State by State
A Panoramic Portrait of America: 50 Writers on 50 States

Someone reviewed this as being written by authors native to each state and that is not the case, which is perhaps the problem. Another problem is that you can't find 50 Dave Eggers or Susan Orleans, so you get some states with less-than-stellar (or lazy) writers. Of the states I read, Ohio and Illin......more

Y’all, this book is GREAT. I normally don’t read things like this, so I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. As you may know, the book is a collection of 50 essays, each written by a different author and each focused on a different state. I chose to read the essays in the order they ap......more

"State By State" editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey had a neat idea here. Inspired by the state guides produced by the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s, Weiland and Wilsey set out to mimic that behemoth venture on a much smaller scale, giving 51 (Washington, D.C. rightly gets a chapter) differ......more

Fifty states. Fifty essays. Fifty writers. Sew it all together, and you have a portrait of the United States, but it's not one that would be endorsed by any state chamber of commerce. This is an unvarnished, true-to-life, sometimes full of praise, sometimes denigrating, and occasionally disturbing p......more