How We Speak to One Another

268 Pages·2017·5.81 MB·English

by  Ander Monson

Copyright © 2017 by Ander Monson and Craig Reinbold Cover design by Kyle G. Hunter Semaphore flag
figures © istockphoto.com/pialhovik
Book design by Rachel Holscher
Photograph of Ander Monson © Cybele Knowles Photograph of Craig Reinbold © Angela Mason Coffee
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Permissions
Photograph on page 34 is courtesy of V. V. Ganeshananthan.
Photograph on page 148 is from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine, © 2004
(published by Graywolf Press). Reprinted by permission of John Lucas.
Photographs on pages 229 and 237 are courtesy of Dave Mondy.
“Wrens” by Eliot Weinberger, found on page 249, is from An Elemental Thing, © 2007 by Eliot
Weinberger. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Names: Monson, Ander, 1975-
editor. | Reinbold, Craig, 1982-editor.
Title: How we speak to one another: an essay daily reader / edited by Ander Monson, Craig Reinbold.
Description: Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016027859 | ISBN 9781566894586 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: American essays—21st
century. | BISAC: LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays. | LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES
Composition & Creative Writing. | LITERARY CRITICISM Books & Reading. | EDUCATION / Essays.
Classification: LCC PS689 .H69 2017 | DDC 814/.608—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016027859
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
To all our Essay Daily readers & contributors, past, present, future
(meaning you)
And for
Steven Barthelme, Randy Freisinger, Jack Jobst, and Rebecca Nowacek
Contents
ANDER MONSON: Here’s How You Use the Lion Mints: An Introduction to
How We Speak to One Another
MARCIA ALDRICH: Invisible Engineering: The Fine Art of Revising “The
Fine Art of Sighing”
KRISTEN RADTKE on Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil
Majestic Ruins: ROBIN HEMLEY on the Work of James Agee
V. V. GANESHANANTHAN on Essays, Assays, and Yiyun Li’s “Dear Friend,
from My Life I Write to You in Your Life”
ROBERT ATWAN: The Assault on Prose: John Crowe Ransom, New Criticism,
and the Status of the Essay
MATT DUBE on Joan Didion, Repo Man, and a ’76 Malibu
AISHA SABATINI SLOAN on Collage, Chris Kraus, and Misremembered
Didion
T CLUTCH FLEISCHMANN: Looking for Samuel Delany
RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ: Observations about Writing Memoir in My
Twenties, Thirties, and Forties
KATHERINE E. STANDEFER on the Mysterious Leslie Ryan and the Structure
of a Trauma Narrative
JULIE LAUTERBACH-COLBY on Arianne Zwartjes’s “This Suturing of
Wounds or Words” and Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel’s “Cannulated Screw”
Living within the Ellipses: CÉSAR DÍAZ on Ilan Stavans’s On Borrowed
Words: A Memoir of Language
EMILY DEPRANG on Joan Didion, on the Morning After My Twenties
LUCAS MANN on Writing Young
DANICA NOVGORODOFF on Losing Yourself
KEN CHEN: Is the Essay at the End of Time?
E-mail from BONNIE J. ROUGH
PETER GRANDBOIS on the Essential Art of Failing
ALBERT GOLDBARTH: Leaping
ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING: Julian Barnes Brings Light to a
Thanatophobe’s Conundrum
STEVEN CHURCH on Tom Junod’s “The Falling Man”
BETHANY MAILE: We Sought but Couldn’t Find: Coming Up Empty in David
Shields’s “Death Is the Mother of Beauty”
Movie Quotes as Misery: DAVID LEGAULT on Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let
Me Be Lonely
JONI TEVIS: A Paperback Cabinet of Wonder: Unlocking the Long Lyric Essay
JOHN D’AGATA: The Essays of Ansel Adams: An Allegory
MEEHAN CRIST: 10 Thoughts on Elision
THOMAS MIRA Y LOPEZ on Donald Hall’s “Out the Window”
DANIELLE CADENA DEULEN on the Virtues of Drowning: Lidia
Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water
JOHN T. PRICE on Hoagland, Animal Obsession, and the Courage of Simile