Weird, nerdy children go through a period where they become obsessed with the 50 states, staring at pastel-colored maps in old encyclopedias and trying to memorize all the capitals. The best of these children never overcome this obsession: Sufjan Stevens has produced two really fine albums about Michigan and Illinois, and this new State by State anthology is a beautiful testament to those childhood afternoons spent in rapt study of each state's vital statistics.

In the introduction, Sean Wilsey explains that State by State is based on the old WPA state guidebooks produced during the Great Depression. Some of the writers are locals: Dave Eggers writes a heartfelt manifesto about why Illinois is the best state ever, in part because it "ranks first in contradictions, in self-delusions, in strange dichotomies." Others, like Ellery Washington, who writes an eerie tribute to New Mexico's atomic industry, are transplants. Others, like David Rakoff, who writes a hilarious anthropology of the institutional racism of Utah's Mormons, are just visiting. A few essays, like Alison Bechdel's Vermont piece, try to be at least vaguely comprehensive about their state's history and geography, but most, like John Hodgman's disinterested paean to Massachusetts's primary dilemma ("How you leave home when you just can't bear to leave home"), only try to capture a certain ethereal feeling of what it means to be in that state.

This is the perfect fall book: 50 authors writing essays on subjects as familiar as home and as alien as a foreign country. Most readers will immediately turn to the states they know—Carrie Brownstein's Washington essay aptly captures the awesome, alien beauty of our trees—and then casually fall into the states that they've never given much thought to. It's impossible to read this book without finding a heretofore-undiscovered author whose writing is a revelation. (I had never read anything by Cristina Henriquez, for example, but her chapter on Texas makes me want to read all her short stories.) It's rare to find a book that creates such a sense of excited discovery, and it's relatively unheard of to find a book that generates enthusiasm for both literature and geography. State by State is an achievement.