The New York Times bestselling book of essays celebrating ordinary delights in the world around us by one America's most original and observant writers, award-winning poet Ross Gay. As Heard on NPR's This American Life/5() Essays on Books. Essay examples Essay topics Books are arguably the greatest invention made by humans. The appearance of the first books goes back thousands of years ago. Its evolution to thee-books of today have come a long way from clay tablets, scrolls Mar 16, · The Next American Essay, The Lost Origins of the Essay, and The Making of the American Essay — anthologies, edited by John D’Agata The Norton Book of Personal Essays — anthology, edited by Joseph Epstein Notes from No Man’s Land — Eula Biss Notes of a Native Son — James Baldwin Not That Kind of Girl — Lena Dunham Estimated Reading Time: 4 mins
Best Book of Essays ( books)
We will do this, of book of essays, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novelsthe best short story collectionsthe best poetry collectionsbook of essays, and the best memoirs of the decadebook of essays we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between and The following books were chosen after much debate and several rounds of voting by the Literary Hub book of essays. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read.
Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move a memoirThe River of Consciousness a hybrid intellectual historyand Hallucinations a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations. But inhe gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay.
Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his deathSacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, book of essays, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, book of essays, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us.
The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Well, we all picked a good one. But what are they about? So read it in awe if you must, but read it. Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, book of essays, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov.
He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare.
There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors book of essays mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding SweetgrassDr. So many in my generation and younger feel this kind of helplessness—and considerable rage—at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land.
Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges book of essays way we inhabit bodies made book of essays of variously gendered influences.
He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive, book of essays. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to book of essays American culture. We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death.
It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential essay collection, On Immunity. As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, book of essays, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life.
As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence. Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent and necessary a defense of basic science as ever, book of essays.
Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, book of essays, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat and important trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, book of essays, book of essays ourselves are impure, have always been so, book of essays, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.
It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women.
Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.
The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between andin many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the book of essays we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a good conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.
Luiselli book of essays a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they both Mexican citizens wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed.
It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual book of essays between the United States of America and Mexico as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment. Tell Me How It Ends is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-thanpages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.
Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, book of essays, she chooses her subjects wisely.
She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, book of essays, and capitalism, book of essays. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me.
It was too thick. A finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction, book of essays, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital. In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next.
Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship.
With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, book of essays, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers.
But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you she has me! that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out or not.
There are days when this does not feel book of essays. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant, book of essays. The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters.
Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, book of essays, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L. as cities of the dead. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic, This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it.
With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy, book of essays. Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader, book of essays.
Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions.
Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to.
When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, book of essays, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy.
Book of essays small moments range from the physical—hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings—to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real book of essays. A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about book of essays and because decisions are hard. Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings · Joyce Carol Oates, book of essays, In Rough Country · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably · Roberto Bolaño, tr.
Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture · Tom Book of essays, Magic Hours · Book of essays Young, The Grey Album · William H, book of essays. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey · Herta Müller, tr.
The Fire This Time · Lindy West, Shrill · Mary Oliver, Upstream · Emily Witt, Future Sex · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City · Mark Greif, Against Everything book of essays Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State · Jim Harrison, book of essays, A Really Big Lunch · J. Caro, book of essays, Working · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature. Features Book Marks CrimeReads Longform Daily Fiction About.
By Emily Temple. Emily Temple Emily Temple is the managing editor at Lit Hub. You can buy it here. Previous Article The 10 Book of essays Memoirs of the Book of essays. Next Article The 20 Best Works of Nonfiction of the Decade. Aleksandar Hemon Best of the Decade Charlie Fox Edwidge Danticat Elena Passarello Elif Batuman Esme Weijun Wang essay collections essays Eula Biss Hilton Als John Jeremiah Sullivan Oliver Sacks Rebecca Solnit Rivka Galchen Robin Wall Kimmerer Ross Gay Roxane Gay Tressie McMillan Cottom Valeria Luiselli Zadie Smith.
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5 Essay Collections I Love
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