Join Kati and Managing Editor of The Iowa Review Lynne Nugent for a celebration of Best American Essays 2016 (ed. Jonathan Franzen) as part of Iowa City's 2016 Festival of the Book. The anthology includes Kati's 2015 Iowa Review Award-winning essay "In Praise of Contempt," and Lynne's work was named Notable. Kati and Lynne will read at 4pm at the Iowa City Senior Center downtown.
Here's what editor Jonathan Franzen had to say of his picks, from publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: "A true essay is “something hazarded, not definitive, not authoritative; something ventured on the basis of the author’s personal experience and subjectivity,” writes guest editor Jonathan Franzen in his introduction. However, his main criterion for selecting The Best American Essays 2016 was, in a word, risk. Whether the risks involved championing an unpopular opinion, the possibility of ruining a professional career, or irrevocably offending family, for Franzen, “the writer has to be like the firefighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames, is to run straight into them.”
