One Path for the Impersonal Essay

In one of the canniest touches in Sally Rooney’s novel, Conversations With Friends, published earlier this year, a writer idolized by Rooney’s 21-year-old narrator and her best friend is celebrated for her collection of essays. Is there any path to fashionable literary fame more quintessential to the late 2010s than this? Over the past few years, the essay, once an inconvenient form prone to washing up in collections of miscellaneous writings that agents assured their clients were fiendishly hard to sell, has enjoyed a boom. The internet’s insatiable appetite for personal stories allowed young writers to break out and get published in outlets that might once have felt out of their reach, even if, as Slate’s Laura Bennett pointed out in 2015, the fees paid for such essays rarely compensated for the often corrosive attention they attracted. This spring, the New Yorker declared the fad to be over. But even in its more respectable book form, the essay collection, essays have become a trouble zone. A much-shared piece by Merve Emre in the Boston Review, “Two Paths for the Personal Essay,” took to task a new generation of popular essayists for their lack of rigor and outlined a future for the form in which writers must choose between mushy emotional meandering and unsentimental intellectual precision. Continue reading at 'Slate'

[ Slate | 2017-10-23 00:00:00 UTC ]
News tagged with: #insatiable appetite #boston review

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