Cristina Nehring on What s Wrong With the American Essay
Of bars that he no longer sees. “Essaylamba.com,” Rainer Maria Rilke
The essay is in a bad way. It’s not because essayists have gotten stupider. It’s not because they’ve gotten sloppier. And it is certainly not because they’ve become less anthologized. More anthologies are published now than there have been in decades, indeed in centuries. The Best American Essays series, which began in 1986, has reached 20 volumes. The problem is that these series rot in basements when they make it as far as that. I’ve found the run of American Essays in the basement of my local library, where they’ll sit with zero date stamps until released gratis one fine Sunday morning to a used bookstore that, in turn, will sell them for a buck to a college student who’ll place them next to his dorm bed and dump them in an end-of-semester clean-out. That is the fate of the essay today.
The Missouri Review, founded in 1978, has helped shape the contemporary literary scene by offering the finest work of today’s most important writers and by discovering the brightest new voices in fiction, poetry, and the essay. We are a quarterly publication based at the University of Missouri, and work first published in our magazine has been anthologized over 100 times in
Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Travel Writing, Best American Poetry, The O. Henry Prize Anthology, and The Pushcart Prize. Additionally, we publish special features on art, and interviews with a diverse body of contemporary writers. Our “History as Literature” series, we publish historical documents that have literary significance or effect, and the “Found Text” series features previously unpublished work by literary giants of the past, including Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams, Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, Charlotte Bronte, Jack Kerouac, and Marianne Moore.
Megan Pillow is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Kentucky. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in, among other places, Electric Literature, SmokeLong Quarterly, Hobart, The Believer, Brevity, and Gay Magazine. Megan has also had stories featured on the Wigleaf Top 50, an essay honored as
Launched in 1956,
Colorado Review is a triquarterly literary journal published at Colorado State University. Each approximately 200-page issue features short fiction, creative nonfiction, book reviews, and poetry. Work first published in Colorado Review has been reprinted or noted in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, Best American Short Stories, Best New American Voices, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best Travel Writing, Best Food Writing, and Pushcart Prize.