Read about the essay form for more than five or six minutes, and you’re almost bound to come across a reference to Montaigne. Write essays, and it’s almost incumbent upon you to at some point confront Montaigne, who began the whole thing so long ago. Which makes it surprising it’s taken so long for an anthology that asks contemporary essayists to do just that in blunt, precise fashion, as the editors Patrick Madden and Chris Lazar relate in their introduction, comparing the essays to cover songs: “We asked more than two dozen . . . essayists to give us their take on a Montaignean subject . . . [in an] attempt to reenvision Montaigne’s topics through a contemporary sensibility.” As an added bonus, the editors also asked the authors to include a brief coda “explaining the process through which the essayist translated, transfigured, reimagined, or rethought some of the essential ideas, figures, and motifs in Montaigne’s original” (and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I preferred a few codas to the actual essays themselves). Like most collections, After Montaigne has its hits and misses, but the former easily outnumber the latter, and the scales are also tilted by the fact that the excellent essays make the worst ones mostly forgettable.

Similar to Montaigne’s originals, the essays range widely in subject and tone, range perhaps even more widely in style and structure, and finally also vary in their attitude toward their source material—some writing in concert with Montaigne, some against (some, as they tell us in the coda, began one way but ended the other), some yanking him forward in time, others content to let him remain in the past. This variety is a clear strength of the collection, as one is almost certain to find something (more than a few somethings more likely) that appeals.

I confess the collection started a bit rough for me, but hit its stride a few essays in with Lia Purpura’s standout piece “Of Prayers,” concerning the murder on one of her students by the student’s father, funneling the incident through a sharp focus on the quilt found at the crime scene: “The quilt bore the weight of the act, of the bodies; and since such fabric isn’t given to absorbing, it must have made channels, and there the blood pooled. There were runnels. And chambers.” The murder is linked as well to the suicide of one of Purpura’s close friends, an act Purpura imagines again and again, as “a new piece of that scene fills in, suggests itself, makes a bid for inclusion.” I loved the movement within this piece, the vividness of its scenes and details, the fully introspective voice, and startlement of language. This was easily my favorite piece, but far from the only strong one. My other favorites were:

Bret Lott’s “Of Giving the Lie.” I liked the way the essay was structure, along with its focus on story, use of third person, and strong sense of narrative and place.

Steven Church’s “Of Idleness” makes use of photos, historical references, and news stories as he examines his own relationship to the idea of idleness and in particular the form it takes via the teenagers that loiter in stores and public areas, but especially just across the street from his home. Throughout, one has the sense that Church is unsure himself of what he’ll learn about his attitudes, and the end scene is pitch perfect.

Barry Borich’s “Of Wearing My Red Dress” takes what could have been a breezy piece focusing on clothes and shifts quickly into a substantive, at times disturbing examination of how her social interactions and dress (the titular one in particular) intertwined.

Judith Oriz Cofer’s “Of Books and Huecos” is a poignant, moving work that begins with the author disposing of her recently deceased mother’s goods, several of which becomes vehicles for her to come to understand her immigrant mother’s two-world existence, her longing for home, and the way the author herself has “no dream of home that can compare to hers.”

In a somewhat different vein from the other essays, Chris Arthur’s “Of Solitude” is a nice overview both of Montaigne and his work and of the essay in general, bringing in his own experiences but in a less intimate fashion than many of the other writers.

Marcia Aldrich has a painful (literally and otherwise) epiphany while on a horseback ride in Mexico, made perhaps even more agonizingly effective by the reader knowing just where this piece is likely to go.

These half-dozen or so stood out particularly for me, but most others succeeded at least partially. Some I wholly enjoyed but felt they seemed not quite complete, some on the other hand went longer than I needed them to, but still had long passages that were moving or thought-provoking, and one or two didn’t compel so much in their content but were presented in an engaging voice. There were only a handful I didn’t much care for at all, and as mentioned above, these few were more than balanced by the stronger ones, making this an easy collection to recommend, whether one has read Montaigne or not.