Recensione:
...a bold and ambitious response by editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey....a mix of memoir that holds you and history you didn't know, an open and self-reflective attitude to race and fantastically good writing...If the new American administration is serious about its cultural diplomacy and it use of soft power, it might want to let the rest of the world in on what America looks like from the inside. From the pages of this book it looks funnier, quirkier, smarter, more fragile but more thoughtful and generous-hearted than most of the world has imagined it recently. The state department could do a lot worse than issue every embassy with a box or two of State to State. --David Goldblatt, The Independent, Dec 08
It was a good idea of the editors of this volume to embark on a systematic treatment of America at a moment when we are asked to think of the country again as a collection of harmonious but very different voices. Fifty writers, of different levels of distinction some very distinguished indeed have been asked to write about each of the 50 states. Some of them write about their home states, others about states which mean something special to them, one or two merely about a visit to a particular state. There are some exceptionally distinguished writers here among them Dave Eggers, Jayne Anne Phillips, Louise Erdrich, Ann Patchett, Rick Moody, Jonathan Franzen and the wonderful Joshua Ferris, elbowing Carl Hiaasen s reputation out of the way with a brilliant piece on Florida. The book is adorned, too, with some charming statistics, telling you that Tennessee has seven separate State Songs, West Virginia has a toothlessness rate of 40.5 per cent, Kentucky has 2.4 roller-coasters per million head of population, and the difference between the highest and lowest oil consumption per capita is a factor of some 385 per cent, between Alaska and Connecticut. All very fascinating. I might even go there one of these days. --Philip Hensher, The Spectator, Nov 08
'Bold and ambitious ... the tone and technique of this collection are brilliantly varied ... If the new American administration is serious about its cultural diplomacy and its use of soft power, it might want to let the rest of the world in on what America looks like from the inside. From the pages of this book it looks funnier, quirkier, smarter, more fragile but more thoughtful and generous-hearted than most of the world has imagined it until recently.' --The Independent - 12th December 2008
L'autore:
Matt Weiland was deputy editor at Granta for 4 years and is now the deputy editor of The Paris Review. Sean Wilsey is the author of the bestselling memoir Oh The Glory of It All (Penguin Press, 2005). He is an Editor at Large at McSweeney's quarterly.
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