THE TEN GREATEST ESSAYS, EVER
Eula Biss
Joan Didion, “New York: Sentimental Journeys”
(from The New York Review of Books, January 17, 1991)
John Cage, 4’33”
(from A Chance Operation: The John Cage Tribute, first performed 1952)
Hilton Als, The Women
(from Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1996)
Winston Churchill, “I have crossed out . . .”
(memorandum to General Ismay, August 8, 1943)
Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
(from Viking Press, 1974)
D.J. Waldie, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir
(from W.W. Norton, 1996)
John Bresland, “The Seinfeld Analog”
(produced online, www.bresland.com, 2005)
James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son”
(from Notes of a Native Son, 1955)
Amy Leach, “Sail On, My Little Honey Bee”
(from A Public Space, issue 7, 2008)
Marilynne Robinson, “The Tyranny of Petty Coercion”
(from Harper’s, August 2004)
About Eula Biss
Eula Biss is the author of two books, The Balloonists and Notes from No Man’s Land, which won the 2008 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Her essays have appeared in The Believer, The North American Review, Gulf Coast, Columbia, and Harper’s, and have been anthologized in the collections The Best Creative Nonfiction and The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction. In 2005 she co-founded Essay Press, dedicated to publishing innovative trans-generic work that “might not otherwise be published.” Biss is currently a Writer-in-Residence at Northwestern University, where she teaches.