PW’s Bests

The 10 Best Mystery Books
1. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins – This is still a wonderfully mysterious novel. It is large and sweeping, with skillfully drawn characters, lovely passages and absolutely haunting scenes, a fully formed 19th century novel with all the trimmings. The story is complicated, but it was originally written in serial form, so the story moves forward in carefully measured steps. Much of what became standard in crime fiction was first done here, so it is not only an engaging read, but a fundamentally instructive one.2. A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne – I have recommended this book many times to all kinds of readers. For me, it is a novel that uses suspense in the best possible way, not by having a character confront one contrived obstacle after another in a mindless stream of action, but by creating an atmosphere of deep moral peril in which the culminating tragedy seems as inevitable as it is, well…tragic. It is also one of those books in which the title become completely apt, and very moving, after one has completed the book. In this case, the “crime in the neighborhood” turns out to be far more profound and long lasting than any single act of violence could be.
3. A Dark-Adapted Eye by Ruth Rendell – I confess that this is one of the most beautiful titles in mystery fiction. The good news is that the book lives up to the title. It is intricate, with genuinely surprising revelations, and the depth of the characterizations makes a major contribution to the novel’s suspense. This is psychological suspense for adults, with real people confronting real, and very dark problems.
4. A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler – “It is not who fired the shot but who paid for the bullet.” It is a line that has since become famous, but it is only one of the many literary beauties of the book. Dimitrios, in life and death, is a figure of surpassing fascination, his life a tale of struggle and fierce intrigue that I have never forgotten. The secondary characters are wonderfully drawn. From the moment Charles Latimer meets Colonel Haki and hears of the mysterious Dimitrios, the reader is returned to the lost Balkan world that flourished between the two world wars, a boiling cauldron of expediency and deceit that Ambler renders in exquisite detail.
5. True Confessions by John Gregory Dunne – The novel begins with a crime based on the Black Dahlia murder, and from there steadily deepens into a work of great emotional power, complete with an unforgettable portrait of Los Angeles in the ’40s. It is a story of two brothers, one a cop, the other a priest, and by following their relationship along the trail of a gruesome crime, it ultimately becomes one of the most movingly redemptive novels I have ever read.
6. The Eye of the Beholder by Marc Behm – I read this novel years and years ago, and have never been able to get it out of my mind. It is a story of obsession, with a private detective called only The Eye who follows a nameless female serial killer for more than a decade. The Eye is the classically damaged PI, not just solitary, but deeply lonely, and the woman he pursues is a heartless–yet in some sense comprehensible–hater of men. The macabre dance of death that becomes their lives is one of the strangest and most intriguing relationships in mystery fiction
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7. A Simple Plan by Scott Smith – In this wholly realistic novel, two brothers and a friend come upon a crashed plane in whose shattered ruins they find an enormous sum of money. Before that moment, none of these men has ever needed to concoct a simple plan to keep and conceal a fortune that quite obviously does not belong them. In the midst of doing just that, they become criminals, as well as victims of crime. The story builds steadily as the wages of sin become more and more costly. Here is a classic cautionary tale about the penalty dishonesty may exact upon ordinary, and largely innocent, human beings.
8. Sneaky People by Thomas Berger – This is arguably one of the funniest crime novels ever written. It is set in the 1930s, and its main character is Buddy Sandifer, a used car dealer who wants one very simple thing: his wife dead. The reason is no less simple. He yearns to live the rest of his days with Laverne, a woman who on occasion dimly realizes that sleeping with men for money adds up to prostitution. Buddy’s efforts to plot his wife’s murder creates one of the most hilarious tales of misadventure you will ever read.
9. The Quiet American by Graham Greene – Published in 1955, The Quiet American provides an intensely observed portrait of Vietnam on the eve of French defeat. Fowler, the world-weary British journalist whose observations enrich this fiercely observed novel, provides just the right counterpoint to Alden Pyle, the idealist “quiet American” whose mysterious death provides the narrative heart of the story. Part novel of intrigue, part mystery, part love story, The Quiet American remains as powerful today as when it was first written.
10. Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg – Hailed by the New York Times as the best novel of its kind in 10 years, Cutter and Bone is the story story of one man’s obsession with another man’s crime, in this case, a murder. What makes Thornburg’s story unique is that the “murderer,” a big money man by the name of J.J. Wolfe, may not have committed the crime at all. For that reason, it is Cutter’s mad pursuit of Wolfe, rather that the justice of that pursuit, that gives the book its passionate momentum.
PW’s Top Authors Pick Their Favorite Books of 2014
We’ve asked the authors of PW’s Top 10 Books of 2014
to each share a favorite title published this year. Their picks are as
diverse as you’d expect from a group that includes two genre-bending
nonfiction writers, an Italian recluse, an Iraqi exile, and a Jamaican
novelist who has written an epic of his native island. This year, our
authors fell hard for memoirs, essay collections, Graywolf Press, and
international gems that are not yet available in English. Being creative
types, they didn’t follow all our rules, but we’re pleased at their
responses.
Eula Biss
Biss’s On Immunity
uses history, research, mythology, and her own experience as the mother
of a young son to delve into a complex issue: immunization. Biss’s
pick, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, similarly takes inspiration from many sources as it tackles another weighted topic: race.
Biss’s pick: Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf)
“I’ve read Rankine’s new book, Citizen,
twice and will read it again soon. The book defies summary, and there is
little I can say about it that it doesn’t say for itself much better.
It’s about, among other things, ‘the anger built up through experience
and the quotidian struggles against dehumanization every brown or black
person lives simply because of skin color.’ Citizen does not
allow us to dismiss this anger and does not allow us to read rage as
insanity. ‘You begin to think, maybe erroneously,’ Rankine writes, ‘that
this… anger is really a type of knowledge: the type that both clarifies
and disappoints.’ When I read Citizen for the first time, I
had the distinct sense that this was a book I had been waiting for
someone to write. (Shortly after, I saw Claudia Rankine read at the
Poetry Foundation in Chicago and I tried to tell her this, but in a
Freudian slip I told her that Citizen was a book I had been
waiting to write. Writing this book as Rankine has written it would be
impossible for me, but the fixations and questions of the book are all
concerns that I would call my own. I too, after all, am a citizen.)
Reading Citizen for the second time, I reconsidered my own
rage. I remembered a moment in which I had raged over a small injustice
suffered by my son. Even as I raged, I had to step outside myself long
enough to ask if there was any way I would survive the rage of raising a
child who was not routinely treated the way white children can expect
to be treated. Would I have any choice? If rage is not the most
reasonable response to injustice, Citizen asks, then what is?”
Lawrence Wright
Wright is not only on 2014’s top-10 list—he wrote Going Clear, one of our top 10 books of 2013. This year, we fell hard for Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David,
a painstaking and riveting account of the 1978 Camp David Accords.
Though it might seem impossible that Wright still has time to read after
publishing two new books in two years, he does. His favorite of the
year is All the Truth Is Out, a thoughtful piece of reportage by Matt Bai, which chronicles Gary Hart’s failed presidential campaign.
Wright’s pick: All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid, by Matt Bai (Knopf)
“The decline of fairness, impartiality, and respect
for privacy in the American press has many causes, but they all seemed
to collide in the sinking of Gary Hart’s presidential campaign in 1987.
In his bracing book All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid,
Bai persuasively argues that the rumors surrounding Senator Hart’s
marital infidelities, ignited by the 24-hour news cycle and the
diversification of media platforms, permanently transformed the ethos of
the political media. Within a few days, the press brought down the
leading figure for the Democratic nomination. After that, the hunger for
such trophies turned private lives into public commodities whenever
they wandered onto the political stage, and entertainment value trumped
the ethical considerations that had once allowed reporters and public
figures to deal with each other as something other than predator and
quarry. Bai’s book should prompt reflection on what we have lost in the
process.”
Joseph O’Neill
The Dog
is Joseph O’Neill’s story of an American man alienated by his native
country who ends up in Dubai, where he must make decisions that
challenge his identity. O’Neill’s choice is a story collection by the
MacArthur-winning Donald Antrim that, like The Dog, parses what it means to be lost in modern society.
O’Neill’s pick: The Emerald Light in the Air, by Donald Antrim (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
“These Antrim stories—brilliant, antic, emotional—are
tremendously funny and moving. I read them with that dreadful
exhilaration that only the best writers can elicit.”
Héctor Tobar
In 2010, 33 miners spent 69 days trapped in a Chilean
copper mine while the world held its breath. Pulitzer-winning
journalist Tobar dives deep into their story of survival in Deep Down Dark. His top read of 2014 is a memoir that hinges not on a newsworthy event but on one writer’s love of a city, surfing, and Moby-Dick.
Tobar’s pick: The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld: A Memoir, by Justin Hocking (Graywolf)
“Hocking’s memoir is a love poem to two quintessential creations of American culture—surfing and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.
As the book opens, Hocking, an avid skateboarder, arrives in New York
City from Colorado to reboot his writing career. He ends up in Brooklyn,
just as the hipster boom is gaining steam, and takes up with assorted
skateboarding soulmates. Hocking is an enormously talented wordsmith,
and this account of a cash-poor but culturally rich New York life is
funny, self-effacing, and unfailingly erudite. He is a writer’s writer, a
master of drop-dead gorgeous similes and metaphors. Like his hero
Melville, Hocking finds himself drawn to the sea. He falls in with a
community of misfit surfers at Rockaway Beach. (Surfing in New York
City? Who knew?) The ghost of the long-dead Manhattanite Melville is
ever present during Hocking’s repeated encounters with the city’s
unexpected natural and human wonders. Life eventually turned harsh for
Melville in Manhattan, Hocking tells us, as he tracks the great writer’s
sad biography while recounting his own literary failures. The Great Floodgates
is as original a New York writer’s memoir as you’re likely to read.
Rarely has modern-day New York been captured so viscerally and
sensually.”
Elena Ferrante
The third of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay,
continues the epic story of two friends in Naples whose lives intersect
and diverge throughout the years. Ferrante’s top pick is Jhumpa
Lahiri’s The Lowland, about two brothers and the woman they share, with a setting that moves from India to the U.S.
Ferrante’s pick: The Lowland, by Jhumpa Lahiri (Knopf)
“When I’m writing, I read very little. The only book that I read this year in English is The Lowland,
by Jhumpa Lahiri. Lahiri conveys the collision of two worlds to
excellent effect. But what makes the book memorable is Gauri [the female
protagonist]. In Italy the novel was titled La moglie (The
Wife). It’s one of those extremely rare cases where the publisher’s
nonliterary rationale indicates to the reader a great literary
accomplishment.”
Emmanuel Carrère
Carrère doesn’t recede into the background in his biographical portrait Limonov.
Instead, the author interacts with the story, interrogating his own
relationship to Limonov as closely as he studies the facts of the
Russian dissident’s life. This year, he recommends a French bestseller
by Maylis de Kerangal, To Repair the Living (FSG has acquired U.S. rights). The novel follows a heart as it moves, literally, from one body to another.
Carrère’s pick: To Repair the Living, by Maylis de Kerangal
“To Repair the Living is a splendid title
and a splendid book. The title comes from Chekov; the book tells of the
heart. The heart in question belongs to a young man who dies in a car
accident after a surfing session on the French coast of Brittany. First
comes the announcement to the mother, then the mother breaking the news
to the father, and then finally the doctor, at the hospital where the
corpse of the young man lies, asks the parents if they will agree to
donate their son’s organs—particularly his heart. The parents are in
shock, of course. They need time to think. But there is no time. A heart
transplant must be performed in the 24 hours following death, or not at
all. This novel is about what happens during these 24 hours. Between
the moment when a 20-year-old dies and the moment his heart finds a home
in the body of a 50-year-old woman. Maylis de Kerangal describes with
frantic energy and wonderful tenderness all the people, all the
individual stories, all the griefs and hopes that are involved in this
process. She writes about performing both mouth-to-mouth resuscitation
and heart surgery. Before this fifth novel, she was considered one of
the most promising French novelists. Réparer les vivants is
more than a promise; in France it was an immediate bestseller, and has
remained so from the beginning to the end of 2014 and reconciled the
most demanding literary critics with the largest audience. It will be
published next year in the U.S.—don’t miss it.”
Hassan Blasim
Iraqi exile Blasim’s The Corpse Exhibition
tackles the Iraq War from an Iraqi perspective. He has been compared to
Gogol and Borges, and Blasim’s stories, like theirs, are both comic and
horrifying, filled with haunting images. Blasim chose Frankenstein in Baghdad
by Iraqi author Ahmed Saadawi, winner of the International Prize for
Arabic Fiction in 2014, a dynamic novel (soon to be translated into
English) that takes as its subject the violence in Iraq in the aftermath
of the American occupation.
Blasim’s pick: Frankenstein in Baghdad, by Ahmed Saadawi
“Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad
courageously confronts the bizarre events set in motion by the violence
after the American occupation of Iraq. In an enjoyable and intelligent
style, Saadawi tells the story of Hadi, a peddler in a poor part of
Baghdad who collects and repairs body parts from people who have been
ripped apart in explosions. A spirit breathes life into the assembled
parts to produce a creature that Hadi calls the Whatsitsname, while the
authorities call it Criminal X. The creature exacts revenge on all those
who helped kill the people to whom the body parts belonged. It’s a
painful and powerful story that goes beyond the limits of reality, in an
attempt to reach the essence of the cruelty of wars that disfigure the
human spirit and society, as fire disfigures skin. In vain, Saadawi’s
novel seeks justice in the labyrinthine chaos of violence in Iraq. His
lively style is reminiscent of horror movies and detective stories, with
touches of black comedy. The novel will soon be translated into
English, and I hope that will be a step toward recognition of the new
Iraqi literature that has emerged from under the rubble of constant
wars, which I like to call the literature of nightmarish realism.”
Marlon James
James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings
is a sweeping epic that chronicles three decades of violence and unrest
in Jamaica, centered on the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in
1976. Like Eula Biss, James picked Claudia Rankine’s Citizen as his top book of the year.
James’s pick: Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf)
“Courageous. Painful. Necessary. Words that we use to describe capital-I important books. It’s also the kind of language that guarantees that people will not read them. But Citizen
is too big a work for such reductive paraphrasing. In fact, it
anticipates this language in the stunning second section, which pivots
between Serena Williams’s ‘stubbornness and grudge,’ and Arthur Ashe’s
dignity and courage, to expose the polite racism behind what is deemed
acceptable black behavior. The question isn’t asked so much as unmasked:
is America still so in love with the concept of the good black because
it makes for great art and sports, or because it provides a racial
template safe to categorize and eventually ignore? What about the
inverse, America’s equal fear and fascination for the angry black woman
and the black male sex machine gone berserk? And yet, even at its most
boldly confrontational, Citizen grabbed me with its huge heart
and disarming openness. Rankine is far more interested in revelation
than confession. It’s the pre-Ferguson book that feels post-, not just
because of how it confronts race and identity but because it already
feels like an ageless and peerless work of art. Several times I found
myself walking into a conversation already happening, in which Rankine
simply scooted over, never breaking thought, but making space for me to
listen, and to eventually speak.”
Leslie Jamison
Jamison’s The Empathy Exams
is a collection of essays that explore pain, femininity, art, love
affairs, and yes, empathy, in language that’s daring and compassionate.
For her, this year’s standout is another essay collection: Charles
D’Ambrosio’s Loitering.
Jamison’s pick: Loitering: New and Collected Essays, by Charles D’Ambrosio (Tin House)
“Loitering is a book I will keep returning
to for years. I love its fidelity to the complexities of life. I’m
excited by the surge and charge of its thought. You get to watch a mind
moving through the world with insight and sensitivity and something like
the opposite of perceptual laziness. A doctor once told me I had an
extra electrical node in my heart—sending out extra signals saying,
‘Beat, beat’—and this collection is like another runaway node, making my
heart beat faster with its synthesis of ferocious nuance and
unapologetic feeling. Its essays are about a rundown utopia and a
Christian haunted house, a Russian orphanage and a woman on trial, a
brother’s suicide and another brother’s survival. They make the
boundaries between the personal and the exploratory—the journalistic or
the critical—feel not just permeable but somehow beside the point: why
polarize these modes of encounter and awareness? Another Charles
(Baudelaire) once protested the segregation of thought and feeling in
writing, insisting that ‘passion… raises reason to new heights,’ and
there is an emotive force to D’Ambrosio’s intelligence that never fails
to take my breath away. These essays are smart without being
overserious: they resist easy answers and treat rigorous thinking as an
ethical imperative rather than a chance to showcase intelligence. They
are generous to the world. I’m so glad they are in it.”
James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son” (originally appeared in Harper’s, 1955)
“I had never thought of myself as an essayist,” wrote James Baldwin, who was finishing his novel Giovanni’s Room
while he worked on what would become one of the great American essays.
Against a violent historical background, Baldwin recalls his deeply
troubled relationship with his father and explores his growing awareness
of himself as a black American. Some today may question the relevance
of the essay in our brave new “post-racial” world, though Baldwin
considered the essay still relevant in 1984 and, had he lived to see it,
the election of Barak Obama may not have changed his mind. However you
view the racial politics, the prose is undeniably hypnotic, beautifully
modulated and yet full of urgency. Langston Hughes nailed it when he
described Baldwin’s “illuminating intensity.” The essay was collected in
Notes of a Native Son courageously (at the time) published by Beacon Press in 1955.
Read the essay here.
Norman Mailer, “The White Negro” (originally appeared in Dissent, 1957)
An essay that packed an enormous wallop at the time
may make some of us cringe today with its hyperbolic dialectics and
hyperventilated metaphysics. But Mailer’s attempt to define the
“hipster”–in what reads in part like a prose version of Ginsberg’s
“Howl”–is suddenly relevant again, as new essays keep appearing with a
similar definitional purpose, though no one would mistake Mailer’s
hipster (“a philosophical psychopath”) for the ones we now find in
Mailer’s old Brooklyn neighborhoods. Odd, how terms can bounce back into
life with an entirely different set of connotations. What might Mailer
call the new hipsters? Squares?
Read the essay here.
Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp'” (originally appeared in Partisan Review, 1964)
Like Mailer’s “White Negro,” Sontag’s groundbreaking
essay was an ambitious attempt to define a modern sensibility, in this
case “camp,” a word that was then almost exclusively associated with the
gay world. I was familiar with it as an undergraduate, hearing it used
often by a set of friends, department store window decorators in
Manhattan. Before I heard Sontag—thirty-one, glamorous, dressed entirely
in black– read the essay on publication at a Partisan Review
gathering, I had simply interpreted “campy” as an exaggerated style or
over-the-top behavior. But after Sontag unpacked the concept, with the
help of Oscar Wilde, I began to see the cultural world in a different
light. “The whole point of camp,” she writes, “is to dethrone the
serious.” Her essay, collected in Against Interpretation (1966), is not in itself an example of camp.
Read the essay here.
John McPhee, “The Search for Marvin Gardens” (originally appeared in The New Yorker, 1972)
“Go. I roll the dice—a six and a two. Through the air
I move my token, the flatiron, to Vermont Avenue, where dog packs
range.” And so we move, in this brilliantly conceived essay, from a
series of Monopoly games to a decaying Atlantic City, the once renowned
resort town that inspired America’s most popular board game. As the
games progress and as properties are rapidly snapped up, McPhee
juxtaposes the well-known sites on the board—Atlantic Avenue, Park
Place—with actual visits to their crumbling locations. He goes to jail,
not just in the game but in fact, portraying what life has now become in
a city that in better days was a Boardwalk Empire. At essay’s end, he
finds the elusive Marvin Gardens. The essay was collected in Pieces of the Frame (1975).
Read the essay here (subscription required).
Joan Didion, “The White Album” (originally appeared in New West, 1979)
Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and the Black
Panthers, a recording session with Jim Morrison and the Doors, the San
Francisco State riots, the Manson murders—all of these, and much more,
figure prominently in Didion’s brilliant mosaic distillation (or
phantasmagoric album) of California life in the late 1960s. Yet despite a
cast of characters larger than most Hollywood epics, “The White Album”
is a highly personal essay, right down to Didion’s report of her
psychiatric tests as an outpatient in a Santa Monica hospital in the
summer of 1968. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” the essay
famously begins, and as it progresses nervously through cuts and flashes
of reportage, with transcripts, interviews, and testimonies, we realize
that all of our stories are questionable, “the imposition of a
narrative line upon disparate images.” Portions of the essay appeared in
installments in 1968-69 but it wasn’t until 1979 that Didion published
the complete essay in New West magazine; it then became the lead essay of her book, The White Album (1979).
Annie Dillard, “Total Eclipse” (originally appeared in Antaeus, 1982)
In her introduction to The Best American Essays 1988,
Annie Dillard claims that “The essay can do everything a poem can do,
and everything a short story can do—everything but fake it.” Her essay
“Total Eclipse” easily makes her case for the imaginative power of a
genre that is still undervalued as a branch of imaginative literature.
“Total Eclipse” has it all—the climactic intensity of short fiction, the
interwoven imagery of poetry, and the meditative dynamics of the
personal essay: “This was the universe about which we have read so much
and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres
flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds.” The essay, which first
appeared in Antaeus in 1982 was collected in Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982), a slim volume that ranks among the best essay collections of the past fifty years.
Phillip Lopate, “Against Joie de Vivre” (originally appeared in Ploughshares, 1986)
This is an essay that made me glad I’d started The Best American Essays
the year before. I’d been looking for essays that grew out of a vibrant
Montaignean spirit—personal essays that were witty, conversational,
reflective, confessional, and yet always about something worth
discussing. And here was exactly what I’d been looking for. I might have
found such writing several decades earlier but in the 80s it was
relatively rare; Lopate had found a creative way to insert the old
familiar essay into the contemporary world: “Over the years,” Lopate
begins, “I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre,
the knack of knowing how to live.” He goes on to dissect in comic yet
astute detail the rituals of the modern dinner party. The essay was
selected by Gay Talese for The Best American Essays 1987 and collected in Against Joie de Vivre in 1989.
Read the essay here.
Edward Hoagland, “Heaven and Nature” (originally appeared in Harper’s, 1988)
“The best essayist of my generation,” is how John
Updike described Edward Hoagland, who must be one of the most prolific
essayists of our time as well. “Essays,” Hoagland wrote, “are how we
speak to one another in print—caroming thoughts not merely in order to
convey a certain packet of information, but with a special edge or
bounce of personal character in a kind of public letter.” I could easily
have selected many other Hoagland essays for this list (such as “The
Courage of Turtles”), but I’m especially fond of “Heaven and Nature,”
which shows Hoagland at his best, balancing the public and private, the
well-crafted general observation with the clinching vivid example. The
essay, selected by Geoffrey Wolff for The Best American Essays 1989 and collected in Heart’s Desire (1988), is an unforgettable meditation not so much on suicide as on how we remarkably manage to stay alive.
Jo Ann Beard, “The Fourth State of Matter” (originally appeared in The New Yorker, 1996)
A question for nonfiction writing students: When
writing a true story based on actual events, how does the narrator
create dramatic tension when most readers can be expected to know what
happens in the end? To see how skillfully this can be done turn to Jo
Ann Beard’s astonishing personal story about a graduate student’s
murderous rampage on the University of Iowa campus in 1991. “Plasma is
the fourth state of matter,” writes Beard, who worked in the U of I’s
physics department at the time of the incident, “You’ve got your solid,
your liquid, your gas, and there’s your plasma. In outer space there’s
the plasmasphere and the plasmapause.” Besides plasma, in this
emotion-packed essay you will find entangled in all the tension a
lovable, dying collie, invasive squirrels, an estranged husband, the
seriously disturbed gunman, and his victims, one of them among the
author’s dearest friends. Selected by Ian Frazier for The Best American Essays 1997, the essay was collected in Beard’s award-winning volume, The Boys of My Youth (1998).
Read the essay here.
David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster” (originally appeared in Gourmet, 2004)
They may at first look like magazine articles—those
factually-driven, expansive pieces on the Illinois State Fair, a luxury
cruise ship, the adult video awards, or John McCain’s 2000 presidential
campaign—but once you uncover the disguise and get inside them you are
in the midst of essayistic genius. One of David Foster Wallace’s
shortest and most essayistic is his “coverage” of the annual Maine
Lobster Festival, “Consider the Lobster.” The Festival becomes much more
than an occasion to observe “the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker” in
action as Wallace poses an uncomfortable question to readers of the
upscale food magazine: “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature
alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” Don’t gloss over the footnotes.
Susan Orlean selected the essay for The Best American Essays 2004 and Wallace collected it in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (2005).
Read the essay here. (Note: the electronic version from Gourmet magazine’s archives differs from the essay that appears in The Best American Essays and in his book, Consider the Lobster.)
I wish I could include twenty more essays but these
ten in themselves comprise a wonderful and wide-ranging mini-anthology,
one that showcases some of the most outstanding literary voices of our
time. Readers who’d like to see more of the best essays since 1950
should take a look at The Best American Essays of the Century (2000).
