 First edition | |
| Author | Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, eds. |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | HarperCollins |
Publication date | 2008 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover, paperback) |
| ISBN | 978-0-06-147090-5 |
State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America is a collection of pieces about the United States, with one essay on each of the fifty states. It was conceived of and edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey.
Weiland and Wilsey stated that they were inspired by the Federal Writers Project of the 1930s, in which the US government helped to create jobs by sending writers across the country and commissioning pieces on their sights and experiences. The two previously edited Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup, in which they commissioned 32 authors to write pieces on the 32 countries competing in the 2006 World Cup; they decided a similar approach could be taken with the United States.
Both Weiland and Wilsey decided that they wanted a mixture of approaches for the collection; while several well-known authors (e.g., Ha Jin, Jhumpa Lahiri, Dave Eggers) were included, they deliberately avoided certain authors that were closely associated with a particular state - for instance, Garrison Keillor with Minnesota, or Carl Hiaasen with Florida. The collection has a mix of familiarity, with some authors writing about places in which they have lived their entire lives, while others visited the state for the first time.
Editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey both agree that they were heavy, interactive editors. "I mean no dishonor to any of the writers to say that we worked very closely with them all to revise as much as possible, to make every piece as lasting and solid and convincing as possible," Weiland told Bookslut . "And I take great pride in that kind of work. I've done it on The Baffler and on Granta and now at The Paris Review . And to Sean, likewise, that means a lot to him—he did it at The New Yorker and continues to do it for McSweeney's....I think [the writers] saw very quickly we wanted to make a book that would still be read decades from now...and that meant...not even taking their A-minus work, but pushing them for their absolute best." Each essay, Weiland said, went through at least six rounds of edits.
Weiland told Bookslut that State by State had served for both its editors as "a kind of reminder of the many things we [as Americans] have to be confident about.... Despite many reasons not to feel optimistic, chiefly during the last eight years of the Bush administration—deep down, I think we’re all right." Wilsey told Brooklyn Rail that he was sorry the late David Foster Wallace had declined to be in the book: "Nobody gets at what makes America the extravagantly sad country it is like Wallace did." Asked whether he hates any states, Wilsey replied, "I hate Maine. I hate New England. It's so claustrophobic, no vistas, the landscape is constantly choking you. The people in New England just don't seem kind; they're all hardened and beaten down by the harsh winters. As a Californian, you're not always kind, but you're always nice, and within the framework of niceness you can either be mellow or stoked. I'm a stoked Californian. New England somehow flattens that. Granted, I went to boarding school there for three years, and those were some of the worst years of my life, so that's probably a big part of my dislike for it."
As he documented in an essay for The Guardian , Sean Wilsey personally presented a copy of State by State to Barack Obama in late 2008. Wilsey was invited to attend an event after donating his portion of the advance for the book to Obama's campaign. "When he turned to shake my hand, for some reason I chose to address him by his first name, saying, 'Barack, I brought you this book.'" Six photographs were taken of the handover. "As I handed it to him I was thinking we, all of us, did this for you. I think you can see that in the [accompanying] picture." Obama was very interested in the book and began reading it in front of Wilsey.
Select institutions received complimentary copies of State by State. Many educators received the book with respectful interest and enthusiasm. On the website The Millions , a teacher asked whether he should assign the book in his 21st century literature class. It was one of four tomes he was considering; the others were "[Charles] Bock's Beautiful Children , [Joshua] Ferris' Then We Came to the End , and Brock Clarke's An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England . "My students are really intelligent, and so just about anything is fair game." Millions contributor Edan Lepucki responded, "Of the four you're considering teaching, I think State by State is the best, since it showcases so many great writers. While I enjoyed Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End, I think a workplace narrative would be lost on most teenagers."
Professor Tyler Cowen, on the site Marginal Revolution: Small Steps to a Much Better World , noted that he was thinking of assigning State by State to his graduate students at Berlin's Freie Universität along with Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America .
Manhattan's progressive Calhoun School used State by State for its Upper School students in 2012 as required summer reading. The school assigned fifteen essays, two of which are graphic essays, or comic strips. "There's interesting material in every essay and we are certain that this book will spark a wide variety of interesting conversations between students, teachers and parents," the school noted on its website.
Matt Weiland and two of his writers were hosted by a Milwaukee high school for a reading at an assembly. "I wasn't sure what high school students would make of it, but we were careful to select the pieces with the most drinking and the most sex," Weiland told Bookslut. Columbia, the alumni magazine of Columbia University, of which Weiland is a graduate, profiled him in an article called "This Land Is Weiland" and praised him as "a consummate intellectual".
Afterword: Washington, D.C. - A Conversation with Edward P. Jones
A first-person narrative is a mode of storytelling in which a storyteller recounts events from their own point of view using the first person such as "I", "us", "our" and "ourselves". It may be narrated by a first-person protagonist, first-person re-teller, first-person witness, or first-person peripheral. A classic example of a first-person protagonist narrator is Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), in which the title character is also the narrator telling her own story, "I could not unlove him now, merely because I found that he had ceased to notice me".
Ferris Bueller's Day Off is a 1986 American teen comedy film written, co-produced, and directed by John Hughes and co-produced by Tom Jacobson. The film stars Matthew Broderick, Mia Sara, and Alan Ruck, with supporting roles from Jennifer Grey, Jeffrey Jones, Cindy Pickett, Edie McClurg, and Lyman Ward. It tells the story of a high school slacker, Ferris, who skips school with his best friend, Cameron, and his girlfriend for a day in Chicago, and regularly breaks the fourth wall to explain his techniques and inner thoughts.
David Brooks is a conservative political and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times. He has worked as a film critic for The Washington Times, a reporter and later op-ed editor for The Wall Street Journal, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard from its inception, a contributing editor at Newsweek, and The Atlantic Monthly, in addition to working as a commentator on NPR and the PBS NewsHour.
Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri is a Bengali American author known for her short stories, novels, and essays in English and, more recently, in Italian.
Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
Interpreter of Maladies is a book collection of nine short stories by American author of Indian origin Jhumpa Lahiri published in 1999. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in the year 2000 and has sold over 15 million copies worldwide. It was also chosen as The New Yorker's Best Debut of the Year and is on Oprah Winfrey's Top Ten Book List.
Andrew Holleran is the pseudonym of Eric Garber, an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer, born on the island of Aruba. Most of his adult life has been spent in New York City, Washington, D.C., and a small town in Florida. He was a member of The Violet Quill, a gay writer's group that met in 1980 and 1981 and also included Robert Ferro, Edmund White and Felice Picano. Following the critical and financial success of his first novel Dancer from the Dance in 1978, he became a prominent author of post-Stonewall gay literature. Historically protective of his privacy, the author continues to use the pseudonym Andrew Holleran as a writer and public speaker.
David Benjamin Rakoff was a Canadian-born American writer of prose and poetry based in New York City, who wrote humorous and sometimes autobiographical non-fiction essays. Rakoff was an essayist, journalist, and actor, and a regular contributor to WBEZ's This American Life. Rakoff described himself as a "New York writer" who also happened to be a "Canadian writer", a "mega Jewish writer", a "gay writer", and an "East Asian Studies major who has forgotten most of his Japanese" writer.
Sean Patrick Wilsey is the author of the memoir Oh the Glory of It All, published by Penguin in 2005.
Natalia Ginzburg was an Italian author whose work explored family relationships, politics during and after the Fascist years and World War II, and philosophy. She wrote novels, short stories and essays, for which she received the Strega Prize and Bagutta Prize. Most of her works were also translated into English and published in the United Kingdom and United States.
The Namesake is a 2006 English-language drama film directed by Mira Nair and written by Sooni Taraporevala based on the novel The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. It stars Kal Penn, Tabu, Irrfan Khan and Sahira Nair. The film was produced by Indian, American and Japanese studios. The film was released in the United States on 9 March 2007, following screenings at film festivals in Toronto and New York City. The Namesake received positive reviews from American critics.
Robin Givhan is an American fashion editor and Pulitzer Prize winning writer.
Boston Review is an American quarterly political and literary magazine. It publishes political, social, and historical analysis, literary and cultural criticism, book reviews, fiction, and poetry, both online and in print. Its signature form is a "forum", featuring a lead essay and several responses. Boston Review also publishes an imprint of books with MIT Press.
Matthew John "Matt" Labash is an American author and journalist who writes the Slack Tide newsletter. He was a senior writer, and later a national correspondent at The Weekly Standard, where his articles frequently appeared. Labash has contributed to Esquire, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Salon, Slate, Washingtonian, The New Republic, The Drake, and Nerve Magazine.
Bookforum is an American book review magazine devoted to books and the discussion of literature. Based in New York City, New York, the magazine was founded in 1994. In June 2023, the magazine announced its relaunch, after it had announced in December 2022 that it would cease publishing.
Joshua Ferris is an American author best known for his debut 2007 novel Then We Came to the End. The book is a comedy about the American workplace, told in the first-person plural. It takes place in a fictitious Chicago ad agency experiencing a downturn at the end of the 1990s Internet boom.
Unaccustomed Earth is a collection of short stories from American author Jhumpa Lahiri. It is her second collection of stories, following Interpreter of Maladies. As with much of Lahiri's work, Unaccustomed Earth considers the lives of Indian American characters and how they deal with their mixed cultural environment. The book was Lahiri's first to top The New York Times Best Seller list, where it debuted at #1.
Allegations that Barack Obama secretly practices Islam, or that he is the antichrist of Christian eschatology, or covertly holds some other esoteric religious position, have been suggested since he campaigned for the U.S. Senate in 2004 and proliferated after his election as President of the United States in 2008. As with conspiracy theories surrounding his citizenship status, the claims are promoted by various political opponents, with American bloggers and conservative talk radio hosts particularly promoting the theories.
The 2013 Booker Prize for Fiction was awarded on 15 October 2013 to Eleanor Catton for her novel The Luminaries. A longlist of thirteen titles was announced on 23 July, and these were narrowed down to a shortlist of six titles, announced on 10 September. The jury was chaired by Robert Macfarlane, who was joined by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Natalie Haynes, Martha Kearney, and Stuart Kelly. The shortlist contained great geographical and ethnic diversity, with Zimbabwean-born NoViolet Bulawayo, Eleanor Catton of New Zealand, Jim Crace from England, Indian American Jhumpa Lahiri, Canadian-American Ruth Ozeki and Colm Tóibín of Ireland.
The Lowland is the second novel by American author Jhumpa Lahiri, published by Alfred A. Knopf and Random House in 2013.