The Best American Essays 2020

Compiles the best literary essays of the year 2019 which were originally published in American periodicals.

A collection of the year’s best essays selected by André Aciman, author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name. “An essay is the child of uncertainty,” André Aciman contends in his introduction to The Best American Essays 2020. “The struggle to write what one hopes is entirely true, and the long incubation every piece of writing requires of a writer who is thinking difficult thoughts, are what ultimately give the writing its depth, its magnitude, its grace.” The essays Aciman selected center on people facing moments of deep uncertainty, searching for a greater truth. From a Black father’s confrontation of his son’s illness, to a divorcée’s transcendent experience with strangers, to a bartender grieving the tragic loss of a friend, these stories are a master class not just in essay writing but in empathy, artfully imbuing moments of hardship with understanding and that elusive grace. The Best American 2020 Essays includes RABIH ALAMEDDINE • BARBARA EHRENREICH • LESLIE JAMISON JAMAICA KINCAID • ALEX MARZANO-LESNEVICH • A. O. SCOTT • JERALD WALKER • STEPHANIE POWELL WATTS and others

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.

The Pulitzer–Prize winning and Guggenheim-honored Hilton Als curates the best essays from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites, bringing “the fierce style of street reading and the formal tradition of critical inquiry, reads culture, race, and gender” (New York Times) to the task. “The essay, like love, like life, is indefinable, but you know an essay when you see it, and you know a great one when you feel it, because it is concentrated life,” writes Hilton Als in his introduction. Expertly guided by Als’s instinct and intellect, The Best American Essays 2018 showcases great essays as well as irresistibly eclectic ones. Go undercover in North Korea, delve into the question of race in the novels of William Faulkner, hang out in the 1970s New York music scene, and take a family road trip cum art pilgrimage. These experiences and more immersive slices of concentrated life await.

A collection of the year's best essays selected by Robert Atwan and guest editor Rebecca Solnit. Award-winning writer, cultural critic, and activist, Rebecca Solnit, an "unparalleled high priestess of nuance and intelligent contemplation" (Maria Popova), selects the best essays of the year from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites.

A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith. Many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves--sometimes critically--to American values, but even in those that don't, one can detect a subtext about being American. The Founding Fathers and early American writers self-consciously struggle to establish a recognizable national culture. The shining stars of the mid-nineteenth-century American Renaissance no longer lack confidence but face new reckonings with the oppression of blacks and women. The New World tradition of nature writing runs from Audubon, Thoreau, and John Muir to Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard. Marginalized groups in all periods use the essay to assert or to complicate notions of identity. Lopate has cast his net intentionally wide, embracing critical, personal, political, philosophical, humorous, literary, polemical, and autobiographical essays, and making room for sermons, letters, speeches, and columns dealing with a wide variety of subjects. Americans by birth as well as immigrants appear here, famous essayists alongside writers more celebrated for fiction or poetry. The result is an extensive overview of the endless riches of the American essay.

The year’s top food writing from writers who celebrate the many innovative, comforting, mouthwatering, and culturally rich culinary offerings of our country. “These are stories about culture,” writes J. Kenji López-Alt in his introduction. “About how food shapes people, neighborhoods, and history.” This year’s Best American Food Writing captures the food industry at a critical moment in history — from the confrontation of abusive kitchen culture, to the disappearance of the supermarkets, to the rise and fall of celebrity chefs, to the revolution of baby food. Spanning from New York’s premier restaurants to the chile factories of New Mexico, this collection lifts a curtain on how food arrives on our plates, revealing extraordinary stories behind what we eat and how we live. THE BEST AMERICAN FOOD WRITING 2020 INCLUDES BURKHARD BILGER, KAT KINSMAN, LAURA HAYES, TAMAR HASPEL, SHO SPAETH, TIM MURPHY and others

A collection of the best science and nature writing published in North America in 2019, guest edited by New York Times best-selling author and ground-breaking physicist Dr. Michio Kaku. "Scientists and science writers have a monumental task: making science exciting and relevant to the average person, so that they care," writes renowned American physicist Michio Kaku. "If we fail in this endeavor, then we must face dire consequences." From the startlingly human abilities of AI, to the devastating accounts of California's forest fires, to the impending traffic jam on the moon, the selections in this year's Best American Science and Nature Writing explore the latest mysteries and marvels occurring in our labs and in nature. These gripping narratives masterfully translate the work of today's brightest scientists, offering a clearer view of our world and making us care. THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING 2020 INCLUDES RIVKA GALCHEN - ADAM GOPNIK - FERRIS JABR - JOSHUA SOKOL - MELINDA WENNER MOYER - SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE - NATALIE WOLCHOVER and others

"Jamison has done an exceptional job curating this volume, selecting essayists who are diverse in ideas and experiences, and essays that are challenging, passionate, sobering, and clever." --Publishers Weekly "The essay is political--and politically useful, by which I mean humanizing and provocative--because of its commitment to nuance, its explorations of contingency, its spirit of unrest, its glee at overturned assumptions; because of the double helix of awe and distrust--faith and doubt--that structures its DNA," writes guest editor Leslie Jamison in her introduction. From the Iraqi desert to an East Jerusalem refugee camp, from the beginnings of the universeto the aftermath of a suicide attempt, the genetic makeup of the eclectic and electric selections inThe Best American Essays 2017 "thrill toward complexity." The Best American Essays 2017 includes RACHEL KAADZI GHANSAH, LAWRENCE JACKSON, RACHEL KUSHNER, ALAN LIGHTMAN, BERNARD FARAI MATAMBO, WESLEY MORRIS, HEATHER SELLERS, ANDREA STUART and others

Curated by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wild, this volume shares intimate perspectives from some of today’s most acclaimed writers. As Cheryl Strayed explains in her introduction, “the invisible, unwritten last line of every essay should be and nothing was ever the same again.” The reader, in other words, should feel the ground shift, if even only a bit. In this edition of the acclaimed anthology series, Strayed has gathered twenty-six essays that each capture an inexorable, tectonic shift in life. Personal and deeply perceptive, this collection examines a broad range of life experiences—from a man’s relationship with Mormonism to a woman’s search for a serial killer; from listening to the music of Joni Mitchell to surviving five months at sea; from triaging injured soldiers to giving birth to a daughter; and much more. The Best American Essays 2013 includes entries by Alice Munro, Zadie Smith, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Dagoberto Gilb, Vicki Weiqi Yang, J.D. Daniels, Michelle Mirsky, and others.

This singular collection is nothing less than a political, spiritual, and intensely personal record of America's tumultuous modern age as experienced by the nation's foremost critics, commentators, activists, and artists.

The twelfth installment of Best Canadian Essays speaks with striking prescience to our contemporary moment. “This book—like most that have found their way into the world this fall—began life in the Before Times,” writes editor Sarmishta Subramanian. Written and first published by leading magazines and journals in 2019, the essays selected here speak with striking prescience to our contemporary moment. From health concerns both global and individual; to decisions about how much of ourselves we should share, online and in person; to surveillance capitalism and cancel culture, public and private concerns intertwine throughout Best Canadian Essays 2020. Just as our current challenges in public health, policing, and justice require researchers, lawmakers, and citizen groups, writes Subramanian, they also require writers. Here she presents sixteen, “essaying in the French sense of the word to think it through.” Featuring work by: James Brooke-Smith • Larissa Diakiw • Jenny Ferguson • Wayne Grady • Alexandra Kimball • Amorina Kingdon • Andy Lamey • Michael LaPointe • Benjamin Leszcz • Alanna Mitchell • Alexandra Molotkow • Jeremy Narby • Andrew Nikiforuk • Michelle Orange • Christina Sharpe • Carl Wilson

The National Book Award–winning author compiles a “thought-provoking volume” of essays by Joyce Carol Oates, Oliver Sacks, Jaquira Diaz and others (Publishers Weekly). As Jonathan Franzen writes in his introduction, his main criterion for selecting The Best American Essays 2016 “was whether an author had taken a risk.” The resulting volume showcases authorial risk in a variety of forms, from championing an unpopular opinion to the possibility of ruining a professional career, or irrevocably alienating one’s family. What’s gained are essential insights into aspects of the human condition that would otherwise remain concealed—from questions of queer identity, to the experience of a sibling’s autism and relationships between students and college professors. The Best American Essays 2016 includes entries by Alexander Chee, Paul Crenshaw, Jaquira Diaz, Laura Kipnis, Amitava Kaumar, Sebastian Junger, Joyce Carol Oates, Oliver Sacks, George Steiner, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and others.

Nonfiction from Malcolm Gladwell, Francine Prose, Jonathan Franzen, and more: “There is not a dud in the bunch. [An] exhilarating collection.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) Whether a personal reflection on a wife’s decline from Alzheimer’s, a critique of the overdiagnosis of mood disorders, a lighthearted look at menopause, a friend’s commentary on David Foster Wallace’s heartbreaking suicide, or a memoir of teaching underprivileged children, this collection highlights the best essays of the year with contributions from: Benjamin Anastas • Marcia Angell • Miah Arnold • Geoffrey Bent • Robert Boyers • Dudley Clendinen • Paul Collins • Mark Doty • Mark Edmundson • Joseph Epstein • Jonathan Franzen • Malcolm Gladwell • Peter Hessler • Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough • Garret Keizer • David J. Lawless • Alan Lightman • Sandra Tsing Loh • Ken Murray • Francine Prose • Richard Sennett • Lauren Slater • Jose Antonio Vargas • Wesley Yang “A trove of fine writing on big issues.” —Kirkus Reviews

The year’s best travel writing, as chosen by series editor Jason Wilson and guest editor Robert Macfarlane. An eclectic compendium of the best travel writing essays published in 2019, collected by esteemed guest editor Robert Macfarlane, author of Mountains of the Mind and Underland. The Best American Travel Writing gathers together a satisfyingly varied medley of perspectives, all exploring what it means to travel somewhere new. For the past two decades, readers have come to recognize this annual volume as the gold standard for excellence in travel writing.

Personal essays exploring identity, work, family, and community through the prism of race and black culture.

The Best American Magazine Writing 2020 brings together outstanding writing, from in-depth reporting to incisive criticism. The anthology features excerpts from major projects that challenge American certitudes: the Washington Post Magazine’s “Prison” issue, detailing the scope of mass incarceration, and the New York Times Magazine’s “The 1619 Project,” which recenters the nation’s history around slavery and its legacies. It includes extraordinary globe-spanning journalism, including pieces on the genocide against the Rohingya (New York Times Magazine) and the unintended consequences of a dengue fever vaccine (Fortune). Pamela Colloff details prosecutors’ reliance on an untrustworthy jailhouse informant (New York Times Magazine in partnership with ProPublica), and a ProPublica series investigates the disaster that befell the USS Fitzgerald. The anthology showcases the work of remarkable stylists, including Jia Tolentino’s cultural commentary (New Yorker) and Ligaya Mishan’s columns on food and culture (T: The New York Times Style Magazine). Columns by s.e. smith consider disability (Catapult), and the DeafBlind poet John Lee Clark writes about art he can touch (Poetry). Jordan Kisner visits a Martha Washington–themed debutante ball in Texas near the Mexican border for The Believer, and Jacob Baynham offers a moving portrait of his father-in-law (Georgia Review). Arundhati Roy excoriates the increasing authoritarianism of Modi’s India (The Nation in partnership with Type Media Center). The anthology concludes with Jonathan Escoffery’s short story of homesickness for Jamaica, “Under the Ackee Tree” (Paris Review).

A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of 2011 Celebrated as one of the most poignant stylists of his generation, André Aciman has written a luminous series of linked essays about time, place, identity, and art that show him at his very finest. From beautiful and moving pieces about the memory evoked by the scent of lavender; to meditations on cities like Barcelona, Rome, Paris, and New York; to his sheer ability to unearth life secrets from an ordinary street corner, Alibis reminds the reader that Aciman is a master of the personal essay.

A LUSHLY ROMANTIC NOVEL FROM THE AUTHOR OF CALL ME BY YOUR NAME Eight White Nights is an unforgettable journey through that enchanted terrain where passion and fear and the sheer craving to ask for love and to show love can forever alter who we are. A man in his late twenties goes to a large Christmas party in Manhattan where a woman introduces herself with three words: "I am Clara." Over the following seven days, they meet every evening at the same cinema. Overwhelmed yet cautious, he treads softly and won't hazard a move. The tension between them builds gradually, marked by ambivalence, hope, and distrust. As André Aciman explores their emotions with uncompromising accuracy and sensuous prose, they move both closer together and farther apart, culminating on New Year's Eve in a final scene charged with magic and the promise of renewal. Call Me by Your Name, Aciman's debut novel, established him as one of the finest writers of our time, an expert at the most sultry depictions of longing and desire. As The Washington Post Book World wrote, "The beauty of Aciman's writing and the purity of his passions should place this extraordinary first novel within the canon of great romantic love stories for everyone." Aciman's piercing and romantic new novel is a brilliant performance from a master prose stylist.

“To read their stories felt to me the way I suspect other people feel hearing jazz for the first time,” recalls Curtis Sittenfeld of her initial encounter with the Best American Short Stories series. “They were windows into emotions I had and hadn’t had, into other settings and circumstances and observations and relationships.” Decades later, Sittenfeld was met by the same feeling selecting the stories for this year’s edition. The result is a striking and nuanced collection, bringing to life awkward college students, disgraced public figures, raunchy grandparents, and mystical godmothers. To read these stories is to experience the transporting joys of discovery and affirmation, and to realize that story writing in America continues to flourish. THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2020 INCLUDES T. C. BOYLE • EMMA CLINE • MARY GAITSKILL ANDREA LEE • ELIZABETH McCRACKEN • ALEJANDRO PUYANA WILLIAM PEI SHIH • KEVIN WILSON and others

"So candid, so penetrating and so beautifully written that it can make you feel cut open, emotionally exposed." —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal Harvard Square is the elegant and sexually charged story of a young émigré grad student, a Jew from Egypt, who meets a brash, magnetic Arab taxi driver—and how their friendship tests his loyalties and throws his life in America into doubt. André Aciman's writing has been hailed by Colm Tóibín as "fiction at its most supremely interesting," and here Aciman delivers a powerful tale of identity and the wages of assimilation.