A guidebook from the gut

New Jersey was the most hotly contested state. Not in any election, but in the fight to see who would write about it in a new essay anthology "State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America," edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey (Ecco: 572 pp., $29.95). The victor was author-chef and TV traveler Anthony Bourdain, who writes: "New Jersey, even now when the whole country looks like Jersey, is still, anachronistically, a punch line."

Fifty states, 50 writers. Some, like Bourdain, are exasperated; a few -- like Dave Eggers, who includes Abraham Lincoln and "snack foods" as why Illinois is "Number One" -- lavish praise. Most fall somewhere in between, examining changing landscapes. Wilsey, in town visiting his mother who featured prominently in his 2005 memoir, "Oh the Glory of It All," says he and Weiland wanted the authors, while thinking about place, to make it personal. "Do something that only you can do," Wilsey recalls prompting the contributors.

Leaning forward, bubbling with excitement in a booth at Hollywood's Kitchen 24, Wilsey says he wanted the essayists to capture "how you see or understand this place and that can only really be in this place. Something that is so deeply about a place and couldn't really be anywhere else."

The editors were inspired, as was Alistair Cooke before them, by the Federal Writers' Project American Guide series. Those 48 volumes, published from 1935 to 1943, were commissioned by the Works Progress Administration. Hundreds of writers -- including Zora Neale Hurston and John Cheever -- were employed to write histories, detail commerce and industry, even map out driving tours. At 500-plus pages each, the guides were certainly thorough. Yet can descriptions of the legislature and agriculture convey the essence of a state?

That's where Weiland and Wilsey's advice came in. Joshua Ferris, whose debut novel, "Then We Came to the End," was a finalist for a National Book Award last year, was assigned Florida, where he spent part of his youth. (While many authors, like California's William T. Vollmann, are natives, others are transplants; a few visited their states explicitly for this collection.) Ferris skipped the statewide overview. "I'm afraid if I tried it, everyone would be asleep before I even had a chance to list all the state's counties," he writes in an e-mail. Instead, he describes his adolescence on Key West: "To give a rural boy his own body of water is to give him the grace necessary, at least in part, to forgive the adults responsible for relocating him. The canal was unwalled and tree lined, fifteen feet deep and sludge bottomed, the water amber colored and scummy with white flotsam, really ugly. I jumped in every day."