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‘The Glorious American Essay,’ From Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace

By John Williams

• Nov. 25, 2020
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No sane person will read this book the way a reviewer has been conditioned to read books: straight through. And that’s just fine, because “The Glorious American Essay,” though it does contain glories, gets off to a starchy start. The book is organized chronologically, which means it begins with an extended browse through the powdered wig section. Even among dead white men, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards and Thomas Paine are particularly dead and particularly white.

But push through — or save for later — the textbooklike feel of the first 100 pages or so, which also include one of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Papers; that still leaves about 800 pages of mostly delight and edification to go. This anthology, which presents 100 exemplary essays from colonial times onward, really gets into gear with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Experience,” from 1844. It’s a remarkably extended fusillade of aphoristic provocation and insight, inspired in part by the death of his son. “There are moods in which we court suffering,” he wrote, “in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is.”

Phillip Lopate, the book’s editor, writes in his introduction that the essay form has been valued for the freedom it offers to “explore, digress, acknowledge uncertainty.” He quotes Cynthia Ozick judging that “a genuine essay has no educational, polemical or sociopolitical use.” But Lopate isn’t so strict. “Why should a piece of writing,” he asks, “be excluded from the essay kingdom simply because it follows a coherent line of reasoning?” Lopate, especially before he gets to the 20th century, relies heavily on such works of reasoning, pieces of public rhetoric and persuasion, like those by Margaret Fuller, Sarah Moore Grimké and Elizabeth Cady Stanton on the standing and treatment of women in America.

For long stretches this book seems intended as a kind of essay-built history of America, as opposed to a history of American essays — though Lopate points out that those histories are naturally intertwined. And naturally echoing. Many of these essays “speak vividly to our present moment,” he writes, about issues that “keep recurring on the national stage.”

It takes no straining to see his point, repeatedly.

“The moral purity of the white woman is deeply contaminated,” Grimké wrote in 1837, because she looks “without horror” upon the crimes committed against her “enslaved sister.”

An essay from 1890 by Sui Sin Far is, as Lopate describes it, a “pioneering effort by a biracial Asian-American woman to examine the enigma of identity, and the conflict between a minority member’s racial pride and her ability to pass, however inadvertently, as part of the white majority.”

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What Makes a Great American Essay?

Talking to phillip lopate about thwarted expectations, emerson, and the 21st-century essay boom.

Phillip Lopate spoke to Literary Hub about the new anthology he has edited, The Glorious American Essay . He recounts his own development from an “unpatriotic” young man to someone, later in life, who would embrace such writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, who personified the simultaneous darkness and optimism underlying the history of the United States. Lopate looks back to the Puritans and forward to writers like Wesley Yang and Jia Tolentino. What is the next face of the essay form?

Literary Hub: We’re at a point, politically speaking, when disagreements about the meaning of the word “American” are particularly vehement. What does the term mean to you in 2020? How has your understanding of the word evolved?

Phillip Lopate : First of all, I am fully aware that even using the word “American” to refer only to the United States is something of an insult to Latin American countries, and if I had said “North American” to signify the US, that might have offended Canadians. Still, I went ahead and put “American” in the title as a synonym for the United States, because I wanted to invoke that powerful positive myth of America as an idea, a democratic aspiration for the world, as well as an imperialist juggernaut replete with many unresolved social inequities, in negative terms.

I will admit that when I was younger, I tended to be very unpatriotic and critical of my country, although once I started to travel abroad and witness authoritarian regimes like Spain under Franco, I could never sign on to the fear that a fascist US was just around the corner.  I came to the conclusion that we have our faults, but our virtues as well.

The more I’ve become interested in American history, the more I’ve seen how today’s problems and possible solutions are nothing new, but keep returning in cycles: economic booms and recessions, anti-immigrant sentiment, regional competition, racist Jim Crow policies followed by human rights advances, vigorous federal regulations and pendulum swings away from governmental intervention.

Part of the thrill in putting together this anthology was to see it operating simultaneously on two tracks: first, it would record the development of a literary form that I loved, the essay, as it evolved over 400 years in this country. At the same time, it would be a running account of the history of the United States, in the hands of these essayists who were contending, directly or indirectly, with the pressing problems of their day. The promise of America was always being weighed against its failure to live up to that standard.

For instance, we have the educator John Dewey arguing for a more democratic schoolhouse, the founder of the settlement house movement Jane Addams analyzing the alienation of young people in big cities, the progressive writer Randolph Bourne describing his own harsh experiences as a disabled person, the feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton advocating for women’s rights, and W. E. B. Dubois and James Weldon Johnson eloquently addressing racial injustice.

Issues of identity, gender and intersectionality were explored by writers such as Richard Rodriguez, Audre Lorde, Leonard Michaels and N. Scott Momaday, sometimes with touches of irony and self-scrutiny, which have always been assets of the essay form.

LH : If a publisher had asked us to compile an anthology of 100 representative American essays, we wouldn’t know where to start. How did you? What were your criteria?

PL : I thought I knew the field fairly well to begin with, having edited the best-selling Art of the Personal Essay in 1994, taught the form for decades, served on book award juries and so on. But once I started researching and collecting material, I discovered that I had lots of gaps, partly because the mandate I had set for myself was so sweeping.

This time I would not restrict myself to personal essays but would include critical essays, impersonal essays, speeches that were in essence essays (such as George Washington’s Farewell Address or Martin Luther King, Jr’s sermon on Vietnam), letters that functioned as essays (Frederick Douglass’s Letter to His Master).

I wanted to expand the notion of what is  an essay, to include, for instance, polemics such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense , or one of the Federalist Papers; newspaper columnists (Fanny Fern, Christopher Morley); humorists (James Thurber, Finley Peter Dunne, Dorothy Parker).

But it also occurred to me that fine essayists must exist in every discipline, not only literature, which sent me on a hunt that took me to cultural criticism (Clement Greenberg, Kenneth Burke), theology (Paul Tillich), food writing (M.F. K. Fisher), geography (John Brinkerhoff Jackson), nature writing (John Muir, John Burroughs, Edward Abbey), science writing (Loren Eiseley, Lewis Thomas), philosophy (George Santayana). My one consistent criterion was that the essay be lively, engaging and intelligently written. In short, I had to like it myself.

Of course I would need to include the best-known practitioners of the American essay—Emerson, Thoreau, Mencken, Baldwin, Sontag, etc.—and was happy to do so.  As it turned out, most of the masters of American fiction and poetry also tried their hand successfully at essay-writing, which meant including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison. . .

But I was also eager to uncover powerful if almost forgotten voices such as John Jay Chapman, Agnes Repplier, Randolph Bourne, Mary Austin, or buried treasures such as William Dean Howells’ memoir essay of his days working in his father’s printing shop.

Finally, I wanted to show a wide variety of formal approaches, since the essay is by its very nature and nomenclature an experiment, which brought me to Gertrude Stein and Wayne Koestenbaum. Equally important, I was aided in all these searches by colleagues and friends who kept suggesting other names. For every fertile lead, probably four resulted in dead ends.  Meanwhile, I was having a real learning adventure.

LH: Do you have a personal favorite among American essayists? If so, what appeals to you the most about them?

PL : I do. It’s Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was the one who cleared the ground for US essayists, in his famous piece, “The American Scholar,” which called on us to free ourselves from slavish imitation of European models and to think for ourselves.  So much American thought grows out of Emerson, or is in contention with Emerson, even if that debt is sometimes unacknowledged or unconscious.

What I love about Emerson is his density of thought, and the surprising twists and turns that result from it. I can read an essay of his like “Experience” (the one I included in this anthology) a hundred times and never know where it’s going next.  If it was said of Emily Dickenson that her poems made you feel like the top of your head was spinning, that’s what I feel in reading Emerson. He has a playful skepticism, a knack for thinking against himself.  Each sentence starts a new rabbit of thought scampering off. He’s difficult but worth the trouble.

I once asked Susan Sontag who her favorite American essayist was, and she replied “Emerson, of course.” It’s no surprise that Nietzsche revered Emerson, as did Carlyle, and in our own time, Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, Richard Poirier. But here’s a confession: it took me awhile to come around to him.

I found his preacher’s manner and abstractions initially off-putting, I wasn’t sure about the character of the man who was speaking to me. Then I read his Notebooks and the mystery was cracked: suddenly I was able to follow essays such as “Circles” with pure pleasure, seeing as I could the darkness and complexity underneath the optimism.

LH: You make the interesting decision to open the anthology with an essay written in 1726, 50 years before the founding of the republic. Why?

PL : I wanted to start the anthology with the first fully-formed essayistic voices in this land, which turned out to belong to the Puritans. Regardless of the negative associations of zealous prudishness that have come to attach to the adjective “puritanical,” those American colonies founded as religious settlements were spearheaded by some remarkably learned and articulate spokespersons, whose robust prose enriched the American literary canon.

Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards were highly cultivated readers, familiar with the traditions of essay-writing, Montaigne and the English, and with the latest science, even as they inveighed against witchcraft. I will admit that it also amused me to open the book with Cotton Mather, a prescriptive, strait-is-the-gate character, and end it with Zadie Smith, who is not only bi-racial but bi-national, dividing her year between London and New York, and whose openness to self-doubt is signaled by her essay collection title, Changing My Mind .

The next group of writers I focused on were the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, and a foundational feminist, Judith Sargent Murray, who wrote the 1790 essay “On the Equality of the Sexes.” These authors, whose essays preceded, occurred during or immediately followed the founding of the republic, were in some ways the opposite of the Puritans, being for the most part Deists or secular followers of the Enlightenment.

Their attraction to reasoned argument and willingness to entertain possible objections to their points of view inspired a vigorous strand of American essay-writing. So, while we may fix the founding of the United States to a specific year, the actual culture and literature of the country book-ended that date.

LH: You end with Zadie Smith’s “Speaking in Tongues,” published in 2008. Which essay in the last 12 years would be your 101st selection?

PL : Funny you should ask. As it happens, I am currently putting the finishing touches on another anthology, this one entirely devoted to the Contemporary (i.e., 21st century) American Essay. I have been immersed in reading younger, up-and-coming writers, established mid-career writers, and some oldsters who are still going strong (Janet Malcolm, Vivian Gornick, Barry Lopez, John McPhee, for example).

It would be impossible for me to single out any one contemporary essayist, as they are all in different ways contributing to the stew, but just to name some I’ve been tracking recently: Meghan Daum, Maggie Nelson, Sloane Crosley, Eula Biss, Charles D’Ambrosio, Teju Cole, Lia Purpura, John D’Agata, Samantha Irby, Anne Carson, Alexander Chee, Aleksander Hemon, Hilton Als, Mary Cappello, Bernard Cooper, Leslie Jamison, Laura Kipnis, Rivka Galchen, Emily Fox Gordon, Darryl Pinckney, Yiyun Li, David Lazar, Lynn Freed, Ander Monson, David Shields, Rebecca Solnit, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Eileen Myles, Amy Tan, Jonathan Lethem, Chelsea Hodson, Ross Gay, Jia Tolentino, Jenny Boully, Durga Chew-Bose, Brian Blanchfield, Thomas Beller, Terry Castle, Wesley Yang, Floyd Skloot, David Sedaris. . .

Such a banquet of names speaks to the intergenerational appeal of the form. We’re going through a particularly rich time for American essays: especially compared to, 20 years ago, when editors wouldn’t even dare put the word “essays” on the cover, but kept trying to package these variegated assortments as single-theme discourses, we’ve seen many collections that have been commercially successful and attracted considerable critical attention.

It has something to do with the current moment, which has everyone more than a little confused and therefore trusting more than ever those strong individual voices that are willing to cop to their subjective fears, anxieties, doubts and ecstasies.

__________________________________

The Glorious American Essay , edited by Phillip Lopate, is available now.

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The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

Phillip lopate.

928 pages, Hardcover

Published November 17, 2020

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Episode 377: The Art of the American Essay Anthology – Interview with Phillip Lopate

Sep 29, 2021 by Gabriela Pereira published in Podcast

Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing Philip Lopate.

Phillip is the author of over a dozen books: 

• 4 personal essay collections ( Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, and Portrait Inside my Head ), as well as Being with Children, Waterfront , and Notes on Sontag
• 3 works of fiction ( Confessions of Summer , The Rug Merchant , and Two Marriages )
• 3 poetry collections ( The Eyes Don’t Always Want to Stay Open, The Daily Round, and At the End of the Day ).  

He has also edited several anthologies, including one of my personal favorites— Art of the Personal Essay —and he’s the author of To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction . 

He is a professor in Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

In this episode Phillip Lopate and I discuss:

• Why you need to have some things you haven’t worked out when you begin to write an essay.
• The ground rules, selection process, and organizational structure for his three volume anthology.
• What qualities make for a great essay, what can kill a piece, and the role the past plays.

Plus, his #1 tip for writers.

About Phillip Lopate

Phillip Lopate is the author of over a dozen books: 4 personal essay collections (Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, and Portrait Inside my Head), as  well as Being with Children, Waterfront, and Notes on Sontag; three works of fiction (Confessions of Summer, The Rug Merchant, and Two Marriages), 3 poetry collections (The Eyes Don’t Always Want to Stay Open, The Daily Round, and At the End of the Day). He has also edited several anthologies (Art of the Personal Essay, American Movie Critics, and Writing New York). He is a professor in Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The Glorious American Essay

A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith.

The essay form is an especially democratic one, and many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves–sometimes critically–to American values. Even in those that don’t, one can detect a subtext about being American.

The Founding Fathers and early American writers self-consciously struggle to establish a recognizable national culture. The shining stars of the mid-nineteenth-century American Renaissance no longer lack confidence but face new reckonings with the oppression of blacks and women. The New World tradition of nature writing runs from Audubon, Thoreau, and John Muir to Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard. Marginalized groups in all periods use the essay to assert or to complicate notions of identity.

Lopate has cast his net intentionally wide, embracing critical, personal, political, philosophical, humorous, literary, polemical, and autobiographical essays, and making room for sermons, letters, speeches, and columns dealing with a wide variety of subjects. Americans by birth as well as immigrants appear here, famous essayists alongside writers more celebrated for fiction or poetry. The result is an extensive overview of the endless riches of the American essay.

The Golden Age of the American Essay: 1945-1970

A one-of-a-kind anthology of American essays on a wide range of subjects by a dazzling array of mid-century writers at the top of their form.

The three decades that followed World War II were an exceptionally fertile period for American essays. The explosion of journals and magazines, the rise of public intellectuals, and breakthroughs in the arts inspired a flowering of literary culture. At the same time, the many problems that confronted mid-century America–racism, sexism, nuclear threat, war, poverty, and environmental degradation among them–proved fruitful topics for America’s best minds. In The Golden Age of the American Essay, Phillip Lopate assembles a dazzling array of famous writers, critics, sociologists, theologians, historians, activists, theorists, humorists, poets, and novelists. Here are writers like James Agee, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, Randall Jarrell, and Mary McCarthy, pivoting from the comic indignities of daily life to world peace, consumerism, and restaurants in Paris. Here is Norman Mailer on Jackie Kennedy, Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, and Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Here are Gore Vidal, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Joan Didion, and many more, in a treasury of brilliant writing that has stood the test of time.

The Contemporary American Essay

A dazzling anthology of essays by some of the best writers of the past quarter century–from Barry Lopez and Margo Jefferson to David Sedaris and Samantha Irby–selected by acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate.

The first decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a blossoming of creative nonfiction. In this extraordinary collection, Phillip Lopate gathers essays by forty-seven of America’s best contemporary writers, mingling long-established eminences with newer voices and making room for a wide variety of perspectives and styles. The Contemporary American Essay is a monument to a remarkably adaptable form and a treat for anyone who loves fantastic writing.

Hilton Als • Nicholson Baker • Thomas Beller • Sven Birkerts • Eula Biss • Mary Cappello • Anne Carson • Terry Castle • Alexander Chee • Teju Cole • Bernard Cooper • Sloane Crosley • Charles D’Ambrosio • Meghan Daum • Brian Doyle • Geoff Dyer • Lina Ferreira • Lynn Freed • Rivka Galchen • Ross Gay • Louise Glück • Emily Fox Gordon • Patricia Hampl • Aleksandar Hemon • Samantha Irby • Leslie Jamison • Margo Jefferson • Laura Kipnis • David Lazar • Yiyun Li • Phillip Lopate • Barry Lopez • Thomas Lynch • John McPhee • Ander Monson • Eileen Myles • Maggie Nelson • Meghan O’Gieblyn • Joyce Carol Oates • Darryl Pinckney • Lia Purpura • Karen Russell • David Sedaris • Shifra Sharlin • David Shields • Floyd Skloot • Rebecca Solnit • Clifford Thompson • Wesley Yang

If you decide to check out the books, we hope you’ll do so via these Amazon affiliate links : The Glorious American Essay , The Golden Age of the American Essay: 1945-1970 and The Contemporary American Essay where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

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John D’Agata's THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN ESSAY

John D’Agata is a champion of the essay, a crusader for lost forms, a defender of nonfiction as an art. The recent publication of The Making of the American Essay , the third volume in D’Agata’s essay-anthology trilogy, shifts his position from expert to shaper; through his curation and introductions to these essays, D’Agata proves himself to be not only a scholar and proponent of the essay but also an artificer of the form. Rather than merely defining the essay for his readers, he enjoins them to write their own definitions.

D’Agata is a maker, and the act of making can be considered the overarching theme of this new anthology. The first of the series, The Next American Essay , offers a selection of bold contemporary work from 1974 to 2003; the second volume, The Lost Origins of the Essay , excavates the ancient roots of the form; and this third volume explores the act of making—making as creation, creation as process, process as essay. The selection ranges from transcripts of age-old oral histories to postmodern semiotic diatribes to abstract portraits of rainclouds to prose-poem memoirs. Some essays offer direct reportage of early American violence, such as Charles Reznikoff's “Testimony” from 1934. Others render natural phenomena as metaphor for human melancholy, as in Walt Whitman’s “The Weather—Does it Sympathize With These Times?” D’Agata brings together the obscure and the famous, the respected and the forgotten. He opens the collection with an anonymous creation myth, then dips into Anne Bradstreet, soars through Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, and Gertrude Stein, and finally settles in the 1970s with Donald Barthelme and Kathy Acker.

In his elegant introduction to the book, D’Agata claims that, according to the Cahto, a coastal Californian Native American tribe, “the meaning behind ‘creation’ is creativity itself, the power and the pleasure of making.” To D’Agata, the world—our existence and our surroundings—is material truth, and when we take that truth into our own hands and shape it, we produce art. D’Agata preaches to the community of writers, artists, and readers at large to “let floods come, let dreams come, let something unexpected overtake us and make us new…let the essay be what we make of it.” His project—that of reshaping the genre of creative nonfiction—is a bold one.

In this colossal trilogy (the collective page count is 1,787), D’Agata—who directs the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program—scoops out an ambitious chunk of raw material from all existing written language and whittles it down according to his particular definitions. However, the nature of these definitions is not explicit, and rather than answering the question “What is an essay?”, these anthologies propose a new question—“What isn’t an essay?”—that leads a reader to wonder about D’Agata’s limitations in creating the book. Which characteristics of short, creative texts led him to exclude said texts from this selection? He has said that many of the texts in this anthology are not essays, but that they exhibit “essayistic tendencies,” and that a text didn’t make it into the book “if I didn’t like it.”

Indeed, what isn’t an essay? It’s an appropriate question, given that D’Agata considers this not an anthology of nonfiction but rather of the essay, a mode rather than a genre. This mode in D’Agata’s books is more fluid and more unusual than the market categorization and public boundaries of nonfiction . At the end of this volume, in a "A Note about the Title," D'Agata illuminates a paradox in the naming of the genre in which essays so amorphously float: "Because if fiction comes from fictio , the Latin word for "make," then doesn't that mean that non-fiction can only mean 'not art,' prohibiting the genre from being able to do what every art medium does: make?" He emphasizes the essay as process, as evidence of the mind on the page, selecting essays that echo the word’s origins in French: “essayer,” to try.

That leads to an enormous scope, including in form. The texts in this volume range from under ten to over thirty pages. Some are deliberately lineated, while others stretch out as dense, unbroken paragraphs across multiple pages. They vary in tone and subject from whimsy to trauma, meditation to suicide. These selections are so varied in terms of form, style, voice, and structure that it can be difficult to trace the ligatures between each essay.

Fortunately, D’Agata takes this unwieldy variety into account, and like the storytelling spider Anansi of Ghanaian myths, he spins delicate threads of his own writing between each piece. The book opens with three simple gestures that epitomize D’Agata’s curative prowess. He suggests to us, through the voices of our literary predecessors, that in writing, reading, and anthologizing the essay, one must “make it plain” (Whitman), “make it new” (Pound), and above all else, “make it sweet again” (Ashberry). His introductions between essays contextualize each work within time, space, and technique. Some are as brief as a phrase, while others eclipse the length of the essay they introduce. All of D’Agata’s companion pieces prove the intensity of his attention to each author’s legacy; they reveal new textures and fresh angles to each author’s work. In his introduction to James Agee’s “Brooklyn Is,” for instance, D’Agata suggests that Agee’s description of the Pennsylvania Station is the “literary equivalent of being inside a sentence that is held aloft by language, by a vim of curiosity, and maybe by a little bit of fear of what comes next.” He has selected these essays, arranged them, and housed them in a web of his own revelatory exposition.

Many of these essays thwart not only genre but also truth and fact, emphasizing instead the fallibility of memory. Where, for example, can we trace John Cage’s philosophical brushstrokes back to reality in his “Lecture on Nothing?” In this piece, phrases like “You have just / experienced / the structure / of this talk / from a microcosmic / point of view” skid across the page over ample white space and punctuation. Essays like Cage’s make no claim to realism or linearity. Although D’Agata has called the essay “an intimate and pure form,” he insists that we must remember that the essay is as “fabricated and forged as any other art form.” The essay reflects the artist’s interface with reality channeled through the pen, twisted and rearranged. The only thing “pure” about the essay, then, is the honest admission of struggle, evidence of thought in action.

This is not the first ambitious anthology of American essays, but its curation is unique; the pieces D’Agata has selected feel more experimental and formally innovative than those selected by his fellow contemporary anthologists. His trilogy is in conversation with The Best American Essays series, a yearly anthology published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, edited first by Elizabeth Hardwick in 1986 and most recently by Jonathan Franzen in 2016. The editors of this series have been careful to consider a broad range of styles, voices, and techniques, but they do not strive to shake the form’s foundation. One also cannot neglect to mention Phillip Lopate’s comprehensive The Art of the Personal Essay , which reaches back to Seneca, catalogues the rise of the English essay, acknowledges the essay’s origins in other cultures, and then categorizes the essays by themes such as thresholds and reportage .

D’Agata’s editorial lens stands out from these equally expansive anthologies. He has included many pieces that could be called prose poems, lists, journal entries, or letters. For example, Joe Brainard’s “I Remember” reads like an autobiographical poem, with the extensive anaphoric phrase that gives the piece its title. Similarly, William Gass’s “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” reads as a series of sentimental object portraits, which are separated by subtitles like “My House,” “Wires,” and “Church.” These essays eschew the form’s unimaginative if traditional expectations, such as the need for a guiding line of inquiry, or for a sense of resolution.

That may leave readers feeling uncomfortable, but here, that’s useful: D’Agata wields discomfort as a tool to teach readers how to read differently. His juxtapositions of unlikely literary bedfellows result in thought-provoking tension. He wants readers to be able to be able to recognize the motor that propels a text. He wants to push readers into spaces that we haven’t yet explored in literature, to stretch our imaginations, to abandon those stiff articles masquerading as essay that we were forced to write in high school English class. He recently insisted, at a reading celebrating the anthology, “An essay shouldn’t have a thesis statement. An essay doesn’t make any promises, and it very often fails to prove anything. That’s what makes the form exciting to read—to watch a consciousness evolve on the page before your eyes, to follow the contours of the speaker’s mind as it works through ideas, emotions, fears, doubts.”

The essay, in its fluidity, is a radical form. If a text alters the reader’s perceptions and displays the human effort of the author, D’Agata would call it essayistic, even if it takes the shape of a poem or presents itself in the guise of a story. This may seem provocative to some, but in these anthologies, the form becomes a spiritual vessel, a portal to deeper truths.

Frances Cannon is a writer and artist currently pursuing a master’s degree in nonfiction and book arts at the University of Iowa, where she also teaches literature courses. She was born in Utah and since then has bounced around living, making artwork, and writing in Oregon, Maine, Montana, Vermont, California, France, Italy, and Guatemala. She received her bachelor's in poetry and printmaking at the University of Vermont, where she self-published several chapbooks of silkscreened prints and poems. She has also worked as an editorial intern and contributor at McSweeney's Quarterly ,   the Believer , and Lucky Peach . She has recently been published in Vice , the Examined Life Journal , Edible Magazine, Electric Lit , and Vol. 1 Brooklyn .

The Making of the American Essay Series: A New History of the Essay Edited by John D'Agata Graywolf Press, March 2016 $25.00 paperback; ISBN-13: 978-1555977344 656 pp. 

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The Best American Essays 2022 Paperback – November 1, 2022

A collection of the year’s best essays, selected by award-winning writer Alexander Chee.

Alexander Chee, an essayist of “virtuosity and power” ( Washington Post ), selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

• Print length 336 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Mariner Books
• Publication date November 1, 2022
• Dimensions 5.5 x 0.75 x 8 inches
• ISBN-10 035865887X
• ISBN-13 978-0358658870
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Editorial Reviews

“ New Yorker  writer Schulz ( Being Wrong ) collects essays that skillfully combine journalistic and literary sensibilities in this powerful addition to the annual anthology series… This is a moving retrospective of a singular year.” — Publishers Weekly on The Best American Essays 2021

“These essays challenge personal and political assumptions and show us life in all its complexities and contradictions. Which in this American moment, and in every other, matters.” — USA Today

“[A] thoughtful entry in the long-running series...The works in this year’s collection are a mix of the disconcerting, the probing, and the self-reflective, and well-suited to challenging times.” — Publishers Weekly

About the Author

ALEXANDER CHEE is the best-selling author of the novels The Queen of the Night and Edinburgh, and the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel . He is a contributing editor at the New Republic , and an editor at large at Virginia Quarterly Review . His work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2016 , the New York Times Magazine , the New York Times Book Review , the New Yorker , T Magazine,   Slate , Vulture , among others. He is winner of a 2003 Whiting Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in prose and a 2010 MCCA Fellowship, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak. He is an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College.

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books (November 1, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 035865887X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0358658870
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• #180 in American Fiction Anthologies
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Robert atwan.

Robert Atwan is the founder and series editor of the annual Best American Essays. The editor of numerous anthologies, he has written on the ancient literature of the Near East and his critical essays and poetry reviews have appeared in many national periodicals. Laurance Wieder is the author of several volumes of poetry, including The Coronet of Tours; No Harm Done; The Last Century: Selected Poems; and One Hundred Fifty Psalms, a complete psalter. He has taught Bible and Ancient Authors at Cornell University.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — A Good Man Is Hard to Find — Symbolism in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

Symbolism in "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

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Hsuan L. Hsu 徐旋

Position Title Professor of English

• (530) 752-1696
• [email protected]

Currently Teaching:

• 184 - Literature & the Environment

Biography: 

pronouns: he/they

a.b. , harvard university, 1998

hsuan l. hsu joined the UC Davis faculty in 2008. His research areas include 19th and 20th-Century U.S. literature, Asian diasporic literature, race studies, cultural geography, sensory studies, and the environmental humanities. He is the author of Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature  (Cambridge, 2010) ,  Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain, Asia, and Comparative Racialization (NYU, 2015) , The Smell of Risk: Atmospheric Disparities and the Olfactory Arts  (NYU, 2020) , and Air Conditioning  (Bloomsbury Object Lessons, 2024). He is currently working on a book that considers how artists and writers have been experimenting with smell as a medium sensorial worldmaking.

Hsuan's recent courses have examined topics such as geographies of risk, transnational American literature, medical humanities, the aesthetics of atmosphere, the aesthetics of chemosensation, and race and realism. He serves (or has served) on the editorial and advisory boards of American Literature,  Literary Geographies , the Journal of Transnational American Studies ,  American Literary Realism , Genre: Forms of Dicourse and Culture ;  EurAmerica, Multimodality & Society , Venti: Air, Experience, Aesthetics , and the Broadview Anthology of American Literature , the Executive Council of the American Literature Society, and the Executive Committees of the MLA's forum for Nineteenth-Century American Literature and for Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities; he is the book review editor for  Senses and Society . His research has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Davis Humanities Institute, the Andy Warhol Foundation's Arts Writers Program, Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the UC Humanities Research Institute, and the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies.

Books & edited projects:

• Air Conditioning   (Bloomsbury Object Lessons series, 2024)
• The Broadview Anthology of American Literature ,  general editor
• The Smell of Risk: Atmospheric Disparities and the Olfactory Arts  (NYU, 2020)
• Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain, Asia, and Comparative Racialization . NYU, 2015.
• Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature . Cambridge University Press, 2010. 257pp.
• (ed.)  Regionalism's Climates . Special issue of  American Literary Realism,  co-edited with Alison Maas and Rachael DeWitt, in progress.
• (ed.)  Senses Without Subjects .  Special issue of  American Literature 95:3 (2023), co-edited with Erical Fretwell.
• (ed.) The Molecular Intimacies of Empire . Special Forum for the  Journal of Transnational American Studies 13:1 (2022) co-edited with David Vázquez.
• (ed.)  Atmospheric Literary Atmospheres . Guest editor. Themed essay cluster for the journal  Literary Geographies  (5:1) 2019.
• (intro, notes, and appendices) John Rollin Ridge,  The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta.   Penguin, 2018.
• (ed.)  Mark Twain's  Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins .  Broadview Press, 2016.
• (ed.)  Representing Environmental Risk in the Landscapes of US Militarization .  exhibition. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society/LMU Munich. 2014.
• (ed.)  Circa 1898 . Special Forum for the  Journal of Transnational American Studies.   Guest Editor. Vol.3, Issue 2 (2011).
• (ed.)   Sui Sin Far (Edith Maud Eaton)'s Mrs. Spring Fragrance . Broadview Press, 2011.
• (ed.)  American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production, 1500-1900 .  Co-edited with Martin Brückner. University of Delaware Press, 2007.
• (ed.)  Asian American Subgenres, 1853-1945 ,  special double issue of  Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture  39:3-4 (Fall & Winter 2006)
• (ed.)  Race, Environment, and Representation .  special double issue of  Discourse  29:2-3 (Spr and Fall, 2007), co-edited with Mark Feldman.

Articles and Essays

• "Twain's Olfactory Gags: Realist Atmospheres, Fermentation, and the Necrobiome"  American Literary Realism,  forthcoming.
• "Olfactory Futures in BIPOC Speculative Fiction." In  Literature and the Senses , eds. Annette Kern-Stahler and Elizabeth Robertson (Oxford, forthcoming).
• "Skunk: Olfactory Violence and Morbid Speculation" (co-authored with Jean-Thomas Tremblay and Aleesa Cohene).  Law and the Senses: Smell,  ed. Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihailapoulos et al. (University of Westminster Press, 2023).
• "Race, Urban Heat, and the Aesthetics of Thermoception."   American Literary History 35:2 (summer 2023) 769-94.
• "The Materials of Art and the Legacies of Colonization: A conversation with Beatrice Glow and Sandy Rodriguez,"   Journal of Transnational American Studies  13:1 (2022), with David Vázquez.
• "Olfactory Politics in Black Diasporic Art." In  Olfactory Art and the Political in an Age of Resistance ,  eds. Debra Parr and Gwenn-Ael Lynn (Routledge, 2021).
• "Smell, History, and Heritage." Conversation with William Tullett, Inger Leemans, Stephanie Weismann, Cecilia Bembibre, Melanie Kiechle, Duane Jethro, Anna Chen, Xuelei Huang, Jorge Otero-Pailos, and Mark Bradley,  American Historical Review 127:1 (Mar 2022) 261-309.
• "Colonial and Anti-Black Legacies of Fragrance and Deodorization,"   Venti Journal  2:2 (Winter 2022).
• "Un-Collected: Remapping Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton" (co-authored with Edlie Wong). In  Asian American Literature in Transition, 1850-1930 ,  eds. Julia Lee and Josephine Lee (Cambridge UP, 2021).
• "Beatrice Glow and the Botanical Intimacies of Empire."   Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art  7:1 (Spr 2021).
• "Post-Apocalyptic Geographies and Structural Appropriation"  (co-authored with Bryan Yazell).  Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies . eds. Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung, Takayuki Tatsumi (Routledge, 2019).
• "Boris Raux, Olfactory Narcissism, and Environmental Risk,"   Senses & Society 14:1   (Mar 2019) 15-30.
• "Paleo-Narratives and White Atavism, 1898-2015."   ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment  (2019).
• "Smelling Setting."   Modernism/Modernity Print Plus  3:1 (Mar 9, 2018) online.
• "Literary Atmospherics."   Literary Geographies  3:1 (2017) 1-5.
• "Olfactory Art, Trans-Corporeality, and the Museum Environment."   Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities  4:1 (Winter 2016) 1-24.
• "Naturalist Smellscapes and Environmental Justice."   American Literature  88:4 (Dec 2016) 787-814
• "The Smell of Risk." In  Peter de Cupere: Scent in Context, Olfactory Art  (Brussels: Stockmans, 2016) 87-91.
• "Mark Twain...and Zombies!"   Common-Place: The Journal of Early American Life  16:3 (2016) online.
• "Literary Topographies and the Scales of Environmental Justice." ELN (English Language Notes) 52:1 (2014).
• " Gravity: A 3D Movie About 3D Movies." Avidly  (Nov 2013).
• "Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain and America's Asia." American Literary History  25:1 (Spr 2013) 69-84.
• "The Invasion of Echo Park." Boom: A Journal of California 2:3 (2012) 86-89.
• "Guahan (Guam), Literary Emergence, and the American Pacific in Homebase and from unincorporated territory." American Literary History 24:2 (Summer 2012): 281-307.
• "Fatal Contiguities: Metonymy and Environmental Justice." New Literary History 42:1 (Winter 2011) 147-68.
• "Asian American Chronotopes and the American West." In  A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West . Ed. Nicolas Witschi. Oxford: Blackwell, 2011. 145-60.
• "Mika Rottenberg's Productive Bodies." Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 25:2 (2010) 40-73.
• "A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of Wu Chih Tien: Mark Twain and Wong Chin Foo." Common-Place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life 11:1 (Oct 2010).
• "Vagrancy, Comparative Racialization, and Civil Death in Huckleberry Finn."   American Literature 81:4 (Dec 2009) 687-717.
• "The Dangers of Biosecurity: The Host and the Geopolitics of Outbreak." Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 51 (Spring 2009).
• "Health Media and Global Inequalities." Co-authored with Martha Lincoln. Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences  138:2 (Spring 2009), 20-30.
• "New Regionalisms: Literature and Uneven Development." In A Companion to the Modern American Novel . Ed. John T. Matthews (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 218-39. 
• Race, Environment, and Representation .  Co-edited with Mark Feldman. Special issue of  Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture  29:2-3 (Spring and Fall 2007).
• "Biopower, Bodies...the Exhibition, and the Spectacle of Public Health." Co-authored with Martha Lincoln. Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 29:1 (Winter 2007): 15-34.
• Wong Chin Foo's Periodical Writing and Chinese Exclusion. Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 39:3-4 (Fall/Winter 2006): 83-105.
• Asian American Subgenres, 1853-1945. Part I . Part II.   Guest editor. Special double issue of  Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture   39:3-4 (Fall/Winter 2006).
• "Racial Privacy, the L.A. Ensemble Film, and Paul Haggis's Crash ."   Film Criticism 31:1 (Fall/Winter 2006): 132-56.
• "Mimicry, Spatial Captation, and Feng Shui in Han Ong's  Fixer Chao.   Modern Fiction Studies  52:3 (Fall 2006): 675-704.
• "Who Wears the Mask?" Review Essay. minnesota review  67 (Fall 2006): 169-75.
• "Literature and Regional Production."   American Literary History 17:1 (Spring 2005): 36-69.
• "Authentic Recreations: Ideology, Practice, and Regional History along Buena Park's Entertainment Corridor," in T rue West: Authenticity in the American West , 304-27, eds. William Handley and Nathaniel Lewis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2004).
• "Regarding Mimicry: Race and Visual Ethics in Invisible Man ." Arizona Quarterly 59:2 (Summer 2003): 107-40.
• "War, Ekphrasis, and Elliptical Form in Melville's Battle-Pieces."   Nineteenth Century Studies 16 (2002): 51-71.
• "Democratic Expansionism in 'Memoirs of Carwin.'" Early American Literature 35:2 (Fall 2000): 137-56.
• Obama Fellowship, Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, JGU Mainz, June 2019.
• UC Humanities Research Institute President's Faculty Research Fellowship, 2018-19.
• ACLS Fellowship, 2018-19.
• Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, 2018.
• Davis Humanities Institute Faculty Fellowship, 2018.
• ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship/Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University 2012-13
• National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend 2012
• Don D. Walker Award for the year's best essay on Western US literature 2010
• Davis Humanities Institute California Cultures Initiative research seminar 2010
• honorable mention, Norman Foerster essay prize,  American Literature  2009
• Nineteenth Century Studies Association Emerging Scholars Award 2008
• Margaret Church Memorial essay prize,  Modern Fiction Studies  2006
• American Academy of Arts and Sciences Visiting Scholar 2004-5
• Phi Beta Kappa Scholarship 2003-4

How racism haunts America, and other lessons from Tananarive Due’s ghostly speculative fiction

Ahead of Juneteenth, the author opens up about the emancipatory quality of speculative fiction and the setting that connects several of her books.

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Welcome back to the L.A. Times Book Club newsletter.

I’m Jim Ruland, a novelist and punk historian, and in today’s newsletter I’m going to take a look at Black fiction that reimagines the past and speculates about the future.

Science fiction writer Octavia Butler, who was born and raised in Pasadena, opens her 1993 novel “Parable of the Sower” in the year 2024. In it, income disparity and climate change bring society to the brink of collapse, which doesn’t exactly bode well for what will likely be a fractious presidential election.

“Octavia was deeply offended by the societal ills she saw around her: poverty, racism, political oppression, and disregard for our natural environment,” Tananarive Due wrote in her essay “The Only Last Truth” part of the anthology in “Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements” edited by Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha

Due’s novel “The Reformatory” wrestles with the horrors of a segregated reform school for boys in northern Florida during the Jim Crow era.

Ahead of Juneteenth and following her Bram Stoker award win , I talked to Due about her new book and the power of speculative fiction to address historical inequality.

In your essay in “Octavia’s Brood,” you discuss Octavia Butler’s use of speculative fiction to get at larger historical truths. “The Reformatory” does something similar, no?

Yes, that’s a great observation. That technique is so effective when Octavia uses it to create science fictional worlds that also reflect our own. So while “The Reformatory” is a ghost story, and it’s set during the Jim Crow era, I really did hope that readers would see how it resonates with issues that persist in the here and now, especially as it pertains to the criminal justice system and the ways that white supremacy dictates different outcomes for different people depending on the color of their skin.

Is “The Reformatory” rooted in family history?

The personal story of the Reformatory is actually a heartbreaking one: My great-uncle Robert Stephens died at the Dozier School for Boys in 1937. He was buried in an unmarked grave and largely forgotten by his family. My mother never told me about him, and I suspect she did not know that he existed. I have a relative who was named for Robert Stephens but didn’t realize for whom he had been named.

How did a story that engages in the supernatural emerge from such a personal story?

As soon as I heard of his existence in 2013, I knew I wanted to write about him. I knew that I wanted people to remember his name, and most of all I knew that I wanted to give him a different story. And since I couldn’t stomach the idea of writing a novel about a place where we’re constantly seeing children being murdered or assaulted, I knew the only way I could tell this story would be to use ghosts.

Ghosts would signal that there have been violent acts in the past and that children died, but we wouldn’t have to be subjected to killing after killing after killing. The fantastic elements of a ghost story gave me the freedom to delve into the more mundane horrors and indignities people suffered during the Jim Crow era.

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Juneteenth is next week. Can you talk about the emancipatory quality of alternate futures and counterfactual narratives?

There are aspects of American history that are so horrific that politicians and school boards across the country are scrambling to ban students from even learning about it. Unless people understand how forceful economic and racial oppression has been, there is no framework to understand why there is so much poverty in our community, or why the criminal justice system still has so many biases against Black people in particular, but people of color in general. So it is incredibly freeing to be able to use a fantasy element like ghosts to walk through that history while also giving readers peeks at a better future.

“The Wishing Pool” is coming out in paperback in October and has stories set in Gracetown, the setting for “The Reformatory.” Do they all take place in the same universe?

Yes! I began writing Gracetown stories about 15 years ago with the premise that it was a rural town in the South where children are more sensitive to acts of magic or future sight. I created Gracetown after my parents moved back to my late mother’s hometown of Quincy, Fla., as a way of embracing that part of my family history. I grew up in the suburbs, so I didn’t know anything about rural life and wanted to explore that in my fiction the way William Faulkner did with Yoknapatawpha County. They are the same town, the same universe.

One character vows never to go to Gracetown again. Will you continue to revisit Gracetown?

My next novel will also start in Gracetown … although most of it will be set in California. I am always tempted to write Gracetown stories with child protagonists, but I also want to be careful about returning to that well too many times.

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More Black fiction in the L.A. Times

Maurice Carlos Ruffin explores the lives of a mother and daughter who are sold into slavery and sent to work in the French Quarter in “The American Daughters.” Lauren LeBlanc writes : “Ruffin creates an intimate and atmospheric portrait of life in New Orleans through interior scenes divided between opulence and abuse.”

Time is out of joint in Phillip B. Williams novel “Ours.” In Ilana Masad’s review , she quotes the author’s intention “to write an epic taking place during the antebellum period where slavery is not the main antagonist without disregarding or disappearing the enslaved.”

Percival Everett has been exploring Blackness in America his entire career , but the adaptation of his novel “Erasure” introduced his work to a wider audience . His latest novel, “James,” is a reimagining of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” through the lens of the enslaved character Jim.

And if you’re dying to know more about Tananarive Due’s trailblazing career in Black horror, Paula L. Woods’ profile is a must read : “There can be something strangely comforting about horror when you’ve actually been through trauma,” [Due] says, “because on one level a book or a film is a validation of your emotions and fears.”

The Week(s) in Books

A.D. Carson on Questlove’s new book “Hip-Hop Is History” : “Histories can claim to be definitive, but they will always raise questions about what was left out and why.”

Lorraine Berry talks to Patrick Nathan about his new novel “The Future Was Color” : “I was focused in writing this book on the kind of balance between being politically committed and wanting to have a life.”

Bethanne Patrick visits Harlan Ellison’s house and talks to J. Michael “Joe” Straczynski, the literary executor of Ellison’s estate: “When you walk into this house,” he says, “you are walking into Harlan’s brain.”

Ever wondered how much Supreme Court Justices earn for book advances? David G. Savage has the verdict.

Support independent Black-owned bookstores in L.A.

Eclectuals Bookstore : Online bookstore based in Lakewood.

Malik Books : 3650 W. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Suite 245, Los Angeles 90008-1700. Open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday through Saturday.

Octavia’s Bookshelf : 365 N. Hill Ave., Pasadena 91104. Open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Closed Monday.

Melanin in YA : Online bookstore specializing in books for young adults.

Reparations Club : 3054 S. Victoria Ave., Los Angeles 90016. Open 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday; noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Closed Monday.

Shades of Afrika : Two locations, 1001 E. 4th St., Long Beach 90802, and 1390 W. 6th St., No. 100, Corona 92882.

The Salt Eaters Bookshop : 302 E. Queen St., Inglewood 90301. Open 1 to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Friday; noon to 5 p.m. Saturday. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.

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Elektrostal

Elektrostal Localisation : Country Russia , Oblast Moscow Oblast . Available Information : Geographical coordinates , Population, Altitude, Area, Weather and Hotel . Nearby cities and villages : Noginsk , Pavlovsky Posad and Staraya Kupavna .

Information

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Elektrostal Demography

Information on the people and the population of Elektrostal.

Elektrostal Geography

Geographic Information regarding City of Elektrostal .

Elektrostal Distance

Distance (in kilometers) between Elektrostal and the biggest cities of Russia.

Elektrostal Map

Locate simply the city of Elektrostal through the card, map and satellite image of the city.

Elektrostal Nearby cities and villages

Elektrostal Weather

Weather forecast for the next coming days and current time of Elektrostal.

Elektrostal Sunrise and sunset

Find below the times of sunrise and sunset calculated 7 days to Elektrostal.

Elektrostal Hotel

Our team has selected for you a list of hotel in Elektrostal classified by value for money. Book your hotel room at the best price.

Elektrostal Nearby

Below is a list of activities and point of interest in Elektrostal and its surroundings.

Elektrostal Page

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• Distance /Russian-Federation--Moscow-Oblast--Elektrostal#dist1
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• Nearby cities and villages /Russian-Federation--Moscow-Oblast--Elektrostal#dist2
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• Nearby /Russian-Federation--Moscow-Oblast--Elektrostal#around
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