The Best American Essays 1998 - Hardcover

Cynthia Ozick is the author of numerous acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction. She is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Man Booker International prize. Her stories have won four O. Henry first prizes, and Ozick was recently awarded the 2008 Pen/Nabokov Award and the 2008 Pen/Malamud Award. She lives in New York.

This year, Ozick (The Puttermesser Papers, LJ 5/15/97) does not contribute an essay to this distinguished anthology but serves as editor. In her introduction, which she calls, "Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body," she writes of the "meditative temperateness" of the essay form, calling it "the movement of the free mind at play." Series editor Atwan warns, "You will find few tidy conclusions in this collection." The 25 selected essays do indeed show authors turning things over in their minds or, as Atwan says, using writing as thought process: Anwar Accawi thinks back to how the arrival of a telephone changed his village, James Wood analyzes why Chekhov's theatrical art is superior, and several contributors (including Sven Birkerts in "States of Reading") write about reading. Other essayists include Edward Hoagland, Jamaica Kincaid, John McPhee, and Oliver Sacks. The introduction explains the selection process, and brief biographies of the essayists and a list of the "Notable Essays" appear at the end. Recommended for public and academic libraries.?Nancy P. Shires, East Carolina Univ., Greenville, NC
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