A review by aprilmei
Freeman's: The Best New Writing on Arrival by John Freeman

4.0

Nicely produced book with an interesting set of glossy color photo pages popped in the middle, in the middle of a story. This is one of the required reading materials that my Creative Writing teacher assigned to our class this spring. I'm not sure that I would have read it otherwise, but I'm glad I did. I had only read a few of the contributing authors here before: Davis, Eggers, and Murakami, so most of the authors here are new to me. I enjoyed the pieces by the authors I've already read and I especially liked one piece by Garnette Cadogan called "Black and Blue." I loved his writing and storytelling and can relate to his topic of race and walking, as my ex-bf was African American and would tell me similar things about walking around NYC. The Lydia Davis piece was very long and almost a bit tedious, but I actually ended up being amused by her meditation on learning Norwegian and all the mini lessons and realizations she shared. I'm going to need to read more poetry because I wasn't a huge fan of the pieces included here, but I'm not usually a big fan of poetry in general. Our class will be taking on poetry after prose this semester, so I'm sure I'll have a better appreciation for poetry after that.