THE TEN GREATEST ESSAYS, EVER
Lawrence Weschler
William Finnegan, “Playing Doc’s Games”
(from The New Yorker, August 24 & September 1, 1992)
Ian Frazier, “Canal Street” & “Nobody Better, Better than Nobody”
(from Gone to New York, 2002)
David Foster Wallace, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again”
(from A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again, 1996)
Susan Sheehan, A Missing Plane (the second part)
(Berkeley Books, 1986)
Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988)
Ellen Pall, “Painting Life into Sammy”
(from The New York Times Magazine, January 29, 1995)
Grace Paley, “A Conversation with my Father”
(from Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories, 1985)
Michael Lewis, “Bill Clinton’s Garbage Man”
(from The New York Times Magazine, September 21, 1997)
Joseph Mitchell, “Mazie” & “Joe Gould’s Secret”
(from Up in the Old Hotel, 1992)
About Lawrence Weschler
Lawrence Weschler is the author of eleven books of nonfiction, including A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers, Boggs: A Comedy of Values, A Wanderer in the Perfect City: Selected Passion Pieces, Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas, and the highly popular Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His most recent book, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. A regular contributor to McSweeney’s and a staff writer at The New Yorker for over twenty years, Weschler has received the George Polk Award for journalism and the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. He directs the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University and the Chicago Humanities Festival.