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"Best American Essays" List Complete!

Filed under: The Squib Report Tagged: Benjamin Chambers, Best American series, books, essays, Rebecca West

I am very pleased to announce that our project of listing the New Yorker essays in Houghton Mifflin's "Best American Essays" series has moved from "spotty" to "thoroughgoing." We were fortunate to spark a "completist mania" (his words) in stalwart Emdashes supporter Benjamin Chambers, who doggedly tracked down the nine missing years for us. We are so vastly grateful to Benjamin for helping us close out that post for good.

When he's not giving Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon a close reading (West wrote 24 items for The New Yorker, ahem), Benjamin is working his way through every single essay in these volumes, a foolhardy but surely a rewarding undertaking. We'll have further updates from his reading progress (on the essays, not on West) in the near future. Benjamin runs the award-winning literary website The King’s English, which we urge you to check out. —Martin Schneider

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Who we?

Emdashes, founded December 2004, is a place where keen and dedicated readers of The New Yorker, past and present, can find related news and commentary: about people, subjects, and ideas within the magazine, and events and conversations outside its pages. Learn more about us and our contributors.

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We welcome tips, questions, and comments about The New Yorker past and present, plus related events, links, typeface sightings, &c. To contact the magazine or send a submission, click here.

No fear: Everything you say or send is off the record unless we ask for your permission to use it.

This site is neither owned nor operated by The New Yorker magazine or Condé Nast Publications.

A few clips

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Review: The King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game by Paul Hoffman (for Newsday)
Review: Does The New Republic's recent redesign mean a change of tune? (for Print)
Proposal: A more attractive MetroCard (for A Brief Message)
Interview: James Surowiecki on what's next for the wisdom of crowds (for Assignment Zero)
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Feature: Muslim immigration iconography in the Netherlands (for Print)
Review: books about various New Yorker cartoonists by Liza Donnelly and Iain Topliss (for Newsday)
Profile: screenwriter and novelist Joe Keenan (for Newsday)
Review: The Complete New Yorker (for Print)

More clips.

Tell me more

They say that dashes “are particularly useful in a sentence that is long and complex.” Emdashes—like em dashes—emphasizes what’s between: in particular, between the lines, covers, and issues of a magazine close to my heart.

Primary sources

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Edited by Martin Schneider, designed by Pretty, and illustrated by Inkleaf. Additional drawings by Carolita Johnson. Kissable pencil girl by Jennifer Hadley, based on a 1943 Dorothy Gray ad.

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