The Best American Essays 2013
Strayed, whose best-selling memoir, Wild (2011), was the inaugural title for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, and whose popular “Dear Sugar” advice columns have been collected in Tiny Beautiful Things (2012), takes the helm of this vibrant annual. In her introduction, she attests to the power source of this flexible literary form: “Behind every good essay there’s an author with a savage desire to know more about what is already known.” Her 26 engrossing selections begin with Poe Ballantine’s potent “Free Rent at the Totalitarian Hotel,” a tale about his struggles to get by in California during the 1987 stock market crash. In “The Exhibit Will Be So Marked,” Ander Monson comes to some surprising conclusions as he considers mixtapes versus mix CDs, the lives and deaths of trees, and the mysterious Paulding Light in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Charles Baxter recounts a harrowing limo accident, and Megan Stielstra evokes a blizzard of emotions in her distilled drama of postpartum depression. Also including essays by Alice Munro, Walter Kirn, Zadie Smith, and Dagoberto Gilb, Strayed does this sterling series proud. --Donna Seaman