{
  "type": "edition",
  "site": {
    "name": "The Book Quiver",
    "language": "en-US",
    "url": "https://www.bookquiver.com"
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  "formats": "Every page has two versions with the same data: JSON (the page address + .json) and markdown (the page address + .md). Append .json or .md to any `url` in this document.",
  "title": "The Best American Essays",
  "subtitle": null,
  "url": "https://www.bookquiver.com/david-foster-wallace/the-best-american-essays/9780618709274",
  "publisher": "Houghton Mifflin",
  "publisher_series": [],
  "translators": [],
  "medium": "paper",
  "duration_seconds": null,
  "narrators": [],
  "illustrators": [],
  "cover_artists": [],
  "isbn": "978-06-1870-927-4",
  "pages": null,
  "published": "2007-10-10",
  "language": "en_US",
  "cover": "https://quivercdn.com/covers/houghton-mifflin/david-foster-wallace/the-best-american-essays_978-06-1870-927-4-fb7ef573.webp?v=2026-11-14%2002%3A55%3A55",
  "json": "https://www.bookquiver.com/david-foster-wallace/the-best-american-essays/9780618709274.json",
  "markdown": "https://www.bookquiver.com/david-foster-wallace/the-best-american-essays/9780618709274.md",
  "binding": "Softcover",
  "description": "The twenty-two essays in this powerful collection -- perhaps the most diverse in the entire series -- come from a wide variety of periodicals, ranging from n + 1 and PMS to the New Republic and The New Yorker, and showcase a remarkable range of forms. Read on for narrative -- in first and third person -- opinion, memoir, argument, the essay-review, confession, reportage, even a dispatch from Iraq. The philosopher Peter Singer makes a case for philanthropy; the poet Molly Peacock constructs a mosaic tribute to a little-known but remarkable eighteenth-century woman artist; the novelist Marilynne Robinson explores what has happened to holiness in contemporary Christianity; the essayist Richard Rodriguez wonders if California has anything left to say to America; and the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson attempts to find common ground with the evangelical community. In his introduction, David Foster Wallace makes the spirited case that ? many of these essays are valuable simply as exhibits of what a first-rate artistic mind can make of particular fact-sets -- whether these involve the 17-kHz ring tones of some kids' cell phones, the language of movement as parsed by dogs, the near-infinity of ways to experience and describe an earthquake, the existential synecdoche of stagefright, or the revelation that most of what you've believed and revered turns out to be self-indulgent crap.?",
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    "title": "The Best American Essays",
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    "url": "https://www.bookquiver.com/david-foster-wallace/the-best-american-essays"
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  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "David Foster Wallace",
      "slug": "david-foster-wallace",
      "url": "https://www.bookquiver.com/david-foster-wallace"
    }
  ]
}