{"product_id":"best-american-essays-9780618709274-new","title":"The Best American Essays","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe twenty-two essays in this powerful collection -- perhaps the most diverse in the entire series -- come from a wide variety of periodicals, ranging from n + 1 and PMS to the New Republic and The New Yorker, and showcase a remarkable range of forms. Read on for narrative -- in first and third person -- opinion, memoir, argument, the essay-review, confession, reportage, even a dispatch from Iraq. The philosopher Peter Singer makes a case for philanthropy; the poet Molly Peacock constructs a mosaic tribute to a little-known but remarkable eighteenth-century woman artist; the novelist Marilynne Robinson explores what has happened to holiness in contemporary Christianity; the essayist Richard Rodriguez wonders if California has anything left to say to America; and the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson attempts to find common ground with the evangelical community. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn his introduction, David Foster Wallace makes the spirited case that \"many of these essays are valuable simply as exhibits of what a first-rate artistic mind can make of particular fact-sets -- whether these involve the 17-kHz ring tones of some kids' cell phones, the language of movement as parsed by dogs, the near-infinity of ways to experience and describe an earthquake, the existential synecdoche of stagefright, or the revelation that most of what you've believed and revered turns out to be self-indulgent crap.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"HOUGHTON MIFFLIN","offers":[{"title":"New","offer_id":51566179320098,"sku":"9780618709274-new","price":18.51,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0893\/4755\/5618\/files\/9780618709274.jpg?v=1777011259","url":"https:\/\/www.albakireads.com\/products\/best-american-essays-9780618709274-new","provider":"AlbakiReads","version":"1.0","type":"link"}