Philip Graham:
I’m currently reading Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine. It was one of this year’s National Book Award finalists, in the poetry category, but these short prose pieces about the daily indignities a black person has to face in this country seem to me more like intense and concentrated essays.
Because I recently lived for a few months near the town of Bristol, Rhode Island, which I discovered was a center of slave trading in the 18th and 19th century, I reread the essays of one of the most necessary of American writers, James Baldwin, and used his essays as a kind of protective bulb of garlic: The Devil Finds Work and Notes of a Native Son are especially powerful.
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Sean Prentiss:
A little slow here, and sorry about that, but one great collection of essays in memoir is Jessica Hendry Nelson's If Only You People Would Follow Directions.
http://jessicahnelson.com/ifonlyyoupeople/
If Only You People Would Follow Directions is a wonderful memoir-in-essays because the reader gets powerful, stand-alone essays that link together to examine alcoholism, mental illness, and one family as it navigates its way through the father's early death. A written memoir that draws the reader in with a powerful narrative and dynamic writing.
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