THE TEN GREATEST ESSAYS, EVER
David Lazar
William Hazlitt, “On the Pleasures of Hating”
(from On the Pleasures of Hating, 1823)
Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay”
(from Glass, Irony & God, 1994)
Charles Lamb, “A Bachelor’s Complaint of the Behavior of Married People”
(from Essays of Elia, 1823)
Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure”
(from The Death of the Moth,1927)
Agnes Repplier, “Words”
(from The Atlantic Monthly, March 1893)
Georges Perec, “The Apartment”
(from Species of Spaces, 1974)
David Wojnarowicz, “Being Queer in America: A Journal of Disintegration”
(from Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, 1991)
M.F.K. Fisher, “Feminine Ending”
(from The Art of Eating, 1954)
Jenny Boully, One Love Affair
(from Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2006)
Joan Didion, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”
(from Slouching Toward Bethlehem, 1961)
About David Lazar
David Lazar is the author of five books, including the essay collection The Body of Brooklyn, the highly popular Conversations with M.F.K. Fisher, the influential critical collection Truth in Nonfiction, and the prose poetry collection Powder Town. His work has appeared in the journals Denver Quarterly, Arts and Letters, Gulf Coast, Sentence, and the Southern Humanities Review, and has been anthologized in The Best of the Prose Poem. Lazar is the founding editor of the literary journal Hotel Amerika and director of the nonfiction writing program at Columbia College in Chicago, which is where this list was composed in collaboration with his students in his graduate seminar “Advanced Creative Nonfiction.”