Extollager
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2010
- Messages
- 9,261
Here's a place to tell the world about an essay you relished or didn't like or that prompted you to go and write one yourself.*
Here too we might begin to compile a list of particular essays that we'd encourage others to read. I recommend that we reserve this subforum for essayists and works that are established -- whatever that might mean -- as such. Thus, commentary on essays by living author Ian Frazier (Gone to New York, etc.) would be appropriate here; an essay you saw in your newspaper's editorial pages, by the paper's editors or readers, probably would not. Perhaps someone will help to refine the statement of this limitation.
In his Introduction to The Oxford Book of Essays, editor John Gross says that "Essays come in all shapes and many sizes. There are essays on Human Understanding, and essays on What I Did in the Holidays; essays on Truth, and essays on potato crisps.....[The essay] can shade into the character sketch, the travel sketch, the memoir, the jeu d'esprit."
Essays can provide much satisfaction, but are often overlooked, so here's a place to improve that situation.
*Essays that we ourselves have written should not be published here unless on the topic of an essayist or essay belonging to the title of this subforum. I recommend that this rule be observed, if perhaps not too stringently. Otherwise, essays by a Chrons person should be published in the Aspiring Writers forum -- or anyway that would be my recommendation!
Here too we might begin to compile a list of particular essays that we'd encourage others to read. I recommend that we reserve this subforum for essayists and works that are established -- whatever that might mean -- as such. Thus, commentary on essays by living author Ian Frazier (Gone to New York, etc.) would be appropriate here; an essay you saw in your newspaper's editorial pages, by the paper's editors or readers, probably would not. Perhaps someone will help to refine the statement of this limitation.
In his Introduction to The Oxford Book of Essays, editor John Gross says that "Essays come in all shapes and many sizes. There are essays on Human Understanding, and essays on What I Did in the Holidays; essays on Truth, and essays on potato crisps.....[The essay] can shade into the character sketch, the travel sketch, the memoir, the jeu d'esprit."
Essays can provide much satisfaction, but are often overlooked, so here's a place to improve that situation.
*Essays that we ourselves have written should not be published here unless on the topic of an essayist or essay belonging to the title of this subforum. I recommend that this rule be observed, if perhaps not too stringently. Otherwise, essays by a Chrons person should be published in the Aspiring Writers forum -- or anyway that would be my recommendation!
