe casual brutality against women as eroticized. "H" about the seemingly unwinnable war against heroin, was another timely and touching essay. And there's a quite interesting one on the cinematic uses and misuses of the black sexual organ. (not sure if Amazon is prudish about the p-word!)

    A Freudian might begin to ponder odd things about Jamison at this point.

    However, they are gems in a swamp of stuff that is trying too damn hard. I would like to ban any essayist, from henceforth, from titling their *essay* as "The Book of the Dead". It's pretentious and worse, unoriginal. And almost always promises incredibly tedious, mordant reading.

    Several other entries had some flashes of interest, possibilities, but really needed a skilled editor to whip them into shape. This is not some old, unwoke idea on this reviewer's part, that all essays must fit a formal shape or proffer some generally cliche 'meaning'--rather, the writer seemed not to have discovered their own topic, yet. It was like reading drafts. I do that for a living, thank you very much. I'd rather not do that for my entertainment.

    The worst entry, by far, the one that was so bad I thought it surely, surely, must have been parody, was the 'Smoker's Manifesto'. No one, I thought, is that devoid of critical thought that they honestly relate someone who chooses to smoke with someone who got in a car that got into a tragic accident--painting both as equally complicit in their health situations. I'm an EMT and I've seen many MVAs and that comparison, cheeky or not, offends me at every possible level. But one never learns if one doesn't challenge oneself, so I persisted in the essay, thinking to myself, 'oh, I know. This is some sort of clever parody, just poorly written, in the vein of Swift's 'Modest Proposal'.' Alas, dear readers, I was mistaken. Though Ms Thunderstorm's blurb at the end of the book is hilariously contradictory (down with patriarchy and capitalism, but send me money so I can dismantle it), it is also the worst kind of tryhard, a woman flinging the f-word around as though she hasn't yet realized that cursing is really just a white flag of surrender--one curses because one has no other weapon in one's intellectual arsenal.

    All in all, this has been a disappointing year for the Best series: honestly, next year I'm going to wait a while and see if it's worth it. I'm tired of pretentious celeb hip it-girl editors trying to signal their wokeness.
    23 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on January 13, 2020
    My daughter is an avid reader. She asked for three different years of the short essays books. She loved them.
  • Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2019
    amazing book, the stories are inspiring. had to buy this for a class but i will be buying this book every year!
  • Reviewed in the United States on April 3, 2018
    I have been reading books from the Best American series for about 10 years. They are outstanding. I look forward to reading many more.
    3 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on May 1, 2018
    Needed this for my English class, and the Kindle version is good. The page numbers are a little wonky, though, in the sense that page 247 sometimes shows as page 246. Gets confusing when my teacher asks us to turn to a particular page. Having the table of contents readily accessible is useful, though, and I don't have to turn pages unnecessarily because I can just click on the link within the Cloud Reader.
    One person found this helpful
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