THE TEN GREATEST ESSAYS, EVER
Ander Monson
James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
(from Mariner Books, 1941)
Theodore Adorno, “Essay as Form”
(from Notes to Literature, 1992)
Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy
(from, New York Review of Books, 1621
Paul LaFarge, “Destroy All Monsters”
(from The Believer, September 2006)
Dame Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins
(from Walker and Company, 1953
H. L. Mencken, “Funeral March”
(from A Mencken Chrestomathy, 1948)
Georges Perec, “Species of Spaces”
(from Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 1974)
Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno
(from The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, Volume 1, 1763)
Lawrence Weschler, “Inhaling the Spore”
(from Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders, 1995)
Joy Williams, The Florida Keys
(from Random House, 1988)
About Ander Monson
Ander Monson is the author of five books, including Safety Features, Our Aperture, Vacationland, Other Electricities, and the nonfiction work Neck Deep and Other Predicaments, which received the second annual Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. A contributor to journals such as The Believer, Ploughshares, and Fence, Monson was nominated for the New York Public Library’s Young Literary Lions Award, and has received the Christopher Isherwood Foundation Fellowship, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and the John C. Zacharias Award. He is the editor of the online journal DIAGRAM as well as the New Michigan Press. He teaches creative writing at the University of Arizona.