Reviewed by Tracy Ilene Miller

In The Best American Essays 2006, guest editor Lauren Slater, author of Welcome to My Country and Prozac Diary, explains how she set out in her early writing career in pursuit of fiction but landed firmly in nonfiction after discovering essays. Essays allowed her to eschew the fiction mantra of the time — show don’t tell — in favor of nonfiction, which fulfilled her strong desire to “say something straight.”

In this collection, the pieces Slater selected reinforce the notion that this genre offers readers information and experience, facts and personal discovery, not through fictional characters but “straight” from the writer — “the writer bare and unpretentious, the writer without the veil of character” — and the characters who populate his or her life.

So it is in Adam Gopnik’s “Death of Fish” that a sometimes humorous recounting of his family’s approach to the death of his daughter’s pet fish, Bluie, turns into a discourse on consciousness. And in “Grammar Lessons,” Michele Morano uses a discussion on a newfound understanding of language from her travels in Spain to skillfully reveal a story of her relationship with a severely depressed boyfriend.

At some point while reading the book, a certain New York City state of mind begins to seep into consciousness. The city settings and landmarks that permeate the stories suggest what is confirmed at the back of the book – a particular influence of geography. Many of the authors are “born and raised” or “living in” the Big Apple and write for publications based in that literary capitol (e.g., The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, and New York magazine).

Perhaps not surprisingly many of the newer authors from outside that lauded area produce some of the more lucid pieces of the book, with clean story lines. For example, Poe Ballantine (settled now in Nebraska) is a self-professed “average guy” but a talented observer of the gritty street life and vagabond lifestyle he inhabited as a recovering alcoholic and drug user in “501 Minutes to Christ.” And Emily Bernard in “Teaching the N-Word” writes an introspective and revealing but plain-spoken account of her experience teaching African-American studies to an all-white class at the University of Vermont.

But there is no doubt the many voices Slater does include evoke the “time, heat, indolence, and grief” that attracted her to essay writing. They summon a powerful range of emotion by scrutinizing the details of life’s experiences.