the best american essays 2021 pdf

The Best American Essays 2021

Kathryn schulz , robert atwan.

256 pages, Paperback

First published October 12, 2021

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Kathryn Schulz

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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

About the Author

Kathryn Schulz is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine , Rolling Stone , Foreign Policy , the Nation , the Boston Globe , and the "Freakonomics" blog of the New York Times . She lives in New York's Hudson Valley.

ROBERT ATWAN has been the series editor of The Best American Essays since its inception in 1986. He has edited numerous literary anthologies and written essays and reviews for periodicals nationwide.

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9780358381754

Best American Essays

Kathryn Schulz

HarperCollins

12 October 2021

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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

Kindle Book

• Release date: April 16, 2024

OverDrive Read

• ISBN: 9780358381228
• File size: 2863 KB

Kindle Book OverDrive Read EPUB ebook

Fiction Mystery Short Stories Thriller

Publisher: HarperCollins

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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The Best American Essays

Ponder life. Read an essay today.

Sunday, July 25, 2021

Richard wright.

- p. 589-90,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

Edmund Wilson

- p. 589,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

Eudora Welty

- p. 588,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

Alice Walker

John updike.

- p. 587-8,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

- p. 587,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

James Thurber

Lewis thomas.

- p. 586-7,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

Gertrude Stein

- p. 586,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

Richard Rodriguez

- p. 585,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

Adrienne Rich

Katherine anne porter.

- p. 584-5,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

S.J. Perelman

- p. 584,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

Vladimir Nabokov

- p. 583,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

- p. 582-3,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

N. Scott Momaday

- p. 582,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

H.L. Mencken

John mcphee.

- p. 581-2,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

Mary McCarthy

- p. 581,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

William Manchester

- p. 580-1,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

Maxine Hong Kingston

- p. 580,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

Martin Luther King, Jr.

William james.

- p. 579-80,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

Zora Neale Hurston

- p. 579,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

Langston Hughes

- p. 578-9,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

Michael Herr

- p. 578,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

Ernest Hemingway

- p. 577-8,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

Robert Frost

- p. 575-6,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

F. Scott Fitzgerald

- p. 575,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

Loren Eiseley

- p. 574-5,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

W.E.B. Du Bois

- p. 573,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

Joan Didion

-  p. 572-3,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

John Jay Chapman

-  p. 572,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

Rachel Carson

Randolph bourne.

-  p. 571,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

Saul Bellow

James baldwin.

-  p. 570-1,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

Maya Angelou

-  p. 570,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

Monday, June 21, 2021

Jane addams.

-  p. 569,   The Best American Essays of the Century .

Henry Adams

The great-grandson of John Adams and grandson of John Quincy Adams, the prominent Bostonian Henry Adams  (1838-1918) did not follow their illustrious paths to the U.S. presidency. Instead, he devoted himself to writing, producing several multivolume histories of the nation, an enormous quantity of political journalism, and two novels. He is best known today for two nonfiction works (both privately printed) that grew out of his scientific theory of history, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres  (1904) and    The Education of Henry Adams  (1907), a third-person autobiography that imagines Americans in the year 2000 while pursuing one of the earliest investigations into ideas of chaos and complexity. Having moved to Washington in 1877 with his wife (who committed suicide in 1885, an incident not mentioned in the autobiography), Adams quickly became an "insider," forming acquaintances with practically every president until his death at age eighty. See Henry Adams: Novels, Mont-Saint-Michel, The Education  (ed. Ernest and Jayne N. Samuels, 1983).

Wednesday, May 19, 2021

Tracy kidder.

- The Best American Essays 1994 .

Ian Frazier

- The Best American Essays 1997 .

Edward Hoagland

- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 1999 .

Stephen Jay Gould

- p. 576-7,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2002 .

Louis Menand

- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2004 .

Susan Orlean

- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2005 .

Lauren Slater

- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2006 .

David Foster Wallace

- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2007 .

Kathryn Schulz

- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2021 .

Sunday, May 9, 2021

Bernard farai matambo.

- p. , The Best American Essays 2018 .

Greg Marshall

Emily maloney, alan lightman.

- The Best American Essays 2000 .

Steven Harvey

Sunday, february 14, 2021, the best american essays 1987.

• RICHARD BEN CRAMER .     What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?
• JOHN GREGORY DUNNE .     On Writing a Novel

Friday, February 12, 2021

-  The Best American Essays 1987  (p. 318). Ticknor & Fields.

Geoffrey C. Ward

- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 1996 .

Calvin Trillin

Robert stone, scott russell sanders.

-  The Best American Essays 1987  (p. 317-8). Ticknor & Fields.

Phyllis Rose

-  The Best American Essays 1987  (p. 317). Ticknor & Fields.

Gregor Von Rezzori

Samuel pickering, jr., william pfaff, elting e. morison, barry lopez.

Barry Lopez on Amazon

BARRY LOPEZ (1945-2020) published the novel Horizon  in 2019. The New York Times Book Review  called it "...beautiful and brutal—a story of the universal human condition." A celebrated writer of fiction and nonfiction, Lopez was awarded the National Book Award for Arctic Dreams  and the John Burrows Medal for Of Wolves and Men ; he received a Guggenheim fellowship among other honors. In 2020, Lopez was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and received the Sun Valley Writers' Conference's first Writer in the World Prize. Throughout his writing life, Lopez collaborated with dozens of international writers and artists and fostered the careers of many younger men and women. For fifty years, Lopez lived next to his beloved McKenzie River in Oregon yet also traveled to more than eighty countries, where he enjoyed rich friendships. He died in December 2020, surrounded by his family.

-  The Best American Essays 2021  (p. 203). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

BARRY LOPEZ has published several collections of short stories and is the author of Arctic Dreams , which won an American Book Award in 1986, and Of Wolves and Men , which won the John Burroughs Medal in 1979. A contributing editor to Harper's  and North American Review , he has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His new book, Crossing Open Ground , will be published next year. 

-  The Best American Essays 1987  (p. 316-7). Ticknor & Fields.

Phillip Lopate

-  The Best American Essays 1987  (p. 316). Ticknor & Fields.

Donald Hall

- p. 577,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

Gary Giddins

Daniel mark epstein, gretel ehrlich.

- p. 574,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

-  The Best American Essays 1987  (p. 315). Ticknor & Fields.

John Gregory Dunne

Richard ben cramer, thursday, february 11, 2021, the american scholar.

https://theamericanscholar.org/

• JOSEPH EPSTEIN .     They Said You Was High Class

The Best American Essays 1986

• John Wain .     JULIA

Southwest Review

http://southwestreview.com/

• Frederick Turner .    VISIONS OF THE PACIFIC    240

Foreign Affairs

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/

• George F. Kennan .    MORALITY AND FOREIGN POLICY    188

The New Republic

https://newrepublic.com/

• Anne Hollander .     DRESSED TO THRILL    174
• Edward Rothstein .    THE BODY OF BACH    227

Natural History

https://naturalhistorymag.com/

• Stephen Jay Gould .    NASTY LITTLE FACTS    161

House & Garden

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_%26_Garden_(magazine)

• William Gass .    CHINA STILL LIFES    152

https://www.thenation.com/

• Kai Erikson .    OF ACCIDENTAL JUDGMENTS AND CASUAL SLAUGHTERS    116

The Kenyon Review

https://kenyonreview.org/

• Gerald Early .    THE PASSING OF JAZZ'S OLD GUARD: REMEMBERING CHARLES MINGUS, THELONIOUS MONK, AND SONNY STITT    93

Grand Street

http://www.grandstreet.com/

• GARY GIDDINS .     "This Guy Wouldn't Give You the Parsley off His Fish"
• Alexander Cockburn .     HEATHERDOWN: A LATE IMPERIALIST MEMOIR

The New York Times Book Review

https://www.nytimes.com/section/books/review

• Julian Barnes .    THE FOLLIES OF WRITER WORSHIP    1

- p. 285, The Best American Essays 1986 .

Frederick Turner

Edward rothstein, cynthia ozick.

"An essay," claims Cynthia Ozick , "is a thing of the imagination...A genuine essay has no educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is movement of a free mind at play." Essays, like the award-winning short stories and novels, she is known for, are imaginative and aesthetic experiments — in other words, literature — not position papers. Born (1928) in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx, Ozick grew up in the atmosphere of a family-operated drugstore. After receiving her B.A. at New York University in 1949 and a year later an M.A. at Ohio State, Ozick called it quits with academic life and set out to take lessons from her master, Henry James, in the demanding art of fiction. Her first novel, Trust , appeared in 1966 and was followed by several volumes of short fiction and three more novels, The Cannibal Galaxy  (1983),   The Messiah of Stockholm  (1987), and The Puttermesser Papers  (1997). Her personal and literary essays appear in four collections: Art & Ardor  (1983), Metaphor & Memory  (1989), Fame & Folly  (1986), and   Quarrel & Quandary  (2000). She is also the author of two essay collections on writing,   What Henry James Knew  (1993) and Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Character  (1996). Ozick was guest editor of The Best American Essay of 1998 .

- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 1998 .

- p. 284-5, The Best American Essays 1986 .

George F. Kennan

- p. 284, The Best American Essays 1986 .

Anne Hollander

William h. gass.

- p. 576,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

Robert Fitzgerald

Kai erikson.

- p. 283-4, The Best American Essays 1986 .

Gerald Early

- p. 573-4,  The Best American Essays of the Century .

- p. 283, The Best American Essays 1986 .

Alexander Cockburn

ALEXANDER COCKBURN has been an Irish citizen resident of the United States since 1973. He writes regular columns for The Nation and The Wall Street Journal , and contributes to many magazines. He is currently writing books about the press and about automobiles.

How to be an Obedient Asian in America

Use few words. Speak less, be unnoticeable. Know when to speak, and know what you're talking about when you speak. Forget what they told you about how you have to make mistakes to learn. Bullshit. That is for them, not you. Learn on your own, do not ask for help. Be useful in whatever you do. Yes, they will talk about you. How you are unsociable. But they also know for a fact, that you are useful.

Forget about equality. You aren't even fun enough to have beer with. It doesn't matter how well you do your job. You won't be part of them. You won't be part of them when they are laughing and joking during work, while you're the only one who's actually working at work. Be unnoticeable until they come to collect your products of your work. And they will reap the fruits of your work, while they're laughing and joking with a beer in their hands with your boss. They will tell you that you're doing great, that you're a Great American. Yeah, whatever, now you're probably like, fuck America.

Be sure to be frugal. Max out your 401k, and do the same for your IRA. In the end you will be a millionaire, and you won't have to see them again. But in retirement they won't even realize the bad financial decisions they've made, because those laughs and jokes got them higher than your hard work. They will keep on enjoying their beers and laughing an joking, and you will die a millionaire because you never unlearned being frugal.

In your deathbed you will wonder why all the troubles you endured being an obedient Asian in America, you will die yearning for the land you left to be free. You've made this land of the free more fertile, and your sons and daughters won't realize how free they are because the never experienced the opposite.

But rest in peace, be assured that your heirs will be real Americans. Their friends will joke and giggle how stereo-typically rich they are, from the money you never learned to waste. They won't even get offended at the Asian jokes and racial slurs because their origin is blurred. In America it doesn't matter what race you are, as long as you know how to laugh and giggle over a beer. If then you will be part of the team, no matter where the team headed.

Lionel Shriver

A prolific journalist with columns in The Spectator and Harper's Magazine , LIONEL SHRIVER has published one short story collection and fourteen novels, including the bestsellers The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 ; Big Brother ; So Much for That ; The Post-Birthday World ; and the Orange Prize winner We Need to Talk About Kevin (a 2011 feature film starring Tilda Swinton). Her latest novel is The Motion of the Body Through Space (2020). Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She lives in London and Brooklyn, New York.

- p. 276, The Best American Essays 2020 .

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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

Kindle Book

• Release date: April 16, 2024

OverDrive Read

• ISBN: 9780358381228
• File size: 2863 KB

Kindle Book OverDrive Read EPUB ebook

Fiction Mystery Short Stories Thriller

Publisher: HarperCollins

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

Why is availability limited?

Availability can change throughout the month based on the library's budget. You can still place a hold on the title, and your hold will be automatically filled as soon as the title is available again.

The Kindle Book format for this title is not supported on:

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The Best American Essays 2021

Edited by kathryn schulz. mariner, $16.99 trade paper (256p) isbn 978-0-358-38175-4.

Reviewed on: 09/09/2021

Genre: Nonfiction

Other - 256 pages - 978-0-358-38122-8

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WINNER OF the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

Every year, the judges of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay search out the best book of essays written in the past year and draw attention to the author's entire body of work. Here, Adam Gopnik , writer, journalist and PEN essay prize judge, emphasizes the role of the essay in bearing witness and explains why the five collections that reached the 2021 shortlist are, in their different ways, so important.

Interview by Benedict King

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick

Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays by Robert Michael Pyle

Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé

Maybe the People Would be the Times by Luc Sante

1 Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

2 unfinished business: notes of a chronic re-reader by vivian gornick, 3 nature matrix: new and selected essays by robert michael pyle, 4 terroir: love, out of place by natasha sajé, 5 maybe the people would be the times by luc sante.

W e’re talking about the books shortlisted for the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay . As an essayist yourself, or as a reader of essays, what are you looking for? What’s the key to a good essay ?

Let’s turn to the books that made the shortlist of the 2021 PEN Award for the Art of the Essay. The winning book was Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich , whose books have been recommended a number of times on Five Books. Tell me more. 

One of the criteria for this particular prize is that it should be not just for a single book, but for a body of work. One of the things we wanted to honour about Barbara Ehrenreich is that she has produced a remarkable body of work. Although it’s offered in a more specifically political register than some essayists, or that a great many past prize winners have practised, the quiddity of her work is that it remains rooted in personal experience, in the act of bearing witness. She has a passionate political point to make, certainly, a series of them, many seeming all the more relevant now than when she began writing. Nonetheless, her writing still always depends on the intimacy of first-hand knowledge, what people in post-incarceration work call ‘lived experience’ (a term with a distinguished philosophical history). Her book Nickel and Dimed is the classic example of that. She never writes from a distance about working-class life in America. She bears witness to the nature and real texture of working-class life in America.

“One point of giving awards…is to keep passing the small torches of literary tradition”

Next up of the books on the 2021 PEN essay prize shortlist is Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick.

Vivian Gornick is a writer who’s been around for a very long time. Although longevity is not in itself a criterion for excellence—or for this prize, or in the writing life generally—persistence and perseverance are. Writers who keep coming back at us, again and again, with a consistent vision, are surely to be saluted. For her admirers, her appetite to re-read things already read is one of the most attractive parts of her oeuvre , if I can call it that; her appetite not just to read but to read deeply and personally. One of the things that people who love her work love about it is that her readings are never academic, or touched by scholarly hobbyhorsing. They’re readings that involve the fullness of her experience, then applied to literature. Although she reads as a critic, she reads as an essayist reads, rather than as a reviewer reads. And I think that was one of the things that was there to honour in her body of work, as well.

Is she a novelist or journalist, as well?

Let’s move on to the next book which made the 2021 PEN essay shortlist. This is Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays by Robert Michael Pyle.

I have a special reason for liking this book in particular, and that is that it corresponds to one of the richest and oldest of American genres, now often overlooked, and that’s the naturalist essay. You can track it back to Henry David Thoreau , if not to Ralph Waldo Emerson , this American engagement with nature , the wilderness, not from a narrowly scientific point of view, nor from a purely ecological or environmental point of view—though those things are part of it—but again, from the point of view of lived experience, of personal testimony.

Let’s look at the next book on the shortlist of the 2021 PEN Awards, which is Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé. Why did these essays appeal?

One of the things that was appealing about this book is that’s it very much about, in every sense, the issues of the day: the idea of place, of where we are, how we are located on any map as individuals by ethnic identity, class, gender—all of those things. But rather than being carried forward in a narrowly argumentative way, again, in the classic manner of the essay, Sajé’s work is ruminative. It walks around these issues from the point of view of someone who’s an expatriate, someone who’s an émigré, someone who’s a world citizen, but who’s also concerned with the idea of ‘terroir’, the one place in the world where we belong. And I think the dialogue in her work between a kind of cosmopolitanism that she has along with her self-critical examination of the problem of localism and where we sit on the world, was inspiring to us.

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Last of the books on the shortlist for the 2021 Pen essay award is Maybe the People Would Be the Times by Luc Sante.

Again, here’s a writer who’s had a distinguished generalised career, writing about lots of places and about lots of subjects. In the past, he’s made his special preoccupation what he calls ‘low life’, but I think more broadly can be called the marginalized or the repressed and abject. He’s also written acute introductions to the literature of ‘low life’, the works of Asbury and David Maurer, for instance.

But I think one of the things that was appealing about what he’s done is the sheer range of his enterprise. He writes about countless subjects. He can write about A-sides and B-sides of popular records—singles—then go on to write about Jacques Rivette’s cinema. He writes from a kind of private inspection of public experience. He has a lovely piece about tabloid headlines and their evolution. And I think that omnivorous range of enthusiasms and passions is a stirring reminder in a time of specialization and compartmentalization of the essayist’s freedom to roam. If Pyle is in the tradition of Thoreau, I suspect Luc Sante would be proud to be put in the tradition of Baudelaire—the flaneur who walks the streets, sees everything, broods on it all and writes about it well.

One point of giving awards, with all their built-in absurdity and inevitable injustice, is to keep alive, or at least to keep passing, the small torches of literary tradition. And just as much as we’re honoring the great tradition of the naturalist essay in the one case, I think we’re honoring the tradition of the Baudelairean flaneur in this one.

April 18, 2021

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©Brigitte Lacombe

Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1986. His many books include A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism . He is a three time winner of the National Magazine Award for Essays & Criticism, and in 2021 was made a chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur by the French Republic.

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The Best American Essays 2022 Paperback – November 1, 2022

Purchase options and add-ons.

A collection of the year’s best essays, selected by award-winning writer Alexander Chee.

Alexander Chee, an essayist of “virtuosity and power” ( Washington Post ), selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

• Print length 336 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Mariner Books
• Publication date November 1, 2022
• Dimensions 5.5 x 0.75 x 8 inches
• ISBN-10 035865887X
• ISBN-13 978-0358658870
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From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

“ 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

“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

“[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

About the Author

ALEXANDER CHEE is the best-selling author of the novels The Queen of the Night and Edinburgh, and the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel . He is a contributing editor at the New Republic , and an editor at large at Virginia Quarterly Review . His work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2016 , the New York Times Magazine , the New York Times Book Review , the New Yorker , T Magazine,   Slate , Vulture , among others. He is winner of a 2003 Whiting Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in prose and a 2010 MCCA Fellowship, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak. He is an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books (November 1, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 035865887X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0358658870
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.2 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.75 x 8 inches
• #309 in American Fiction Anthologies
• #820 in Essays (Books)
• #2,291 in Writing Reference

About the author

Robert atwan.

Robert Atwan is the founder and series editor of the annual Best American Essays. The editor of numerous anthologies, he has written on the ancient literature of the Near East and his critical essays and poetry reviews have appeared in many national periodicals. Laurance Wieder is the author of several volumes of poetry, including The Coronet of Tours; No Harm Done; The Last Century: Selected Poems; and One Hundred Fifty Psalms, a complete psalter. He has taught Bible and Ancient Authors at Cornell University.

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The Best Reviewed Essay Collections of 2021

Featuring joan didion, rachel kushner, hanif abdurraqib, ann patchett, jenny diski, and more.

Well, friends, another grim and grueling plague year is drawing to a close, and that can mean only one thing: it’s time to put on our Book Marks stats hats and tabulate the best reviewed books of the past twelve months.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2021, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections ; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature; Literature in Translation; General Fiction; and General Nonfiction.

Today’s installment: Essay Collections .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. These Precious Days by Ann Patchett (Harper)

21 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed Read Ann Patchett on creating the work space you need, here

“… excellent … Patchett has a talent for friendship and celebrates many of those friends here. She writes with pure love for her mother, and with humor and some good-natured exasperation at Karl, who is such a great character he warrants a book of his own. Patchett’s account of his feigned offer to buy a woman’s newly adopted baby when she expresses unwarranted doubts is priceless … The days that Patchett refers to are precious indeed, but her writing is anything but. She describes deftly, with a line or a look, and I considered the absence of paragraphs freighted with adjectives to be a mercy. I don’t care about the hue of the sky or the shade of the couch. That’s not writing; it’s decorating. Or hiding. Patchett’s heart, smarts and 40 years of craft create an economy that delivers her perfectly understated stories emotionally whole. Her writing style is most gloriously her own.”

–Alex Witchel ( The New York Times Book Review )

2. Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion (Knopf)

14 Rave • 12 Positive • 6 Mixed Read an excerpt from Let Me Tell You What I Mean here

“In five decades’ worth of essays, reportage and criticism, Didion has documented the charade implicit in how things are, in a first-person, observational style that is not sacrosanct but common-sensical. Seeing as a way of extrapolating hypocrisy, disingenuousness and doubt, she’ll notice the hydrangeas are plastic and mention it once, in passing, sorting the scene. Her gaze, like a sentry on the page, permanently trained on what is being disguised … The essays in Let Me Tell You What I Mean are at once funny and touching, roving and no-nonsense. They are about humiliation and about notions of rightness … Didion’s pen is like a periscope onto the creative mind—and, as this collection demonstrates, it always has been. These essays offer a direct line to what’s in the offing.”

–Durga Chew-Bose ( The New York Times Book Review )

3. Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Viking)

12 Rave • 13 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Orwell’s Roses here

“… on its simplest level, a tribute by one fine essayist of the political left to another of an earlier generation. But as with any of Solnit’s books, such a description would be reductive: the great pleasure of reading her is spending time with her mind, its digressions and juxtapositions, its unexpected connections. Only a few contemporary writers have the ability to start almost anywhere and lead the reader on paths that, while apparently meandering, compel unfailingly and feel, by the end, cosmically connected … Somehow, Solnit’s references to Ross Gay, Michael Pollan, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Peter Coyote (to name but a few) feel perfectly at home in the narrative; just as later chapters about an eighteenth-century portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds and a visit to the heart of the Colombian rose-growing industry seem inevitable and indispensable … The book provides a captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker … And, movingly, she takes the time to find the traces of Orwell the gardener and lover of beauty in his political novels, and in his insistence on the value and pleasure of things .”

–Claire Messud ( Harper’s )

4. Girlhood by Melissa Febos (Bloomsbury)

16 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Girlhood here

“Every once in a while, a book comes along that feels so definitive, so necessary, that not only do you want to tell everyone to read it now, but you also find yourself wanting to go back in time and tell your younger self that you will one day get to read something that will make your life make sense. Melissa Febos’s fierce nonfiction collection, Girlhood , might just be that book. Febos is one of our most passionate and profound essayists … Girlhood …offers us exquisite, ferocious language for embracing self-pleasure and self-love. It’s a book that women will wish they had when they were younger, and that they’ll rejoice in having now … Febos is a balletic memoirist whose capacious gaze can take in so many seemingly disparate things and unfurl them in a graceful, cohesive way … Intellectual and erotic, engaging and empowering[.]”

–Michelle Hart ( Oprah Daily )

5. Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told by Jenny Diski (Bloomsbury)

14 Rave • 7 Positive

“[Diski’s] reputation as an original, witty and cant-free thinker on the way we live now should be given a significant boost. Her prose is elegant and amused, as if to counter her native melancholia and includes frequent dips into memorable images … Like the ideal artist Henry James conjured up, on whom nothing is lost, Diski notices everything that comes her way … She is discerning about serious topics (madness and death) as well as less fraught material, such as fashion … in truth Diski’s first-person voice is like no other, selectively intimate but not overbearingly egotistic, like, say, Norman Mailer’s. It bears some resemblance to Joan Didion’s, if Didion were less skittish and insistently stylish and generated more warmth. What they have in common is their innate skepticism and the way they ask questions that wouldn’t occur to anyone else … Suffice it to say that our culture, enmeshed as it is in carefully arranged snapshots of real life, needs Jenny Diski, who, by her own admission, ‘never owned a camera, never taken one on holiday.’” It is all but impossible not to warm up to a writer who observes herself so keenly … I, in turn, wish there were more people around who thought like Diski. The world would be a more generous, less shallow and infinitely more intriguing place.”

–Daphne Merkin ( The New York Times Book Review )

6. The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 by Rachel Kushner (Scribner)

12 Rave • 7 Positive Listen to an interview with Rachel Kushner here

“Whether she’s writing about Jeff Koons, prison abolition or a Palestinian refugee camp in Jerusalem, [Kushner’s] interested in appearances, and in the deeper currents a surface detail might betray … Her writing is magnetised by outlaw sensibility, hard lives lived at a slant, art made in conditions of ferment and unrest, though she rarely serves a platter that isn’t style-mag ready … She makes a pretty convincing case for a political dimension to Jeff Koons’s vacuities and mirrored surfaces, engages repeatedly with the Italian avant garde and writes best of all about an artist friend whose death undoes a spell of nihilism … It’s not just that Kushner is looking back on the distant city of youth; more that she’s the sole survivor of a wild crowd done down by prison, drugs, untimely death … What she remembers is a whole world, but does the act of immortalising it in language also drain it of its power,’neon, in pink, red, and warm white, bleeding into the fog’? She’s mining a rich seam of specificity, her writing charged by the dangers she ran up against. And then there’s the frank pleasure of her sentences, often shorn of definite articles or odd words, so they rev and bucket along … That New Journalism style, live hard and keep your eyes open, has long since given way to the millennial cult of the personal essay, with its performance of pain, its earnest display of wounds received and lessons learned. But Kushner brings it all flooding back. Even if I’m skeptical of its dazzle, I’m glad to taste something this sharp, this smart.”

–Olivia Laing ( The Guardian )

7. The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by Amia Srinivasan (FSG)

12 Rave • 7 Positive • 5 Mixed • 1 Pan

“[A] quietly dazzling new essay collection … This is, needless to say, fraught terrain, and Srinivasan treads it with determination and skill … These essays are works of both criticism and imagination. Srinivasan refuses to resort to straw men; she will lay out even the most specious argument clearly and carefully, demonstrating its emotional power, even if her ultimate intention is to dismantle it … This, then, is a book that explicitly addresses intersectionality, even if Srinivasan is dissatisfied with the common—and reductive—understanding of the term … Srinivasan has written a compassionate book. She has also written a challenging one … Srinivasan proposes the kind of education enacted in this brilliant, rigorous book. She coaxes our imaginations out of the well-worn grooves of the existing order.”

–Jennifer Szalai ( The New York Times )

8. A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House)

13 Rave • 4 Positive Listen to an interview with Hanif Abdurraqib here

“[A] wide, deep, and discerning inquest into the Beauty of Blackness as enacted on stages and screens, in unanimity and discord, on public airwaves and in intimate spaces … has brought to pop criticism and cultural history not just a poet’s lyricism and imagery but also a scholar’s rigor, a novelist’s sense of character and place, and a punk-rocker’s impulse to dislodge conventional wisdom from its moorings until something shakes loose and is exposed to audiences too lethargic to think or even react differently … Abdurraqib cherishes this power to enlarge oneself within or beyond real or imagined restrictions … Abdurraqib reminds readers of the massive viewing audience’s shock and awe over seeing one of the world’s biggest pop icons appearing midfield at this least radical of American rituals … Something about the seemingly insatiable hunger Abdurraqib shows for cultural transaction, paradoxical mischief, and Beauty in Blackness tells me he’ll get to such matters soon enough.”

–Gene Seymour ( Bookforum )

9. On Animals by Susan Orlean (Avid Reader Press)

11 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed Listen to an interview with Susan Orlean here

“I very much enjoyed Orlean’s perspective in these original, perceptive, and clever essays showcasing the sometimes strange, sometimes sick, sometimes tender relationships between people and animals … whether Orlean is writing about one couple’s quest to find their lost dog, the lives of working donkeys of the Fez medina in Morocco, or a man who rescues lions (and happily allows even full grown males to gently chew his head), her pages are crammed with quirky characters, telling details, and flabbergasting facts … Readers will find these pages full of astonishments … Orlean excels as a reporter…Such thorough reporting made me long for updates on some of these stories … But even this criticism only testifies to the delight of each of the urbane and vivid stories in this collection. Even though Orlean claims the animals she writes about remain enigmas, she makes us care about their fates. Readers will continue to think about these dogs and donkeys, tigers and lions, chickens and pigeons long after we close the book’s covers. I hope most of them are still well.”

–Sy Montgomery ( The Boston Globe )

10. Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache from the American South  by Margaret Renkl (Milkweed Editions)

9 Rave • 5 Positive Read Margaret Renkl on finding ideas everywhere, here

“Renkl’s sense of joyful belonging to the South, a region too often dismissed on both coasts in crude stereotypes and bad jokes, co-exists with her intense desire for Southerners who face prejudice or poverty finally to be embraced and supported … Renkl at her most tender and most fierce … Renkl’s gift, just as it was in her first book Late Migrations , is to make fascinating for others what is closest to her heart … Any initial sense of emotional whiplash faded as as I proceeded across the six sections and realized that the book is largely organized around one concept, that of fair and loving treatment for all—regardless of race, class, sex, gender or species … What rises in me after reading her essays is Lewis’ famous urging to get in good trouble to make the world fairer and better. Many people in the South are doing just that—and through her beautiful writing, Renkl is among them.”

–Barbara J. King ( NPR )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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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

Kindle Book

• Release date: April 16, 2024

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• ISBN: 9780358381228
• File size: 2863 KB

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Publisher: HarperCollins

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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