The Next American Essay

Next American Essay will really make you think about the genre-What is the essay? How do we define it and why? What are our expectations and do they matter?If you are looking for a traditional anthology this book is not for you, but if you are interested in exploring the possibilities of the essay, this book is a find! Next American Essay offers the reader a lot, but most of it is not on the surface. This is not an anthology that is easy to skim through, but it's definitely worth a serious read.

The essays in this anthology defy genre catagories. You've got the story that Jamaica Kincaid wrote about growing up in Antigua, and the story that takes the form of a recipe by the awesome Harry Mathews, and a poem by James Wright for heck's sake. Everything according to this anthology is an essay, I mean. What the anthology argues is a little far fetched, but this is the kind of experimenting that we need more of, I think. What unites the selections of "ESSAYS" are the introductions to each of them by John D'Agata, an experimentalist if ever there was one. Sometimes his own whimsies overtake the essays and actually seem more interesting than the selections, but in general this is a book that itself defies genre definition by rewriting the idea of an anthology.

The anthology is made up of about 30 essays by biggies like McPhee and Joan Didion and David Foster Wallace. Essays that everyone's read before. So it's not an anthology you turn to because you want to figure out what's new out there. Really it's anthology you turn to for the sake of the sensibility behind it, John D'Agata's own voice that somehow manages to creep into the anthology and carry the entire 500 pages through on a whimiscal story about why he loves essays. It's got to be the most charming anthology I've ever read. At times bold (many of the essays aren't traditinally thought of as essays), at times funny, sentimental, outright smart, the anthology is trying to show what the essay has in its potential. It's a huge success. But what makes it especially thrilling are the 30 extra essay we get from D'Agata himself, introductions that stand on their own like jewels embedded in the history of a genre.

Apparently it wasn't enough that D'Agata "redefined the essay"--as Annie Dillard put it--in his first book Halls of Fame. Now he's somehow redefined the anthology. Next he tries his hand at cookbooks.