The Best American Essays 2020: Essays on Truth, Empathy, and Grace Selected by André Aciman

by André Aciman

A collection of the year’s best essays selected by André Aciman, author of the worldwide bestseller  Call Me by Your Name.

“An essay is the child of uncertainty,” André Aciman contends in his introduction to  The Best American Essays 2020 . “The struggle to write what one hopes is entirely true, and the long incubation every piece of writing requires of a writer who is thinking difficult thoughts, are what ultimately give the writing its depth, its magnitude, its grace.” The essays Aciman selected center on people facing moments of deep uncertainty, searching for a greater truth. From a Black father’s confrontation of his son’s illness, to a divorcée’s transcendent experience with strangers, to a bartender grieving the tragic loss of a friend, these stories are a master class not just in essay writing but in empathy, artfully imbuing moments of hardship with understanding and that elusive grace. 

The Best American 2020 Essays includes  RABIH ALAMEDDINE • BARBARA EHRENREICH • LESLIE JAMISON JAMAICA KINCAID • ALEX MARZANO-LESNEVICH • A. O. SCOTT • JERALD WALKER • STEPHANIE POWELL WATTS and others 
 

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Anthologies, 21st Century, Writing, American

336 pages, Paperback

First published October 6, 2020

About the author

André Aciman was born in Alexandria, Egypt and is an American memoirist, essayist, novelist, and scholar of seventeenth-century literature. He has also written many essays and reviews on Marcel Proust. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Condé Nast Traveler as well as in many volumes of The Best American Essays. Aciman received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, has taught at Princeton and Bard and is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at The CUNY Graduate Center. He is currently chair of the Ph. D. Program in Comparative Literature and founder and director of The Writers' Institute at the Graduate Center.

Aciman is the author of the Whiting Award-winning memoir Out of Egypt (1995), an account of his childhood as a Jew growing up in post-colonial Egypt. Aciman has published two other books: False Papers: Essays in Exile and Memory (2001), and a novel Call Me By Your Name (2007), which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won the Lambda Literary Award for Men's Fiction (2008). His forthcoming novel Eight White Nights (FSG) will be published on February 14, 2010

Reviews

[Lauryn · Rating 2 out of 5]

No shade, but Andre Aciman has the taste of an old white dude. I don’t care about old white dudes and their opinions. The best stuff in here was not by old white dudes.

[Dana Ray]

It's hard to rate a collection that included pieces I both loved and abhored.

[Nathan Shuherk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some absolute stand-out essays (that arguably make it worth reading - especially the first one), and quite a few essays that simply shouldn’t have been selected. I think that somewhat the trend of this series.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a lot of good writing, pleasurable to read and intellectually provocative, in The Best American Essays 2020, but all that starts once you have finished the odd forward by the series editor and the introduction by the volume editor. The series editor takes a spin through his thoughts on Gertrude Stein, which have little if nothing to do with the essays here, all of which are more readable than Getrude Stein's writing. The volume editor then indulges in unoriginal reflections on Machiavelli. Both editors tip their hats to Montaigne. Again, the relevance of Machiavelli and Montaigne is questionable. Of course they were great essayists, but the essays in this volume are marked not so much by greatness as by fulfilling a dictum offered by the volume editor: "This, in the end, is why an essay is always personal." And that means these are essays full of psychological intimacies, contemplation of illness and death, and the quirks of contemporary culture.

One essayist writes entertainingly about his misadventures as a bartender. A second essayist reflects on recent experiences while driving. A third essayist reports on her impressions of an exhibition of Garry Winogrand's photographs. In each case--bartending, driving, and Winogrand--the topic at hand leads back to the person with the pen. Since these are interesting people who write well, that's not a flaw, it's a strength.

One of the most provocative essays is a piece by Philip Weinstein called "Soul-Error," which he defines as "the comedy of the mind's altering relation to objects and others and events in time and space. Although this formulation is pretty abstract, not to say it is exceedingly vague, Weinstein gets at the uncanny sensation we often have of knowing one thing and yet believing another, or, as Kafka would have it, always finding ourselves in the antechamber of a greater reality, never certain that what is important in existence is within our grasp.

Critic Peter Schjeldahl writes about his aimless, feckless but highly productive journey to cultural prominence in New York. These reflections are prompted by and wrapped around the sad fact of his lung cancer. My only problem with the essay is that it was published in the New Yorker in late 2019 and as far as I can discover, Schjeldahl may still be alive in April, 2021. I don't really want to learn otherwise, but if he's still kicking, he sure has gotten a lot of mileage of his reflections on mortality.

A.O. Scott's essay, "Under the Sign of Susan," about Susan Sontag inadvertently highlights one problem with the essay as a personal vehicle. The relationship of his fascination with the Sontag mystique is pretty thin stuff. By leaving A.O. Scott out of the piece, A.O.Scott might have strengthened it. Just a thought.

And by the way, I don't think that the essay form is always, in the end, personal. They certainly can be, as these essays are, but there are innumerable great essays that skip the personal and focus on an idea, an event, a person, or an entire society.

[Sairam Krishnan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Been a big fan of the Best American books, and I really enjoyed this one too. 3 stars because the introductory essays by the editors are quite terrible, and put me off getting to the book itself for a while.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first essay is exceptional and it's still lingering in my mind. The rest are mostly good enough but I'm surprised they qualified for the Best Essays.

[Anthony · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my first reading of this compilation series. I've heard of this series from Roxanne Gay who mentioned it in a Essay Workshop course. I'm glad I picked this up.

The essays in this ranged from incredible to banal. The following were my favorite:

How to Bartend - Rabih Alameddine
Driving as a Metaphor - Rachel Cusk
Cosmic Latte - Ron Huett
Body Language - Alex Lesnevich
Was Shakespeare a Women - Elizabeth Winkler
After the Three-Moon Era - Gary Fincke
Letter to Robinson Crusoe - Jamaica Kinkaid

I've found myself thinking about How to Bartend for days after I've read it. If I could rate just these essays alone I'd give them 5/5. As far as the entire compilation, it's average with the rest of the additional essays holding them back.

Driving as a Metaphor's entire structure is also perfect. The pace, prose and stream of thoughts cements it as one of my favorite essays so far.

I'm glad I picked this up.

[Madeline · Rating 3 out of 5]

The essays from this I loved:

How to Bartend
Cosmic Latte
After the Three-Moon Era
A Street Full of Splendid Strangers
To Grieve is to Carry Another Time
Under the Sign of Susan
Ode al Vento Occidentale
Was Shakespeare a Woman?

[Patrick Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a strange mixture. I did like a lot of them but many suffered from antiquated structure and content.

[Jade · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 maybe? Hard to rate an anthology like this, as there are bound to be hits and misses. In contrast to a lot of other reviewers, I enjoyed the Forward and Introduction. I found the (however pretentious) musings on the goals of an essay to be helpful to me as a writer. I also greatly enjoyed many of the essays, pushing through others, and only getting genuinely upset at a rare few (Lionel Shriver, I’m looking at you!).
My favorites include “Driving as a Metaphor” by Rachel Cusk, “After the Three Moon Era” by Gary Fincke (a deftly lyrical essay about death and grief), Ron Huett’s “Cosmic Latte” (a heartfelt exploration of passing and race), Leslie Jamison’s “A Street Full of Splendid Strangers” (a meditation on how art can make us feel less alone), Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s “Body Language” (a well-researched and deeply personal exploration of gender), Mark Sundeen’s “Holiday Review” (a surprisingly moving essay in the form of an AirBnB), and Elizabeth Winkler’s “Was Shakespeare a Woman?” (which transformed me from a skeptic into a believer). I enjoyed many more, and I will picking up more from the series!

[Ann Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always get the best food writing, the best travel writing, and the best essays. This year the food writing was disappointing, the travel writing good, and the essays terrific. The first essay alone, "How to Bartend" by Rabih Alameddine (an author I'd never heard of and originally published in Freeman's, a magazine I'd never heard of) was worth the price of the book. And that's another good point. Some years most of the essays are from magazines I read anyway--The New Yorker, or The Atlantic--but this is a much broader collection. Even the introduction was good: "an essay is like a story, only with the difference that the author may have no idea where he is headed."

[Phil J]

This collection did not impress me. I agree with the group consensus that the first essay- How To Bartend by Rabih Alameddine- was the strongest. It was a memoir that used humor to show deeper connections.

I also read
Driving as a Metaphor by Rachel Cusk
A Letter To Robinson Crusoe by Jamaica Kincaid
77 Sunset Me by Peter Schjeldahl
Was Shakespeare a Woman? by Elizabeth Winkler

and they were all okay without doing much to stand out to me. Mostly, they were too on the nose and just so, so earnest. Some people have suggested that this collection's editor had poor taste- that may be true.

[Tanis G · Rating 2 out of 5]

As if 2020 wasn’t bad enough, André?!?! You couldn’t have thrown in just one feel good essay for good measure. Cried through the antagonizing 278 pages thinking oh god when will this end. Then just as the saddest essay I’ve ever read ends, you hit me with another one.

[Pia · Rating 2 out of 5]

A few really good pieces but way too many white dudes who assume they have something interesting to say. And why the fuck did Aciman give page space to a racist pro-Brexiter??! Ugh. So much of the volume were exercises in pretension.

[Cora · Rating 4 out of 5]

favorites:
the humanoid stain, barbara ehrenreich
after the three-moon era, gary fincke
cosmic latte, ron huett
a street full of splendid strangers, leslie jamison
77 sunset me, peter schjeldahl
my pink lake and other digressions, alison townsend
breathe, jerald walker
was shakespeare a woman? elizabeth winkler

-will read everything by schjeldahl going forward! also excited to read more jerald walker and alison townsend
-didn't think i would find myself reading an essay about someone sympathizing with an arrogant, calculating child murderer (nathan leopold) simply because he was also a birdwatcher???? way to get it so incredibly wrong, susan!!

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really loved the first 2/3 of this collection. Lionel Shriver’s essay ground that momentum to a halt and I never quite recovered after that but wow, there’s some really wonderful stuff in here.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of this depends on if you want the editor of the anthology to have one essay in many different categories or to chose a themes pick a theme that interests them and curate a collection based on a theme. Andre Aciman has done the latter which is a fine approach but he seems to be really into writing about illness and people whose children died unexpectedly. Which is as good a subject as any and he's chosen good work here. Mostly. Mostly I don't care for his choice of topic and his preferred essay style seems to be a ton of abstraction and intellectualizing and then, surprise!, we're talking about a dead kid!

Yeah, no thanks. I guess I prefer a "best of" to be a survey rather than an extension of the editor's tase.

[Dori Sabourin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two Escape Routes

In the foreward, Aciman points out that the prevailing style of nonfiction prose today seems quite the opposite of exploratory or experimental, is less interested in compositional challenges or literary playfulness and much more intent upon sustaining a sincere-sounding, unambiguous, straightforward documentation of largely painful personal narratives.

In the Introduction, Acumen tells the reader that writers write because it is their escape from a world in which they may not feel adequate enough, but it is also their way of justifying that escape, of claiming that it was their choice to banish the world, when in reality, as in Machiavelli’s case, it was the world that had banished them first. He further goes on to say: "Great writing is not the product of an outline, or of ideas that have already been fleshed out and are simply waiting to be transcribed to paper.The struggle to write what one hopes is entirely true, and the long incubation every piece of writing requires of a writer who is thinking difficult thoughts, are what ultimately give the writing its depth, its magnitude, its grace. And this is the very essence of what an essay is. If it knew where it was headed, it would be a report, not an essay; An essay is like a story, only with the difference that the author may have no idea where he is headed. An essay, as I said, embraces chaos but ultimately tames it. In the process, however—and herein lies the miracle—an essay may adventitiously uncover an idea, a truth, that only the act of writing could have propelled, because that idea or that truth did not exist before writing uncovered it—because, contrary to a foundational law of physics, something can indeed come from nothing, and the act of writing itself can ultimately generate as persuasive an idea as one that is born from research, from fieldwork, or from a well-formulated thesis. An essayist presumes that the more he discloses his own idiosyncrasies and his idiosyncratic way of seeing things, the more he mirrors the readers’ own. All an essayist says is, This is what I see, this is what I know—or think I know. But it comes from me and from how I see."

Rabih Alameddine in How to Bartend tells the reader that memory is the mother’s womb we float in as we age, what sustains us in our final days.
H
Leslie Jamison in A Street Full of Splendid Strangers contemplates how much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure . . . You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers


Andre Aciman has chosen twenty-four stories to make the reader think about what was read. As the writer writes to escape, as the author points out, the reader can also escape in the pages of The Best American Essays 2020.

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn't entirely sure what to expect from this volume when I got it: but I am now quite glad I did.

These essays cover so much ground: from deeply personal memoir to the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, and I think that's what I like most about them: they prompt reflection and thought without imposing much of what I should think. I will definitely want to buy the 2021 edition this fall!

[Fern F · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read "The Best American Essays 2020" throughout the course of January. As with every BA collection, whether or not you enjoy the selection depends on the guest editor, in this case André Aciman [who, coincidentally, I also read this month]. By and large, Aciman made a good selection: there are a lot of essays I really enjoyed (Ron Huett's Cosmic Latte, Mark Sundeen's Holiday Review, Elizabeth Winkler's Was Shakespeare a Woman?) and even more that I liked, including one that I reluctantly admired even as I found the subject matter uncomfortable (Susan Fox Rogers' The Other Leopold). And, as is natural for a collection, there are a few duds and one that made me go "really? This is amongst the best American essays published in 2019?" (It was the one bemoaning grammar). Not every essay will please you, but I finished the collection having discovered new writers and even new magazines, which is really the best you can get from a BA collection.

[Emily D’Antonio · Rating 3 out of 5]

How to bartend was by far the best essay from this year's collection. It brought out all of the emotions in me! I hate to admit that the majority of the rest were honestly mediocre...

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this was 3. 5 stars for me. This year's volume of BAE was decent but I thought it was uneven. Guest editor Andre Aciman chose primarily deeply personal and introspective works. This introduction explains that he sees the essay form of writing as being primarily for writers who are probing something personal and unresolved; a way to explore one's own thoughts while connecting with readers. That was definitely reflected in his selections. A frequent theme seemed to be people of advanced age reflecting on their lives, as well as grief and loss. Generally, the essays on these topics were thought provoking but the volume might have benefitted from a less gloomy, sad tone.

That said, there was some amazing writing in this year's volume that I think will stick with me for a while and I am increasingly drawn to thoughtful reflections on the experience of getting older and the very complex feelings that entails. For that reason, I really enjoyed "77 Sunset Me" by Peter Schejldahl, a moving and propulsive reflection of a retired art critic as he battles terminal disease. "After the Three Moon Era" by Peter Finke was another reflection of an older man on his life and the end of his father's life, but mixed in with some scientific anecdotes that border on the paranormal. "Cosmic Latte" by Larry Huet was a unique and terrific description of Huet's identity as a person of mixed racial background. Huet's matriculation to Columbia in his 30s after community college is awesome. I loved "Body Language" by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich because it vividly articulated how fulfilling it was for the writer to live as a non-binary person. Finally, my favorite might have been "Odo al Vente Occidentale" by Mark Sullivan. In this amazing, captivating essay, the writer (who I believe is a poet) describes his trip to Florence with his wife who was teaching there. He would go for jogs in a park in Florence and, during those jogs, would look for a plaque at a specific fountain, the plaque was dedicated to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who composed the poem "Ode to the West Wind" at that spot. I had never heard of this poem or Shelley before reading this essay. The poem is a favorite of Sullivan's and the essay is about the poem's evocations of mortality, inspiration, and how artists strive to go beyond human limits with their craft. The essay is beautiful and moving and I also appreciated Sullivan's jogs through Florence as a jogger myself.

I also have to give honorable mention to "Was Shakespeare a Woman" by Elizabeth Winkler. I'm not a huge Shakespeare fan but her theory about the true bard was probably the most fun I had with this collection.

Overall, it was a good year for BAE. I'm already looking forward to the next volume.

[Tibby]

Reading these collected essays made me feel extremely disappointed in my English composition education. Who knew essays could be so compelling and so diverse in form and also so personal? Who knew people write essays for a living and not novels? (This is rhetorical, I did know this, but not in such an explicit way.) This is the sort of example material we should have been reading in those classes and then modeling our own writing on. Not only is it a more attainable form of writing for most people and students (you probably have ten pages in you, but might not have 300), but also the shorter length makes for quicker reading and analysis- you'll get through more material than if you focus exclusively on novels.

Instead we read a lot of tedious old novels with white male protagonists. There are plenty of good books that fall under that category, but there are plenty more that don't. Plus the novel was held up as the ultimate goal of learning to write. Except there are incredible essays out there like the ones in this collection and I wish they had been part of the curriculum. I also don't recall learning much about essay form and it's clear there is both form and breaking with form in these essays.

There were only a couple essays in here were I wanted to skip them, but for the most part they were all engaging. I don't think this is exactly a broad swath of essay writing since the majority of the original publications are quite well known, but it was a lot cheaper than subscribing to a stack of magazines and periodicals. It also felt like a good place to start and I think I'll pick up the 2021 edition to get more.

As a librarian I know how award committees work for things like the Newbery Medal and the Caldecott, but I would be curious to know how they found and chose these essays. I agree their amazing, but how many did they have to read to find them?! Was there a committee of did the editor have to do all that reading?

[Erick · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5 stars. Favorite essays and corresponding excerpts:

RABIH ALAMEDDINE How to Bartend

"Memory is the mother’s womb we float in as we age, what sustains us in our final days."

"It never occurred to me to plan against regret... I did not die and I did not recover."

LESLIE JAMISON A Street Full of Splendid Strangers

"On the subway that summer, I found myself leaking tenderness toward the unknowable strangers sitting across from me, playing Candy Crush on their cell phones and picking up their kids’ dropped Popsicles. Someone in a church basement quoted Plato: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle,” which was not actually something Plato said. It was something a nineteenth-century Scottish minister said, but the urge to make the sentiment ancient or immutable made me love it even more."

"Perhaps Winogrand’s photos invite us not only to imagine the lives of strangers but to respect the ways these imagined lives are also, always, projections of our own. We are perpetually finding in the face of another person whatever jigsaw piece—foil or mirror—fits our needs in that moment."

STEPHANIE POWELL WATTS The Unfound Door

"When people are far away you don’t have to believe in death. Death is simply distance, a few hours in a car, a dreaded flight. When you live apart, you can believe your people live still. It is your schedules that don’t synch. Any day you will see them again."

[Patrick Pierce · Rating 4 out of 5]

4/5
I always enjoy this annual collection, and the stand-out essays for me in this one were:

Rabih Alameddine, "How to Bartend" [from Freeman's] (the AIDS epidemic killed so many people in the 80s and 90s; I want more personal histories from that time, especially ones that surprise like this one)

Gary Fincke, "After the Three-Moon Era [from Kenyon Review Online] (I wrote "whoa!" in the margins of this one at least three times.)

Leslie Jamison, "A Street Full of Splendid Strangers [from The Atlantic] (with echoes of Miranda July - "All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life—where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.")

Matthew Salesses, "To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time [from Longreads] (on memory - "To remember is not to time-travel; it is to alter how time feels.")

Mark Sundeen, "Holiday Review" [from Virginia Quarterly Review] (the dilemma of writing a negative Airbnb review)

Jerald Walker, "Breathe" [from New England Review] (The best of the collection. I've continued to think about this essay every day since I read it - precise, simultaneously fury-inducing and controlled, devastating.)

[Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve read a handful of these collections and I always feel pretty good about them after I’ve finished.

I liked this one MORE than the last few collections I’ve read. I tend to think that which ones really speak to you is going to be pretty subjective. Here, guest editor, Andre Acimam (Call Me By Your Name), spent some time with very topical issues (it IS the latest edition) and allowed a lot of pages for essays with depressing topics.

I’ve always been a sucker for depressing. Going from an essay about AIDS in the eighties and bartending to searching through family history in the generations that follow the Holocaust to an interesting parallel between cancer and John Carpenters ‘The Thing’ to the nature of time and the succumbing of your spouse to cancer.

But there’s also gender identity and racism and the things that have really risen to the forefront of the national consciousness. This volume seemed to me to be appropriately of the moment.

I really liked this one.

[Jacob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really more like three and a half stars. I liked most of these essays, only finding one to skim due to its being almost impenetrable: a lengthy, indulgent essay on inspiration paired with an exploration of a Percy Shelley poem allegedly written in Venice. Only a few took my breath away or challenged my assumptions or, surprisingly, left me emotional.

The writing here is for the most part excellent. It's my first time reading a collection from The Best American series. They put the selections in alphabetical order from the authors' last names, so there is really no pacing or sense of overall flow. I couldn't help but think that these same essays could have been better sequenced like an excellent compilation or playlist.

Some here are worth revisiting, many are worth reading. Only recommend if you like to read to appreciate the writing that goes into it due to the disparate topics but the vibrant authorial voices.

[Laurie Lisle · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a devotee of nonfiction, every year I eagerly anticipate reading the latest selections in The Best American Essays series. Various writers edit it every year, so the essays differ in substance, subjects, and styles, and I read fewer entries than usual in this edition edited by Andre Aciman. I did enjoy an essay by Leslie Jamison about how an exhibit of the black-and-white photographs of Garry Winogrand helped her through a crisis as well as a provocative piece by Jamaica Kincaid, "A Letter to Robinson Crusoe," which challenges the way white people have always regarded him. I was intrigued most of all by the well-researched last essay, “Was Shakespeare a Woman” by Elizabeth Winker, who wonders if the “dark lady” in the playwright's sonnets was Emilia Bassano, maybe his friend, lover, or even collaborator, since much material in his plays was informed and influenced by her court experiences and feminist attitudes. The volume is well worth a look.

[Janet · Rating 3 out of 5]

I often enjoy reading essays on various topics because they surprise me with perspectives or insights I don’t usually encounter. Some of the essays in this collection did that. I especially enjoyed Elizabeth Winkler’s “Was Shakespeare a Woman?” from the Atlantic. She made a compelling case for the answer Yes! What I disliked was the guest editor’s bias for English Teacher-y topics: classic literature (not just Shakespeare, but also Robinson Crusoe and Percy Shelley among others), correct grammar and punctuation, and writing in second person POV. Also, 16 of the 24 writers are male; not as glaring a discrepancy as previous editions, I’m sure, but still… This took me a long time to read because I picked it up between other books. I will probably pick up another Best American Essays edition if I see it in a Little Free Library, used book store, or Yard Sale. I might be surprised what I read!

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 3 out of 5]

It wasn't my favorite year, but I was happy to have read it, and happy to have made some new discoveries thanks to the curation of series editor Robert Atwan and guest editor Andre Aciman. Among my favorites were these: Peter Schjeldahl, "77 Sunet Me," about his battle with lung cancer, the long perspective that has allowed him to take upon his life as an art critic, husband, person; A.O. Scott, "Under the Sign of Susan," on the influence of Susan Sontag on Scott's own criticism, and a study of Sontag as critic and personality; Alison Townsend, "My Pink Lake and Other Digressions," on the nature of digression, illustrated with her own; and Philip Weinstein, "Soul-Error," about how we covet what we don't have and devalue what we do. Something in this volume is bound to sparkle for you if you let it.