An ambitious project that casts far and wide for exemplary contributions to the essay as a risk-taking work of art.”—Lambda Literary
“The concluding volume of D’Agata’s massive trilogy of anthologies on the nonfiction form showcases a remarkable array of writers from Anne Bradstreet to Kathy Acker.”—Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
“I would say that out of the twenty come years I’ve been doing this show there are few books that I’m certain will be read well beyond the show’s lifetime, and it’s been an honor to be associated with them.”—Michael Silverblatt, KCRW’s Bookworm
“D’Agata is America’s most intellectually eloquent reader of the essay….With this third and final volume of his long labor of love he gives us a defining work of reference that will serve generations to come.”
—Vivian Gornick
“John D’Agata’s anthologies are always stimulating, provocative and full of surprises. Moreover they invaluably extend our notion of what an essay is and can be. This third volume provides the fitting capstone to a brilliant, insanely ambitious endeavor. There are enough nourishing pieces to munch on for years to come.” —Phillip Lopate
“John D’Agata has given our civilization an inexhaustible gift with his three massive compendia of the recent past, the remote past, and the ingenious present and speculative future of the essay. Monumental and intellectually and imaginatively generous, these books are not only absorbing reading but wonderful examples of how, in the right hands, the act of anthologizing becomes an art in its own right.”—Vijay Seshadri
“John D’Agata’s alternative histories of the essay are anthologies in the same way the aurora borealis is actually a bunch of charged collisions; in his books we get to see pieces of art crash against his own restless brilliance. In this third installment, he is once more a stunning curator, giving us the story of the American essay as a strange, nimble creature—vexed and incandescent in its uncertainties, constantly surprising in its negotiations of anguish, mischief, and awe. Here we find ancient varieties of wonder and doubt provisionally fleshed in captivity tales and curiosity cabinets; we find silence and insomnia, blood and swollen moons. This American history is also a history of unknowing itself: a record of the human impulse to metabolize the world and a record of this impulse continually meeting the world’s infinitudes.”—Leslie Jamison
“It’s clear that the past fifteen-or-so years saw a rethinking and a rebirth of the essay, and equally clear that John D’Agata’s work was essential in both. He pushed the form forward with one hand and extended our grasp of its roots with the other. He remains as exciting to read as to argue with, and his hunting in the worlds of lost non-fiction has shown me many new writers and texts.The Making of the American Essay completes a series on the subject and brings the achievement of all three books into focus. It is major.”—John Jeremiah Sullivan
“Please, if the world gets blown to smithereens tomorrow, let this series be the one that tells the next civilization all that we thought and dreamt and said. John D’Agata has done something truly remarkable here: as archivist and archaeologist, as artist and impresario of the purest literary form—the essay—he has left a dazzling record of, as he puts it, ‘our human wondering.’ A New History of the Essay is learned and idiosyncratic, addictive and wildly entertaining. It belongs on every shelf.”—Michael Paterniti
“At last The Making of the American Essay completes John D’Agata’s anthology series, A New History of the Essay. Here the crucial middle years—how we got here—have been filled in, and we can understand anew just how the essay, our American essay, has grown and lived and been written and rewritten. This canon-making is a major undertaking and an astonishing act of literary generosity for which we all should be grateful. As D’Agata puts it, ‘The world, we all know, is already a nonfiction. Let the essay be what we make of it.’ Emphasis on the make—these are the essays we have made, and of these essays we are made—but also on the we. The essay may be a solo thing, but these are songs for all of us to sing.”—Ander Monson
“Nothing could be sweeter than another hugely ambitious and visionary gathering of essays from John D’Agata and Graywolf. In the preceding anthologies I’ve sat in my chair and circled the world, sought out the past, and looked into the future. Now set squarely in America, once again the essay, that most humble and solitary of forms, finds its epic account, rising out of a flood and sweeping toward a horizon of ellipses, a leaving off and a farewell that generously makes room . . . for more . . . more of our voices, more of our shapes, more of our secrets and uncertainties, more of the teeming and inventive energy inside the simplest facts . . . and more of us, reader and writer alike, because in the end this wild and wandering epic is our song to sing.”—Charles D’Ambrosio
“For well over a decade now, John D’Agata has been the renovator-in-chief of the American essay. As practitioner and theorist, writer and anthologist, as example and the enabler of examples, D’Agata has refused to yield to the idea of non-fiction as stable, fixed, already formed. . . . Instead, he has pushed the essay to yield more of itself, to find within itself an enactment of its own etymology—an essaying, a trying, a perpetual attempt at something (after the French verb essayer, to try). He has emphasized that the essay should make, and not merely take; that it should gamble with the fictive and not just trade in the real; that it should entertain uncertainty as often as it hosts opinion; that the essay can be as lyrical, as fragmented, as self-interrupting, and as self-conscious as the most experimental fiction or verse. . . . ‘Let the essay be what we make of it,’ is D’Agata’s refrain, and his three large anthologies have made good on that promise.”—James Wood, from the foreword to A New History of the Essay
“John D’Agata is a groundbreaking literary activist. It is due to him and these anthologies that the most exciting writing today is happening in the realm of nonfiction, in particularly the realm of the essay, which he has, near-single-handedly, rescued from the literary dustbin and turned into a vital contemporary art form. A New History of the Essay is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of nonfiction.”—Heidi Julavits
“John D’Agata has provided a wonderful—and useful—map of the vast territory that is the American essay.”—Lewis Hyde
2015-11-18
A literary anthology and textbook incorporating some three dozen presumably teachable essays—some of which are not essays at all. Why would Charles Reznikoff's Testimony: The United States (1934), a classic of modernist poetry, figure in an anthology devoted to the essay? We'll never know, apart from the whispery suggestion that the poem had its origins in court transcripts that were then broken into lines of verse "to accentuate common speech"—thus, presumably, qualifying as an essay. But what of T.S. Eliot's "Dry Salvages," the third of his famed four quartets? Again, D'Agata (Creative Writing/Univ. of Iowa; About a Mountain, 2010, etc.) offers an indistinct distinction in which an essay is presumably a piece that addresses "how each of us individually processes perception, how experience is layered, and knowledge uncertain." At this point, Montaigne would be reaching for his rapier. The value added to an anthology of any sort is the interpretation of the pieces that make it up on top of whatever rarity or literary quality they might have. In this regard, the editor's glancing notes are far from useful; although admittedly poetic and spiritually embracing, his remark that the book finds its contents "situated as essays always are between chance and contrivance, between the given and the made" is completely unhelpful. As for rarity? Any anthology that includes Henry David Thoreau's "Walking," available in dozens of other anthologies and hundreds of websites, lacks vigor; several hundred pages are in the public domain and readily available elsewhere. What about literary quality? In that regard, the anthology shines, for there are some very good things, including selections from the captivity narratives (not essays, mind you) of Mary Rowlandson, albeit without meaningful interpretation of her place in literary history; from F. Scott Fitzgerald's now little-read The Crack-Up, ditto; and from Gay Talese's essential but still already much-reprinted "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." The editors of the Norton anthologies need not worry: their position in literature and in the market remains secure.
