Longtime readers know that I'm a fan of the Best American series; despite my reservations about a selection process that inevitably results in 6-10 pieces from the New Yorker every year, the volumes are generally good reads. Unfortunately, this year's Best American Essays, edited by Lauren Slater, is by far the worst edition of the series I've read. The essays themselves are generally decent; what's lacking is anything resembling variety. The chart above is no exaggeration: nearly every essay in the book is about dead pets, dead mothers, or dead mothers and their pets (also dead). A third of the way through the book, this pattern is evident; two-thirds of the way through, it's downright embarassing.

The stand-out essays are the few which escape the hegemony of dead things: Oliver Sacks's "Recalled to Life," Emily Bernard's "Teaching the N-Word," Peter Selgin's "Confessions of a Left-Handed Man." And, yes, to be fair, several of the dead-pets-and-or-moms essays are quite good too: David Rieff remembering his mother, Susan Sontag, for instance.

It's just that people wrote about other things last year. I'm certain of it.