more geeky editorialising

Anne Fadiman on how she went about selecting essays for The Best American Essays 2003:


What captivated me? A memorable voice, like Brian Doyle's wild Irish tenor in "Yes". (In an article, content trumps style; in an essay, style trumps content.) Shapeliness, like the graceful arc of Atul Gawande's "The Learning Curve", which starts and ends with the insertion of a central line into a surgical patient's vena cava. (The best writers had wonderful beginnings and endings; the less skilled ones were comfortable in the midzone, but they got self-conscious in the places they thought were Important and started soundung orotund or abstract or corny.) Restraint, as in Myra Jehlen's "F.P", an essay about death that had innumerable opportunities for melodrama and turned its back on every one. (Why is it assumed that personal essays must be self-indulgent?) Attention to detail, as in Frederic Morton's "A Delivery for Fred Astaire", which describes the narrator's hunger to sound American as precisely as it describes the apricot tarts he attempts to deliver to Mr Astaire. (Vagueness is the essayist's mortal enemy.) The determination to explore one thing deeply, as in "Wooden Dollar", Ben Metcalf's revisionist portrait of Sacajawea, rather than cover the waterfront. (Given the essay's space constraints, monumentality can be catastrophic.) Vitality, as in Edward Hoagland's "Circus Music", which contains enough life to fill ten tents. (Some essays were craftsmanlike but dessicated; I wanted to hear the pulsing of blood through their veins.) Density, as in Marshall Jon Fisher's "Memoria ex Machina", whose paragraphs are assembled as tightly as the machines they describe. (By density, I don't mean obscurity; I liked essays that were as clear as newly Windexed windowpanes, and if I couldn't understand something, out it went. I mean the sort of density my daughter had in mind when, in the course of her seventh-grade science fair project, she discovered that a pint of cheap ice cream is pumped full of air and is therefore as light as a feather, whereas a pint of Haagen-Dazs weighs a ton. It's crammed. The essays in this book, even the long ones, have no extra air. They're all Haagen-Dazs.)


(from the 'Introduction' to The Best American Essays 2003, ed. Anne Fadiman)