The anthology was edited by Alexander Chee, who describes it as "almost an anthology of elegies" in the introduction. He notes that the writers featured in the collection were preoccupied with death and loss, whether related to the pandemic or not, and that the anthology serves as a tribute to those who have passed away.
Here are few selections of the 23 from the anthology that I enjoyed the most...
Vauhini Vara's essay “Ghost” is a mesmerizing piece about the experience of losing her sister to disease in 2001. She's had trouble working through this loss and decides to use GPT-3, an Artificial Intelligence model, to help her write about it. The result is a mix of nine mini-stories written by her and the AI. She starts with “My sister was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma when I was in my freshman year of high school and she was in her junior year,” which begins each story, as each takes a different path as she elaborates and lets the AI finish for her.
I blogged about the essay “The Wrong Jason Brown” by one Jason Brown about a month ago. It's probably the best essay I've ever read. Details sexual abuse the author suffered at the hands of his mother with compassion. It was moving and incredible. If I knew what it was about, I wouldn't have read it. But glad I did. Masterfully done to ease you into this world. It blew my mind.
In his essay for The New Yorker, “My Gentile Region,” Gary Shteyngart recounts his experience of a botched circumcision he suffered as a 7-year-old Russian Jewish immigrant in Brooklyn. It is not for the faint of heart. Shteyngart raises difficult questions about the necessity of the procedure and its consequences. He explores the middle ground between those who take circumcision for granted or as a central aspect of male Jewish identity and those who advocate for male genital integrity, highlighting the enduring impact of his own traumatic experience.
Jesus Quintero's essay “Anatomy of a Botched Assimilation” is another great one. This one hilariously/heartbreakingly details an experience he had in childhood. As an immigrant in elementary school, his parents put a lot of pressure on him to make something of himself. Instead, he fucked around at school and was forced to work with the janitor after school as punishment, keeping all this from his parents. One day, the janitor, who doesn't speak Spanish, comes to his house and makes Jesus translate for him. “Tell him that you are the worst. Ready?... Go ahead. Tell them in Spanish. You're a piece of shit.” Afterwards, his dad kicks the shit out him in the backyard while the neighbors look on with enjoyment. All the while the dad says stuff like “Why can't you be like them, huh? The white people,” and “Don't be like me. I'm nothing.”
Some other great ones include “At the Bend of the Road” by Aube Rey Lescure (about secular pilgrimages she went on in Portugal alone while listening to 2666 on audio book, freaking out about violence, when she is attacked and has to fight for life), “If You Ever Find Yourself” by Erika J. Simpson (her rules for living dirt poor and how her and mother survived on love and hope though they had nothing), and “The Lost List” by Ryan Bradley (about a list he started during Covid about lost things, places, people, ideas, so forth, where he meditates on and interviews a couple experts about being lost and what it teaches us).
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