best american essays pdf

The Best American Essays

Ponder life. Read an essay today.

Saturday, November 11, 2023

Land of wizards.

• by  Tom Wolfe
• from  Popular Mechanics  /   The Best American Essays 1987
• Read at:  https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3748224W/The_Best_American_Essays_1987

Tiger in the Road!

• by  Geoffrey C. Ward
• from  Audubon  /   The Best American Essays 1987

Rumors Around Town

• by  Calvin Trillin
• from  The New Yorker  /   The Best American Essays 1987
• Read at: 
• https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1986/01/06/rumors-around-town
• https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3748224W/The_Best_American_Essays_1987

A Higher Horror of the Whiteness: Cocaine's Coloring of the American Psyche

• by  Robert Stone
• from  Harper's Magazine  /   The Best American Essays 1987
• https://harpers.org/archive/1986/12/a-higher-horror-of-the-whiteness-cocaines-coloring-of-the-american-psyche/

The Inheritance of Tools

• by  Scott Russell Sanders
• from  The North American Review  /   The Best American Essays 1987

Tools of Torture: An Essay on Beauty and Pain

• by  Phyllis Rose
• from  The Atlantic  /   The Best American Essays 1987
• https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1986/10/paris-tools-of-torture/667413/

A Stranger in Lolitaland

• by  Gregor Von Rezzori
• from  Vanity Fair  /   The Best American Essays 1987
• https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/1986/8/in-pursuit-of-lolita

The Best American Essays 2023

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For any essay lover , a highlight of the literary calendar is the publication of the year’s Best American Essays volume. The 2023 edition is the thirty-eighth in the series, and it matches the standard of excellence set by its predecessors. While every year’s selection is different, the organizing principle behind each one remains the same. Series editor Robert Atwan scans the periodical literature for what he describes as “a selection of the year’s outstanding essays.” He’s looking for “works of literary achievement that show an awareness of craft and a forcefulness of thought.” A list of around one hundred possibilities is then passed on to a guest editor, who decides what should be included in the volume. 

Vivian Gornick, 2023’s guest editor, is the most recent in a long line of distinguished literary figures who have taken on this role. As well as making their selections, guest editors contribute an introduction that says something about how they handled their assignment, and their take on the mercurial genre with which the series is concerned. In fact, it would be hard to find a better introduction to the art of the essay than what is provided in the guest editors’ introductions (and the series editor’s forewords) over the course of the years. Cumulatively, they cast a great deal of light on the nature of the essay form.

To say what an essay is “about” always undersells it. Yes, in one sense, The Best American Essays 2023 contains essays that are about addiction, adoption, aging, anorexia, Bambi, bereavement, concision, gender, Los Alamos, marriage, mental illness, prison life, racism, sex, and writing. Although giving such a raw listing of subject matter may indicate the volume’s pleasingly diverse spread of material, it also risks creating a kind of Procrustean bed—where the idea of an essay is stretched or trimmed to fit a topic, with the expectation that it will address it in the manner of an article. That essays, whatever they are (and they are notoriously hard to define), are not articles becomes quickly evident when you read good ones, like the selection offered here.

In the preface to what remains a key reference book for the genre—the Encyclopedia of the Essay , edited by Tracy Chevalier—Graham Good suggests that “at heart, the essay is the voice of the individual.” That catches something important about the nature of this kind of writing. It is the individuality—and authenticity—of the voices speaking to us, the particular personal perspectives they offer on whatever it is their speakers are concerned with, that gives the twenty-one essays in The Best American Essays 2023 their power, rather than their topics per se. Echoing Good’s point, Vivian Gornick ends her introduction by assuring readers that the selection she has chosen is full of voices, “ real voices.” Listening to them is like being invited to share in a whole range of conversations. The turns they take are enlightening, amusing, unexpected, and sometimes shocking. The talk is easy and informal, always clear, often lyrical—a world away from the specialized jargon of a scholarly article. The authors are from all sorts of backgrounds. They represent a very varied range of interests and insights. But they share one vital characteristic: they know what they’re talking about and have the ability to share it in an engaging and accessible manner. Without exception, these are voices worth listening to.

Robert Atwan notes in his foreword that “literary magazines form the foundation of our creative writing.” In addition to showcasing twenty-one fine pieces of prose, The Best American Essays 2023 , like its sister volumes, provides readers with a stimulating sampler from the many literary magazines that flourish in North America. The twenty-one essays selected for reprinting in the volume are drawn from eighteen different magazines (with two essays apiece coming from the Chicago Quarterly Review , New England Review , and Sewanee Review ). The selection of the year’s “Notable Essays and Literary Fiction,” compiled by Robert Atwan and occupying the final pages of the book, identifies many more of the magazines that play such an important role in fostering good essay writing. World Literature Today is, unsurprisingly, among the publications listed.

After initiating the series in 1986 and overseeing its publication every year since then, Robert Atwan is finally stepping down. The 2024 volume will see Kim Dana Kupperman taking over as the new series editor. To have guided the series so successfully over so many years is an impressive literary achievement. One hopes that retirement from his editorial role may allow Mr. Atwan time to write more on a form that’s obviously close to his heart and about which he has unrivaled knowledge.

Looking back to the first volume in the series, The Best American Essays 1986 , Elizabeth Hardwick—the inaugural guest editor—made the point that the word “best” in the book’s title should be thought of as “some of the best.” The same point is echoed by the present guest editor, who is pleasingly open about the fact that the essays chosen “are simply the ones that gave me great pleasure, or moved me for reasons I can’t readily articulate, or were so indisputably well written I had no choice but to include them.” Vivian Gornick surely speaks for any of the series’ thirty-eight guest editors when she stresses that “another editor might, with equal justification, have chosen an entirely different set of selections that would have been as satisfying as this one.” This, she says, is because we’re fortunate to be living at a time when “there is an abundance of superior essay writing being done.” 

Robert Atwan can, I think, take some of the credit for fostering this abundance and, through the pages of this splendid series, bringing it to the attention of a wider audience.

Chris Arthur St. Andrews, Scotland

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With a cover illustration by Edel Rodriguez,  “Writing the Polycrisis”  headlines the March/April 2024 issue of  World Literature Today , showcasing contributions by nine writers, mainly from the Global South. Additional highlights include interviews, creative nonfiction, booklists, essays, and more! Plus a book review section brimming with the latest must-reads also enliven the issue, making it your latest passport to the best new reading from around the world.

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Table of Contents

Writing the polycrisis: dispatches from a calamitous planet, in every issue, creative nonfiction, book reviews.

The Best American Essays 2019 PDF

A collection of the year’s best essays selected by Robert Atwan and guest editor Rebecca Solnit. “Essays are restless literature, trying to find out how things fit together, how we can think about two things at once, how the personal and the public can inform each other, how two overtly dissimilar things share a secret kinship,” contends Rebecca Solnit in her introduction. From lost languages and extinct species to life-affirming cosmologies and literary myths that offer cold comfort, the personal and the public collide in The Best American Essays 2019. This searching, necessary collection grapples with what has preoccupied us in the past year—sexual politics, race, violence, invasive technologies—and yet, in reading for the book, Solnit also found “how discovery can be a deep pleasure.”   The Best American Essays 2019 includes Michelle Alexander, Jabari Asim, Alexander Chee, Masha Gessen, Jean Guerrero, Elizabeth Kolbert, Terese Marie Mailhot, Jia Tolentino, and others....

Chapter List (32 chapters):

• Chapter 1: Title Page
• Chapter 2: Contents
• Chapter 3: Copyright
• Chapter 4: Foreword
• Chapter 5: Introduction
• Chapter 6: RABIH ALAMEDDINE: Comforting Myths
• Chapter 7: MICHELLE ALEXANDER: We Are Not the Resistance
• Chapter 8: HEATHER ALTFELD: Obituary for Dead Languages
• Chapter 9: MARIO ALEJANDRO ARIZA: Come Heat and High Water
• Chapter 10: JABARI ASIM: Getting It Twisted
• Chapter 11: ALEXANDER CHEE: The Autobiography of My Novel
• Chapter 12: CAMILLE T. DUNGY: Is All Writing Environmental Writing?
• Chapter 13: MASHA GESSEN: Stories of a Life
• Chapter 14: JEAN GUERRERO: My Father Says He’s a “Targeted Individual.” Maybe We All Are.
• Chapter 15: LACY M. JOHNSON: On Likability
• Chapter 16: WALTER JOHNSON: Guns in the Family
• Chapter 17: ELIZABETH KOLBERT: How to Write About a Vanishing World
• Chapter 18: J. DREW LANHAM: Forever Gone
• Chapter 19: LILI LOOFBOUROW: Men Are More Afraid Than Ever
• Chapter 20: TERESE MARIE MAILHOT: Silence Breaking Woman
• Chapter 21: DAWN LUNDY MARTIN: When a Person Goes Missing
• Chapter 22: KAI MINOSH PYLE: Autobiography of an Iceheart
• Chapter 23: GARY TAYLOR: Death of an English Major
• Chapter 24: JIA TOLENTINO: The Rage of the Incels
• Chapter 25: DAYNA TORTORICI: In the Maze
• Chapter 26: Contributors’ Notes
• Chapter 27: Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction of 2018
• Chapter 28: Notable Special Issues of 2018
• Chapter 29: Read More from the Best American Series
• Chapter 30: About the Editors
• Chapter 31: Connect with HMH
• Chapter 32: Footnotes

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The Best American Essays 2021

Description.

A collection of the year’s best essays, selected by award-winning journalist and New Yorker  staff writer Kathryn Schulz “The world is abundant even in bad times,” guest editor Kathryn Schulz writes in her introduction, “it is lush with interestingness, and always, somewhere, offering up consolation or beauty or humor or happiness, or at least the hope of future happiness.” The essays Schulz selected are a powerful time capsule of 2020, showcasing that even if our lives as we knew them stopped, the beauty to be found in them flourished. From an intimate account of nursing a loved one in the early days of the pandemic, to a masterful portrait of grieving the loss of a husband as the country grieved the loss of George Floyd, this collection brilliantly shapes the grief, hardship, and hope of a singular year. The Best American Essays 2021 includes ELIZABETH ALEXANDER • HILTON ALS • GABRIELLE HAMILTON • RUCHIR JOSHI • PATRICIA LOCKWOOD• CLAIRE MESSUD • WESLEY MORRIS • BETH NGUYEN • JESMYN WARD and others

• Kathryn Schulz - Editor
• Robert Atwan - Author

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• Release date: April 16, 2024

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Kindle Book Release date: April 16, 2024

OverDrive Read ISBN: 9780358381228 Release date: April 16, 2024

EPUB ebook ISBN: 9780358381228 File size: 2863 KB Release date: April 16, 2024

• Formats Kindle Book OverDrive Read EPUB ebook
• Languages English

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9780063288843

Best American

Vivian Gornick

HarperCollins

17 October 2023

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In her introduction to this year's The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections "contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience." Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors' unapologetic observations of the world around them. From an inmate struggling to find purpose during his prison sentence to a doctor coping with the unpredictable nature of her patient, to a widow wishing for just a little more time with her late husband, these narratives—and the others featured in this anthology—celebrate the endurance of the human spirit.

The Best American Essays 2023 includes Ciara Alfaro • Jillian Barnet • Sylvie Baumgartel • Eric Borsuk • Chris Dennis • Xujun Eberlein • Sandra Hager Eliason • George Estreich • Merrill Joan Gerber • Debra Gwartney • Edward Hoagland • Laura Kipnis • Phillip Lopate • Celeste Marcus • Sam Meekings • Sigrid Nunez • Kathryn Schulz • Anthony Siegel • Scott Spencer • Angelique Stevens • David Treuer

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The Best American Essays 2023 Paperback – October 17, 2023

In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays , guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic observations of the world around them. From an inmate struggling to find purpose during his prison sentence to a doctor coping with the unpredictable nature of her patient, to a widow wishing for just a little more time with her late husband, these narratives—and the others featured in this anthology—celebrate the endurance of the human spirit.

The Best American Essays 2023 includes Ciara Alfaro • Jillian Barnet • Sylvie Baumgartel • Eric Borsuk • Chris Dennis • Xujun Eberlein • Sandra Hager Eliason • George Estreich • Merrill Joan Gerber • Debra Gwartney • Edward Hoagland • Laura Kipnis • Phillip Lopate • Celeste Marcus • Sam Meekings • Sigrid Nunez • Kathryn Schulz • Anthony Siegel • Scott Spencer • Angelique Stevens • David Treuer

• Print length 288 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Mariner Books
• Publication date October 17, 2023
• Dimensions 5.5 x 0.65 x 8.25 inches
• ISBN-10 0063288842
• ISBN-13 978-0063288843
• See all details

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

“[A] thoughtful entry in the long-running series...The works in this year’s collection are a mix of the disconcerting, the probing, and the self-reflective, and well-suited to challenging times.” — Publishers Weekly

“An eclectic, accomplished collection rich in variety and talent.” — Library Journal  (starred review)

“These essays challenge personal and political assumptions and show us life in all its complexities and contradictions. Which in this American moment, and in every other, matters.” — USA Today

“ New Yorker  writer Schulz ( Being Wrong ) collects essays that skillfully combine journalistic and literary sensibilities in this powerful addition to the annual anthology series… This is a moving retrospective of a singular year.” — Publishers Weekly on The Best American Essays 2021

About the Author

VIVIAN GORNICK is a writer and critic whose work has received two National Book Critics Circle Award nominations. Her works include the memoirs Fierce Attachments —ranked the best memoir of the last fifty years by the New York Times — The Odd Woman and the City, and Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader , as well as the classic text on writing, The Situation and the Story.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books (October 17, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0063288842
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0063288843
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.8 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.65 x 8.25 inches
• #27 in American Fiction Anthologies
• #72 in Essays (Books)
• #3,213 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Vivian gornick.

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