ANTHOLOGIES - ESSAYS
PUSHCART BOOK OF ESSAYS
Best essays from The Pushcart Prize
Edited by Anthony Brandt
Includes Neon Effects by Emily Hiestand, which can be read on this site.
The single best measure of the state of affairs in American literature today.
— New York Times Book Review
”Great writing elicits a visceral response, and each of the 35 essays chosen to represent the cream of the Pushcart Prize crop hits hard.” — Booklist
"From the beginning in 1976, the editors of The Pushcart Prize celebrated the essay. This collection selects opinions and reflections on much of the social, literary, and political history of recent decades from authors including Andre Dubus, Emily Hiestand, Louise Erdrich, Seamus Heaney, Naomi Shihab Nye, and many more.
Excerpt from ‘Neon Effects’
"Do you want to know what I think?" Tommy asks, mildly and not rhetorically but offering his customer the small window of free will, the chance to not know what already burdens Tommy's superior automotive mind.
What Tommy Hoo thinks has rarely been apparent in the eight years that he and Steve Yuen and their pals at Nai Nan Ko Auto Service have cared for my Subaru three-door coupe. No, normally one must urge Tommy and Steve to say what they think, posing brutally direct questions: "Do I need a new battery before winter or not?" "Is the gurgle in the transmission trouble or not?" Even when Tommy and Steve do answer, they convey a sense that the jury is still out on the beloved Western idea "cause and effect." They have a bone-deep respect for the contingency of all things, and have never before actually volunteered a definitive opinion. So, it is an unprecedented moment in our relationship, when Tommy asks, "Do you want to know what I think?"
"Yes, yes," I murmur. Encouraged, my mechanic declares, firmly and unambiguously, "Don't put it on your car."
What I want to put on my car came as a gift from Peter, who was with me the palmy summer night that I saw a medium-size UFO floating down Brighton Avenue, hovering on a cushion of clear blue light that came billowing from underneath the craft — an airy, etherealizing light, shedding a serene glow over the asphalt road and its scurrying film of detritus. Some of us have been half-hoping for this all our lives, those of us who as children crept out after bedtime on summer nights, who stood in our backyards barefoot in the mowed grass to look up at the implacable dark glittering.
And we have been well prepared for the moment in the close of darkened movie theaters; the special effects teams of Spielberg and Lucas have taught us, shown us, how to experience an encounter. We grow quiet, we suspend yet more disbelief, we feel a naive awe and a shiver of fear as the Mother Ship appears, huge and resplendent with lights beyond our ken, and again when the fragile, more-advanced-than-us beings step out into our atmosphere.
But we think it will happen far away, if it happens at all, in a remote desert, on some lonely country road, above all, to someone else. We are not prepared for this astonishment to visit our own city street, to publicly glide past the Quickie Suds and Redbone's Bar-B-Que. Now Peter has pulled up close to the hovercraft and I can see inside its glowing body. There, not abducted, are two teenage boys such as our own planet produces.
"It's a Camaro," Peter says.
Ahh. A silver Camaro to which the boys have done something — something that washed over me, as Philip Larkin said of jazz, the way love should, "like an enormous yes." And now Tommy has said, "Don't put it on your car," pronouncing where Tommy has never before pronounced.