The Best American Essays 2014 (41 page)

E
MILY
W
ITT

What Do You Desire?,
n+
1
,
no.
16.

M
ELORA
W
OLFF

Masters in This Hall,
Normal School
, Spring.

J
AMES
W
OOD

Why?,
The New Yorker
, December 9.

L
IA
W
OODALL

Torn in Two,
South Loop Review
, no. 15.

R
USSELL
W
ORKING

Us,
Narrative Magazine
, Stories of the Week 2013–2014.

A
MANDA
W
RAY

Black Dolls,
American
Athenaeum
, Summer.

K
AREN
W
UNSCH

My Mother, Eating; or Dystalgia, a Memoir,
Hotel Amerika,
Spring.

 

K
EVIN
Y
OUNG

Blood Nation,
Virginia Quarterly Review
, Spring.

P
AULINE
Y
U

The Number One Funeral Home,
American Scholar
, Autumn.

N
AOMI
Z
ACK

More than Skin Deep,
Oregon Humanities
, Summer.

B
EATRIZ
Z
ALCE

You Are Here,
Cimarron Review
, Spring.

 

Notable Special Issues of 2013

 

American Athenaeum
, Things They Carry, ed. Jan Nerenberg, Summer.

Antioch Review
, Cartography with a Twist, ed. Robert S. Fogarty, Fall.

Black Warrior Review
, Offal Issue, ed. Emma Sovich and staff, Spring/Summer.

Briar Cliff Review
, 25th Anniversary, ed. Tricia Currans-Sheehan, no. 25.

Chattahoochee Review
, The Animal, ed. Anna Schachner, Fall/Winter.

Chautauqua
, Journeys & Pilgrimages, ed. Jill and Philip Gerard, no. 10.

Creative Nonfiction
, Issue 50, ed. Lee Gutkind.

Daedalus
, American Music, ed. Gerald Early, Fall.

December
, Revival Issue, ed. Gianna Jacobson, Winter.

Gulf Coast
, The “Issues” Issue, ed. Zachary Martin and Karyna McGlynn, Summer/Fall.

Hudson Review
, Literature and the Environment, ed. Paula Deitz, Spring.

Lapham's Quarterly
, Animals, ed. Lewis H. Lapham, Spring.

Mānoa
, Cascadia: The Life and Breath of the World, ed. Frank Stewart and Trevor Carolan, vol. 25, no. 1.

Massachusetts Review
, W.E.B. Du Bois in His Time and Ours, ed. Jim Hicks, Michael Thurston, and Ellen Dore Watson, Fall.

Michigan Quarterly Review
, Back to School, ed. Jonathan Freedman, Summer.

Midwestern Gothic
, Creative Nonfiction Issue, ed. Jeff Pfaller and Robert James Russell, Fall.

Minerva Rising
, Rebellion, ed. Kimberly Brown, no. 3.

North Dakota Quarterly
, Going Global, ed. Robert W. Lewis, Spring/Summer.

Oregon Humanities
, Skin, ed. Kathleen Holt, Summer.

Oxford American
, Southern Music Issue, ed. Roger D. Hodge and Rick Clark, Winter (no. 83).

The Point
, What Is Marriage For?, ed. Jon Baskin, Jonny Thakkar, and Etay Zwick, Fall.

Portland
, Heroes, ed. Brian Doyle, Spring.

Post Road
, Writing the Body: Creative Nonfiction, ed. Amy Boesky, no. 24.

Prairie Schooner
, A War Portfolio, ed. Brian Turner, Winter.

The Progressive
, Living Our Values, ed. Matthew Rothschild, January.

Ruminate
, The Body, ed. Brianna Van Dyke, Winter (no. 30).

Slice
, The Unknown, ed. Elizabeth Blachman, Celia Blue Johnson, and Maria Gagliano, no. 13.

Smithsonian
, 101 Objects That Made America, ed. Michael Caruso, November.

South Dakota Review
, 50th Anniversary Issue, ed. Lee Ann Roripaugh, no. 50.

Southern Humanities Review
, Cultural Memoir, ed. Patricia Foster, Fall.

Southern Review
, The National Book Award 1963, Revisited, ed. Chris Bachelder and Emily Nemens, Autumn.

Sport Literate
, Body and Mind, ed. William Meiners, vol. 8, no. 2.

Threepenny Review
, A Symposium on Revenge, ed. Wendy Lesser, Fall.

Transition
, Django Issue, ed. Tommie Shelby, Glenda R. Carpio, and Vincent Brown, no. 113.

Water-Stone Review
, Forms of Wanting, ed. Mary Francois Rockcastle, no. 16.

Wired
, Inventing a Better World, ed. Bill Gates, December.

Witness
, Redemption, ed. Maile Chapman, Spring.

 

Correction
: The following essay was inadvertently omitted from
Notable Essays of 2012
: Deja Early, Virgin,
Ruminate
, Winter (no. 22).

 

Visit
www.hmhco.com
to find all of the books in The Best American Series
^®
.

J
OHN
J
EREMIAH
S
ULLIVAN
, guest editor, is a contributing writer for the
New York Times Magazine
and the southern editor of
The Paris Review
. He has been the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Pushcart Prize, and an M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. He is the author of
Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son
and
Pulphead: Essays
.

 

R
OBERT
A
TWAN
, the series editor of
The Best American Essays
since its inception in 1986, has published on a wide variety of subjects, from American advertising and early photography to ancient divination and Shakespeare. His criticism, essays, humor, poetry, and fiction have appeared in numerous periodicals nationwide.

1. The authorship of the
Remedies
has been wondered about since it was written, and its obscurity depends heavily on our failure to crack its “Anonym[o]us” mask. But a linguist at Princeton, the New Jersey–born Williamson Updike Vreeland, discovered that the book was Joseph Hall's more than a century ago, and published the information in his
Study of Literary Connections Between Geneva and England Up to the Publication of
la Nouvelle Héloïse (1901). Vreeland didn't care about Bishop Hall, not much—he was interested in the book's translator, the zealous Swiss Calvinist Theodore Jaquemot, who rendered at least a dozen of Hall's books into French—but Vreeland had gone to the library in Geneva and seen the only known French copy of the
Remedies
, titled by Jaquemot
Remèdes contre les mécontentements
, and it read right there on the title page, “Traduit nouvellement de l'anglais de révérend Seigneur Joseph Hall . . . 1664.” Sixteen sixty-four: Bishop Hall was seven or eight years dead by then—Jaquemot didn't need to worry about protecting his friend's identity. Plus, once you introduce Vreeland's evidence, other things line up: Hall, it turns out, favored the phrase “Remedies Against” in the chapter heads of his later books, the ones he claimed; and he knew fairly well the man to whom the book is personally dedicated, Sir Edward Coke, the attorney general under Elizabeth I. The
Remedies
is all but certainly Joseph Hall's. But Vreeland, not really caring about Hall and maybe not even knowing that the
Remedies
had long been considered a frustratingly mysterious book, didn't broadcast the discovery, and it's safe to say scant few scholars of English came across his study, so this tiny datum has hunkered there since 1901, waiting for the magic of just the right database and search-term combination to conjure it forth. Well, you might say, who cares? Fair enough. Probably hardly anyone anymore. But sometimes a little fact like that will ignite a constellation of things, the way you can make a strand of Christmas-tree lights come on by replacing one burned bulb. Specifically, this is how it becomes intriguing: Bishop Joseph Hall, though largely forgotten, is major. I won't wear you out quoting four-hundred-year-old accolades. Suffice it to say that his impact and influence in and on his own time were enormous. They called him “the English Seneca.” He argued with Shakespeare in taverns and quarreled with Milton in print. He resolved spiritual controversies. He pioneered multiple prose forms in English, among them the satire, the dystopia, the Theophrastian character sketch, and the Neostoical meditation. In the 1650s, when he was old and fallen from power and sick—suffering from, among other ills, “strangury” (painful, constricted urination)—he was attended and his life prolonged by a younger, admiring friend, the writer-physician Sir Thomas Browne, who went on to quote from Hall in his own work. Thomas Browne closed Hall's eyes. Alexander Pope read Bishop Hall. Laurence Sterne knew Bishop Hall's sermons and used them. But most significant of all:
Francis Bacon
knew Hall, and is highly likely to have read his
Remedies.
A year later, Bacon publishes his own
Essayes.
Granted, Hall hadn't used that word in his book. He'd used
Discourses.
But the formal and stylistic overlap between the two productions is huge. Which means we need to consider the likelihood that Joseph Hall is, if not the father, at minimum a coparent of the English essay. There is more to be learned about him.

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2. An at-the-time disproportionate-seeming number of Montaigne's earliest readers were female, and he was made fun of for it. He dedicated several of his pieces to women and boasted that he would come to know more about that sex than any man before, because his book would become a tiny Trojan horse that would carry him even into their bedrooms, even into their
toilettes.
Among his most passionate early defenders, and his first posthumous editor, was the great Marie le Jars de Gournay, whom he called his
fille d'alliance
(something between a goddaughter and a female apprentice). Good on this topic is Grace Norton's
Montaigne: His Personal Relations to Some of His Contemporaries, and His Literary Relations to Some Later Writers
, which mentions the “peculiar interest Montaigne has inspired through all generations in women.”

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3. Read Pierre Villey's
Montaigne en Angleterre
for both a tour de force treatment of this subject and an amusing instance of the French attitude to it, which is (or was for a long time) that we English are a little bit weird about Montaigne. Every country treasures him, but England has
loved
him. In the nineteenth century we tried to claim him, Villey points out, by seizing on a claim he makes, at one point in the
Essais
, that his father's family was descended from one situated in England and that he could recall seeing, as a boy, English relics in Eyquem family homes. Genealogies were drawn, more wishfully than carefully, tracing
Eyquem
back to
Ockham.
That would explain the English fixation on Montaigne, our drive to emulate him.
He was really ours.

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4. Notice the self-canceling doubleness of even his syntax there. Those other pieces can't be “essays” (looser meaning) because they're strong, and able to endure the sharpest “trial” (stricter meaning). Cornwallis seems to be winking at us there, letting us know that he knows that the whole problem of the word is a linguistic ouroboros. Takeaway being, 1601 and you already have the ironic essay about essays.

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