The Best American Essays 2019: Literary Voices Exploring Personal Discovery and Public Connection―Edited by Rebecca Solnit

by Robert Atwan

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.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Anthologies, Politics, 21st Century, Memoir, Writing

256 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2019

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Jan Priddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

It seems that my favorite books this year are all nonfiction. This collection of essays is quite different from any other Best American collection, as good as my favorite years—brilliant. These are challenging essays. The ideas challenged me to think hard, to consider politics and personal relationships from another angle. I did not always enjoy the view, and sometimes even disagreed with the author's thesis. I was always gratefully enlightened. Climate change, mental illness as the canary in our daily coalmine lives, a raging against those men who chose to kill, those men who regard women as receptacles for their personal needs and not as people, so much more.

The experience of reading these essays was interesting and compelling. I was engaged by each one.

[Grady · Rating 4 out of 5]

This year’s edition of the Best American Essays has to have one of the most inclusive sets of authors - in terms of race, gender identity, and sexual orientation - of any year in the series. That said, the essays show an unusually narrow range of foci and frames - they are virtually all ‘political’ and closely related to the priorities of editor Rebecca Solnit’s own writing. In particular, several essays describe our ongoing climate emergency, and most of the rest are interested in the ways we as a society perpetuate structures of gender and racial oppression. Several of the authors come across as difficult people, which seems to be another special interest of Solnit’s. And perhaps she intends her selections to underline this message: these writers have something to say, and they are saying it despite pressure from the (straight, white, male, bourgeois) powers-that-be for non-straight-white-male voices to be deferential and ‘nice’. To keep their voices in the face of that pressure, some have to be intense, abrasive, or just persistent.

What’s not in this year’s collection are varieties of form and theme: an elegy, a profile, a mystery, a sharing of a personal hobby, a humorous piece. These are accomplished essays (of course) and play off one another strongly; it would be more satisfying to read a collection from a similarly diverse set of authors, with a much more diverse range of intents and forms.

Favorites from this year for me include Michelle Alexander, We Are Not the Resistance, arguing for proactive advocacy; Alexander Chee, The Autobiography of My Novel, on the writing of his first published novel; Masha Gessen, Stories of a Life, on immigration and gender identity; J. Drew Lanham, Forever Gone, on extinction and racial oppression; Dawn Lundy Martin, When a Person Goes Missing, exploring the injustice of our criminal justice system through her brother’s experience; and Dayna Tortorici, In the Maze, which - placed last because of the author’s last name - nonetheless nicely sums up a major theme of this year’s collection, the contest between freedom and oppression and the role of language on each side.

[Crystal · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an unusually strong edition of Best American Essays. I usually skip a few out of disinterest but I read all excepting the ones I'd already read.

[Joe Kraus · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a long-time annual reader of this collection, I could tell something would be different this year from the very beginning. Series editor Robert Atwan – whom, I am happy to boast is an acquaintance who’s been warm and supportive in the decade or so I’ve known him – opens this year with reflections not on his go-to essay/definer in Montaigne but instead on George Orwell.

That’s a crucial difference since Montaigne represents a tradition of the essay concerned with the self, the self working outward to understand the world, while Orwell represents the political essay, the essay that explores some changing aspect of the cultural or partisan political world as it affects the self.

That difference is even more fully underlined in Rebecca Solnit’s powerful introduction. As she puts it thoughtfully and articulately, “I was assigned to pick out the best of the very good essays we gathered, and for me that meant not only the integrity of the writing and the writers’ visions, but essays that engaged with the most important and conflicted stuff of our time.”

The result, then, is that the “best essays” selected here are overwhelmingly direct and political in their focus. Solnit justifies that by arguing that our moment is so partisan, so conflicted, that writing that fails to take a direct stand against what we might call, for short-hand, Trumpism is somehow complicit in pretending that things aren’t so riven.

So, I do hear the justification, and I can’t help but be persuaded by some of it. In such a context, an annual event like the Best American Essays ought to be a forum for amplifying some of the powerful voices plumbing the socio-political crisis of the moment.

And yet…I admit that I come to this series for a particular aesthetic experience. I have never yet tired of Montaigne and all he represents. There is something fragile in the personal essay, something that allows a particular human to give the rest of us a sense of her or his or their self as it opens into the larger world. Hearing Solnit’s rationale, I can’t argue otherwise, but I do miss the personal-essay-centered approach of my favorite iterations of this series.

Put differently, I am not asking for an escape from the political; even if I were that naïve, I couldn’t continue to be so after reading Solnit’s introduction. Instead, I believe there is a subtler politics that grows out of allowing artists to explore their experience without the initial insistence that they wrestle with the ills we all (or all of us at all likely to pick up such a volume) already recognize.

So, I own up to a disappointment in this volume. Everything is well done, but little of it opens up from the perspective of a particular person tentatively – and then ever more forcefully – discovering a voice for discovering the world.

I do want to acknowledge a handful of my favorites from this year, though. Kai Minosh Pyle’s piece is a powerful, enumerated narrative about her recovery from emotional illness. She weaves in her Native-American experience in understanding her affliction as partly due to a Windigo, and the result is a moving experience of her recovering her health through a process that is “fantastic” only to those of us raised outside the culture she knows.

Lacy Johnson also has a very strong piece about the trap of “likability” as an impulse that can limit our capacity to interrogate experience in an honest way. It’s good and thoughtful work.

Jean Guerrero offers a haunting portrait of her father, a man who endured paranoid schizophrenia of the familiar “everybody’s listening to me” kind. Chillingly, she connects his experience to the experience we are all now undergoing in a world where our data and even conversations all wind up in a cloud that others have the capacity to search.

Finally, I was moved by Alexander Chee’s “The Autobiography of My Novel” in which he recounts how he came to write a novel featuring a character like him but not him. It’s a thoughtful unwinding of the vague line between fiction and nonfiction.

As I say, there were none of these I hated, but I miss having more of these in the traditional personal essay vein. It’s great to support this volume every year, but this one is far from a favorite of mine, and I’ll be curious to see whether Atwan takes this back in the other direction next year.

[John W. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rebecca Solnit seem to have picked only those essays which coincided with her political views, feminist, sexual politics etc.

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good anthology centering around social justice. rtf

4 Stars

Read on kindle

[k-os · Rating 5 out of 5]

Solnit's excellently curated collection reminds me of the unique potential for the essay, generically, to take up the most urgent political questions of our time from the humble place of the personal. There's so much insight and grace and power here.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished Best American Essays 2019, which is a good snapshot of what writers—and a lot of us—are thinking about at the end of this very weird decade. Very good, complex work in this one. I would have liked to have seen a few more non-American voices included (the essays have to be published in North America in English, but that shouldn't exclude foreign-born folks), but on the other hand I was glad to see good Indigenous representation. And, of course—Rebecca Solnit is the guest editor—an abundance of women's voices. At least two of the essays, by J. Drew Lanham and Terese Marie Mailhot, impressed me enough that now I want to read their books (The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature and Heart Berries: A Memoir, respectively. A good collection, worth reading. Working on a review of this for LJ now.

[Brad · Rating 2 out of 5]

This might be the most disappointing volume in the series. One of my favorite parts of reading the Best American Essays each year is seeing powerful, engaging writing in good faith from those I may not agree with. With a few exceptions, it seems that the editor’s standard for “best” is essentially “does the writer hate non-leftists?” The essays that deal with writing craft are all excellent. Sadly, the tone for much of the rest of the collection is set by the first essay, which is essentially a crummy blog post (though in a respected source). The end of Walter Johnson’s “Guns in the Family” deserves particular infamy for its over the top dishonesty.

[Desi A · Rating 5 out of 5]

I stumbled on this collection accidentally, and now I will have to go through other years in the series!

I bounced around the collection, not in order, and I don't think I necessarily read everything. The collection Solnit curated was sometimes too much for me and my despair heart.

One of the most beautiful ones in the volume, and one that I had not even heard about, let alone read before was "Forever Gone" by J. Drew Lanham.

[Maureen Stanton · Rating 3 out of 5]

I eagerly anticipate the release of BAE each year and read it cover to cover. This was one of my least favorite issues, unfortunately, but of course this is entirely subjective. I look to BEA first for stunning writing, innovation, and personal stories with honest reflection that deeply move me. I look for pieces I can teach to inspire my students. The selections always reflect the guest editor and in this case, as with the issue edited by David Brooks (another one I did not like much), Solnit has emphasized the political over "best" writing. I read plenty of political articles and essays elsewhere; I'm deeply politically engaged and active. But that's not what I want to read in BEA (unless the essay is truly astonishing and beautifully written, like past essays by Zadie Smith). There are some standout pieces. Walter Johnson's "Guns in the Family"; Dawn Lundy Martin's "When a Person Goes Missing"; and Kai Minosh Pyle's "Autobiography of an Iceheart." But overall I find many of the pieces impenetrable, or revealing nothing new, or not really powerful "essays" per se (i.e., Lacy M. Johnson's piece "On Likeability" was originally a speech and while it surely was a dynamic speech, it doesn't translate all that well as a great essay, and Johnson is a writer whose books I deeply admire and have reviewed quite favorably on this site). There you have it, my unvarnished opinion of this year's BAE.

[Janet · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not my favorite of these collections, too political, too Solnit, but there are a few gems.

[Bibliophile10 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This BAE volume keeps one awake. Its essays' subjects are all vital, most of them urgent, ranging from patriarchy to extinction (of wildlife, language, culture) to mental health. As editor, Rebecca Solnit tended to prioritize timely topics over artfulness; my ideal essay anthology consistently merges both. Nevertheless, this was a very strong collection with at least 8 pieces I'll be coming back to. Here they are, rated according to my checkmark system (1 for the good, 2 for the great, 3 for the fantastic):

1 Checkmark
Rabih Alameddine's "Comforting Myths"
Michelle Alexander's "We Are Not the Resistance"
Alexander Chee's "The Autobiography of My Novel"
Masha Gessen's "Stories of a Life"
Jean Guerrero's "My Father Says He's a 'Targeted Individual'"
J. Drew Lanham's "Forever Gone"
Kai Minosh Pyle's "Autobiography of an Iceheart"

2 Checkmarks
Heather Altfield's "Obituary for Dead Languages"

One of Solnit's most remarkable editorial choices was including a variety of voices (remarkable, yes, because such a mix is woefully uncommon, and unprecedented in BAEs past). From what I could tell, 18 of the 20 selections are by women, BIPOC, and/or non-binary individuals (i.e., only 2 were by white cis men). I'll attribute the volume's notable energy to this unusually diverse chorus.

Solnit's introduction is longer than I typically care for, but it is so articulate about the spirit and potential of the essay—and the work of literature, in general—that I will be returning to it again and again. One section, in particular, I admire because it speaks to the collective labor of essays:

. . . [I]n recent years some of the key transformations in the United States have proceeded in no small part by the arguments advanced in essays, not landmark individual ones, generally, but flocks of essays that fill the sky . . . covering all aspects of a subject, one essay making a case that lets another make a case that goes a little further, establishing together a new set of perspectives from which new statements can be made and old problems reexamined. The flock lands in countless imaginations and settles in. (xxiii)

This BAE, as a flock, makes some beautiful noise.

[Michael Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

These annual anthologies are always a mixed bag, and while this this year's offering contains a few gems, it's one of my least favorite Best American Essay volumes.

Perhaps I am disenchanted because I waited too long to read it. I meant to tackle it in December, but my teaching load didn't allow for that. Now, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the essays seem dated or not-as-relevant as they once were. When the lockdowns end, perhaps I will see things differently again.

Several of these essays fell flat for me because they seem too fixated on the issue of the day without providing more timeless context and treatment of the issues. Many of the essays addressed important issues (like white privilege and male violence), but some come across as mere in-the-moment screeds, while others offer a more timeless exploration of these issues along with application to the manifestations of these issue in our day.

Some of my favorites: Rabih Alameddine on Comforting Myths in literature; Jean Guerrero on her father (and perhaps all of us) as a targeted individual; Lacy Johnson on Likability (my favorite in the book); Walter Johnson on Guns in the Family; and Gary Taylor's Death of an English Major.

Favorite Quote (from Rabih Alameddine): "We invade your countries, destroy your economies, demolish your infrastructures, murder hundreds of thousands of your citizens, and a decade or so later we write beautifully restrained novels about how killing you made us cry."

[Seamus Thompson]

A rare impulse buy. I had been thinking that I should read more contemporary essayists and then I saw this collection, edited by one of my favorite essayists, sitting on a shelf of new releases. I snatched a copy and headed straight to the cashier.

I’m glad I did. In the future, this collection will serve as a fascinating time capsule of what living in the US has been like these last few years. Solnit’s generosity as a writer extends to her selections as editor. The subjects are timely, the writers from a variety of backgrounds and communities, and the perspectives are nuanced and varied.

Some personal favorites:

- Marion Alejandra Ariza, Come Heat and High Water
- Alexander Che, The Autobiography of My Novel
- Masha Gessen, Stories of a Life
- Jean Guerrero, My Father Says He’s a “Targeted Individual.” Maybe We All Are.
- Walter Johnson, Guns in the Family
- Dawn Lundy Martin, When a Person Goes Missing
- J Drew Lanham, Forever Gone
- Dayna Tortorici, In the Maze

[Megan Doney · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some real jewels here. 4 stars only because I had read many of them in their original publications.

[Timons Esaias · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am a longtime reader of this series, though somewhat random in the order in which I get to them. I finished 2024 in April, and both 2020 and 2021 are parked on my unread shelves.

I prize them for the diversity of subject and authorship, the surprising things I learn from them, and for the reliably high quality of the prose. (Yes, I sometimes find a clinker in a collection, but usually not.)

Individual volumes vary in quality, sometimes due to what came out that year, sometimes because of the aesthetic preferences of the guest editor. If I feel that the selection process was a bit distorted (say, all the pieces about elder care and cancer; or author gender disproportionately high) I mention it in my reviews.

This volume is just not what I look for from The Best American Essays. The subject matter is the narrowest I've ever seen, and I would classify more than half of the stories as something other than an essay. The quality of the writing is quite uneven between pieces, and the quality of logical thinking is uneven as well.

The series editor chose to evoke George Orwell and his permission to hold two incompatible ideas at once, and I think that might have been an attempt to defuse the criticism this collection was likely to evoke. The problem is that a proper essay can do that, but the point of the essay would be to hold them side-by-side. Many of these essays seem more thoughtlessly contradictory (like hateful rants against hate) than anything.

Both editors did warn potential readers that this edition "grapples with what has preoccupied us in the past year -- sexual politics, race, violence, invasive technologies" but I hadn't expected what I actually found. My brief notes began piling up the same terms, repeatedly: political, but mostly BS; political opinion; doomsday and political; political rant, strong but hateful. Rape, sexual misconduct, politics, gender, sexism, rinse and repeat. The ideological variation is rather slight, and even though I'm probably right in the middle of that section of the spectrum, I didn't find most of these works to be well-reasoned or balanced.

That's the big problem with this volume versus my expectations. I generally hope that an essay will be either instructive or well-reasoned. Few of these were instructive, and even those that were making points I believe in had logical fallacies or weaknesses that ruined their effect. There was far more ranting than reasoning, far more opinion than consideration. And the same thing over and over again, so very little diversity of subject.

What particularly disturbed me was how reductionist many of the arguments were. There is just one problem and it is this. There is just one truth and it is this. Only one gender matters.

When I finished, I did my usual gender count, which seemed especially logical since so many of these pieces brought up gender. There are 20 essays. 11 authors use the feminine pronoun, 2 use the neutral/indefinite pronoun, 7 use the masculine pronoun. Hmmm.

Nonetheless, seven of the twenty pieces earned an exclamation mark in the table of contents.

Heather Altfeld's "Obituary for Dead Languages" is really a prose poem, and that was nice. It has an anti-imperialist bias, which is understandable, but what, exactly is one to expect of languages and dialects? That they would live forever?

Mario Alehandro Ariza's "Come Heat and High Water" is a Doomsday piece, with political features, but at least it's based on actual science.

Alexander Chee's "The Autobiography of My Novel" stood out from the rest, being what I actually expect in these collections. The subject matter is sexual abuse, which reinforces the running theme of this collection; but it was presented organically and logically.

Jean Guerrero's "My Father Says He's a "Targeted Individual." Maybe We All Are." is another Doomsday piece, discussing how the surveillance society is engulfing us all. The piece exposes what most of us are deliberately ignoring about our world, and does so rather well. Except. Yeah, except that she brings in Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind as an authority for two paragraphs. Jaynes's book is a load of nonsense, riddled with logical errors and errors of fact. Those two paragraphs should simply be expunged.

Lacy M. Johnson's "On Likeability" is about sexual abuse and politics (which seems necessary to be in this collection), but at least it's an essay.

Walter Johnson's "Guns in the Family" is good in part. There is an essay in it, but it also has a political manifesto welded into it.

Gary Taylor's obituary "Death of an English Major" is about murder and sexism, but is an artful construction.

As I mentioned above, I do sometimes find a clinker in these volumes. There is one piece in here that is an excellent example of phony academic prose. The idea of the piece is interesting, though reductionist. But it's full of evasive phrasing, precious assertions, and meaningless distinctions. I intend to use it as an example of What Not To Do. I'll be listing the traits I find deplorable, in hopes of inoculating my students against them.

Not recommended for a cover-to-cover read. Check it out of the library, and cherry pick.

[Art · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Essays are restless literature, trying to find out how we can think about two things at once, how the personal and the public can inform each other, how two overtly similar things share a secret kinship.” — Rebecca Solnit

Solnit’s introduction, an essay about essays, strands as the best piece by far in this year’s edition. She writes a good, tight exploration of the essay.

“It takes a certain kind of confidence to reach a conclusion,” writes Solnit. Thoughtfulness of the writer and the reader meet in a slow and focused way.

Solnit, as this year’s guest editor, picked the best of very good essays, favoring integrity and engagement with the stuff of our time. She hoped to find more essays about climate. Elizabeth Kolbert’s essay takes up the climate crisis, which breaks her heart while creating a storytelling crisis, discussed in How to Write about a Vanishing World, which first appeared in The New Yorker.

Solnit read a hundred essays to find twenty that published here. Reading anything of length is a solitary act, a settling into slowness and thoughtfulness, writes Solnit. And it means paying attention to what the writer thought while solitary, reflective and introspective. And from there, the reader reads in solitude, reflecting and looking inward, guided by the writer.

Five stars for Solnits essay.

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with any anthology, a few standouts and a few duds. “Obituary for Dead Languages” made me cry several times. I picked 2019 because I wanted something pre-Covid and then was quickly reminded how stressful and terrible 2018/2019 were in their own right. So that’s on me. It’ll be interesting to revisit this in like…2043 (when we’ve solved all our societal problems and reversed global warming) as an artifact of a strange and unfathomable time.

[Cookie M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really like "The Best American..." series, which gathers together some of the top writing styles in several fields each year. It is kind of like an almanac of what is happening in journalism, magazine writing, fiction and non-fiction. 2019 was a good year for essayists. The ones presented here give a good feeling for what it was like to live in our world in the late 20-teens.

[Lisa]

I was not a fan of this collection. It seems most others who didn't like this felt it was too liberal. That wasn't my issue - in general, I am having a hard time revisiting political writing from 2016-2020 or so.

[Don Gubler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some excellent selections and some that are kind of lame.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

A little time capsule into 2019– post Trump election, during Trump, pre-COVID. Rebecca Solnit’s curation doesn’t disappoint so you gotta prepare your heart. Everything from contemplating phone calls from jail, indigenous sexual violence and generational trauma to incels to the white supremacist patriarchal backlash against “wokeism”, to gun violence, climate change, bird extinction as a parallel for contemplating racism… light work. But well written across the board and beautifully assembled.

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the second year in a row that this collection was really underwhelming. A series like this is an opportunity to highlight ideas and writing that add to our understanding of the world. The problem with BAE 2019 is that the essays don't really add anything new at all and the writing is mostly just fine. In the introduction, Rebecca Solnit says that when she picked the essays for the volume, she was interested in climate change, race, gender, gender identity, and misogyny. Those are important topics and I don't have any issue with Solnit's politics, but these are not exactly marginalized issues right now. Moreover, the essays in this volume don't add anything to the discourse on these topics that hasn't been written extensively already. Maybe if a climate change denying misogynist picks up BAE 2019 with an open mind, he'll learn something, but the actual audience for this series will find it to be kind of a slog, in my view.

A lot of the essays are deeply personal reflections and usually connect a personal hardship to some kind of social or historical injustice. I value that kind of writing, but that appears to be all that Solnit thought was interesting. I also value the effort to include diverse writers. In fact, the only thing about this volume that I actually liked was that I appreciate reading the thoughts of people with whom I'd probably never get the chance to speak, particularly about their personal hardships. At the same time, I have to think that writers from historically underrepresented demographics occasionally write about topics other than themselves and their own problems. This volume is another example of how a focus on diversity of the author can accidentally lead to a bland, monotonous repetition of the same kind of idea that's told from different perspectives.

In a volume full of conventional leftist discourse about identity and oppression, there were three essays I thought were interesting: 1) "Getting it Twisted" by Jabari Asim: This was a really interesting reflection on the role of language in social justice movements; 2) "My Father Says He's a 'Targeted Individual.' Maybe We All Are" by Jean Guerrero: A story of the mental illness of the author's father and a haunting connection to surveillance by tech companies; and 3) "Guns In the Family" by Walter Johnson: This was my favorite in the volume. It is a reflection on the author's childhood in a community that loved guns and hunting. It doesn't tell you what to think about the culture of gun ownership but it's an important, and deeply under-discussed perspective of someone who grew up as someone who was supposed to inherit that culture but who instead ran away from it.

Hopefully, this series can find some more interesting material in the future.

[Oisín · Rating 3 out of 5]

A big step up from last year's edition. It is worth reading for Solnit's introduction alone, although I think reading it after reading the essays themselves is a good idea, it helped me tie up the book in my mind. The main subject-matter, if such a thing exists in such a disparate collection, is both the potential and limitations of imaginative responses to the current global situation. As Solnit emphasises in the introduction, the essay is a particularly suitable form in which to do this as it allows for the most cohesive blend of intellectual and emotional energy – combining the personal, the academic, and the political. Unlike last year's edition (which, possibly due to the freshness of the source material – the essay on the women's march was particularly dire – was inflexible and doggerel in its approach), these essays invested significantly more energy in the underlying concerns that have lead us to this point, once again underscoring the true value of the essay form, lending a discursive element to the book. I was a bit unsure if I would buy this year's edition after last year's disappointment, but I'm so happy that rather than the shut box full of pretty but arid essays of last year, I've bought a book of considerable worth and discovered a string of writers I hope to read more of soon.

[Akin · Rating 3 out of 5]

One could argue that this curation is right on the nose. One could argue that it is remarkable uncurious. Of course, two or more things can be right at the same time. (Oh, there's one contribution here that must be Sokal territory. I refuse to believe otherwise.)

[Noah Tiegs · Rating 3 out of 5]

I mean, it’s kinda hard to rate a collection of essays. Especially because I’ve never been a huge essay reader, but these were quite good! In reading them, I wondered if 2019 was like, the First Year Whomst Is Bad, or if it was just the first year I was really aware of us being in a bad place socio-politically. Like, 2019 was the year of Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, there was a lot of police violence, maybe the first year incels were really a part of the public consciousness, lots of mass shootings… yeah it was not a good time. Really really good reflections in this collection though.

Favorites: My Father Says He’s a “Targeted Individual.” Maybe We All Are; Death of an English Major; In The Maze

[Lud · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rebacca Solnit is the editor -- if you don't like her work or her 'politics', you won't like this. This is not a cheery read (for that, try the Best Food Writing compilation), but it is filled with essays that discuss the issues of the day - climate change, #MeToo, racism, gun violence, political action. My favorites were 'Obituary for Dead Languages' by Heather Atfeld; 'We Are Not the Resistance' by Michelle Alexander; and 'Rage of the Incels' by Jia Tolentino.

[Darlene Young · Rating 2 out of 5]

These are good journalistic, issue-driven essays. But I love the genre for what it can do with small things, insights into specific lives, pushing on questions. I would have liked a greater variety of types of essays.

[Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was quite disappointed with this particular essay collection. Only a few were noteworthy, in my opinion.