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The Best American Essays 2023
In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic observations of the world around them. From an inmate struggling to find purpose during his prison sentence to a doctor coping with the unpredictable nature of her patient, to a widow wishing for just a little more time with her late husband, these narratives—and the others featured in this anthology—celebrate the endurance of the human spirit.
The Best American Essays 2023 includes Ciara Alfaro • Jillian Barnet • Sylvie Baumgartel • Eric Borsuk • Chris Dennis • Xujun Eberlein • Sandra Hager Eliason • George Estreich • Merrill Joan Gerber • Debra Gwartney • Edward Hoagland • Laura Kipnis • Phillip Lopate • Celeste Marcus • Sam Meekings • Sigrid Nunez • Kathryn Schulz • Anthony Siegel • Scott Spencer • Angelique Stevens • David Treuer
The Best American Essays 2023 includes Ciara Alfaro • Jillian Barnet • Sylvie Baumgartel • Eric Borsuk • Chris Dennis • Xujun Eberlein • Sandra Hager Eliason • George Estreich • Merrill Joan Gerber • Debra Gwartney • Edward Hoagland • Laura Kipnis • Phillip Lopate • Celeste Marcus • Sam Meekings • Sigrid Nunez • Kathryn Schulz • Anthony Siegel • Scott Spencer • Angelique Stevens • David Treuer
284 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 17, 2023
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395 people want to read
About the author
Vivian Gornick
44 books1,145 followersVivian Gornick is the author of, among other books, the acclaimed memoir Fierce Attachments and three essay collections: The End of the Novel of Love, Approaching Eye Level, and, most recently, The Men in My Life. She lives in New York City.
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January 2, 2024I loved a lot of the essays here. Some favorites:
"Bidders of the Din"
"Concision: A Sprawl" (wow!!)
"We Were Hungry" (wow!!)
"Revelation at the Food Bank"
"Care Credit"
"The Americas They Left Me"
More than previous collections, I felt the editorial hand (Vivian Gornick's) in curation.
"Bidders of the Din"
"Concision: A Sprawl" (wow!!)
"We Were Hungry" (wow!!)
"Revelation at the Food Bank"
"Care Credit"
"The Americas They Left Me"
More than previous collections, I felt the editorial hand (Vivian Gornick's) in curation.
October 29, 2023
I think after the unmitigated disasters of the last few years, Atwan's choice of Gornick as an editor was a strategic decision to try to salvage the series in decline.
And for the most part, he (and she) succeed. There's a lot to love in this book--"Care Credit" is about growing up poor and 'making it' but still having to deal with the consequences of one's history. "Fat Man and Little Boy" is an essay of place and also an essay of time (how Los Alamos has changed and come to terms with its dark past). "The Americas They Left Me" is a poignant memoir of a child of a Holocaust immigrant and an Indigenous woman, and how he struggles to reconcile their views of America, and I can't name drop essays without naming "A Fist of Muscle"--a brother whose brother has just, suddenly, died too young and the struggle with grief and loss--seems like a perennial topic, but in the hands of good writers, all these topics take on powerful life.
HOWEVER and I do mean how and ever, there are two notable clods in this collection. Eliason's "Rough Ride" is a white woman trying to prove her woke bona fides, which works until you realize the actual harm that could come to Black people if she follows through her own new 'wisdom'. Frankly, I have no time for white women trying to prove how virtuous they are to any system (wokism, tradism whatever because they're all serving patriarchal ends) but I especially have no time for anyone (especially a doctor) choosing fealty to an ideology over the real harm to other people.
I also did not care for the incoherent shoggoth-shape of "Gender: a Melee". This essay is new, but the idea in it comes from, oh, about 2016--it's basically still ranting about Target bathrooms and trans people. A good essay reaches for the heart--this bypasses that, and also the brain, except the amygdala. Being angry feels *good*. However, it's not productive and certainly doesn't win anyone over. It was out of touch, poorly written, and not really written with the idea of an audience outside the bubble in mind.
It will, I suspect, be the essay that ages the least well in this collection.
What makes it especially ick is, okay, literally 2 essays after this one, which bashes white affluent feminism (college feminism as my parents termed it), is "A Thousand Gentle Smotherings" which is...a classic college feminist essay about an eating disorder tied directly to confrontations with a sexualizing patriarchy. You could have found this essay in any college literary journal in the 1990s but in 2023 everything old is new again and feminism is rediscovered?
So in about 20 pages we go from 'white feminism is awful and capitalism is awful' (gotta love a woman whose net worth is easily over $1 million ranting against capitalism) we have a 'feminism is kinda necessary because this kind of thing happens way too much to adolescent women.' Huh. HUH. Square that circle, please, Ms Gornick?
It's a good start trying to resteer the collection to something that won't age worse than an open box of Frosted Flakes. And that's been the real problem with the last two or three years of this collection--it's not that the essays were poorly written so much as they have already outlived their 'best by' date by a long shot. There's nothing tradwife or christofascist nationalist or right wing or whatever in thinking that a good essay can capture a moment, but also still speak to the eternal truths of human existence.
And for the most part, he (and she) succeed. There's a lot to love in this book--"Care Credit" is about growing up poor and 'making it' but still having to deal with the consequences of one's history. "Fat Man and Little Boy" is an essay of place and also an essay of time (how Los Alamos has changed and come to terms with its dark past). "The Americas They Left Me" is a poignant memoir of a child of a Holocaust immigrant and an Indigenous woman, and how he struggles to reconcile their views of America, and I can't name drop essays without naming "A Fist of Muscle"--a brother whose brother has just, suddenly, died too young and the struggle with grief and loss--seems like a perennial topic, but in the hands of good writers, all these topics take on powerful life.
HOWEVER and I do mean how and ever, there are two notable clods in this collection. Eliason's "Rough Ride" is a white woman trying to prove her woke bona fides, which works until you realize the actual harm that could come to Black people if she follows through her own new 'wisdom'. Frankly, I have no time for white women trying to prove how virtuous they are to any system (wokism, tradism whatever because they're all serving patriarchal ends) but I especially have no time for anyone (especially a doctor) choosing fealty to an ideology over the real harm to other people.
I also did not care for the incoherent shoggoth-shape of "Gender: a Melee". This essay is new, but the idea in it comes from, oh, about 2016--it's basically still ranting about Target bathrooms and trans people. A good essay reaches for the heart--this bypasses that, and also the brain, except the amygdala. Being angry feels *good*. However, it's not productive and certainly doesn't win anyone over. It was out of touch, poorly written, and not really written with the idea of an audience outside the bubble in mind.
It will, I suspect, be the essay that ages the least well in this collection.
What makes it especially ick is, okay, literally 2 essays after this one, which bashes white affluent feminism (college feminism as my parents termed it), is "A Thousand Gentle Smotherings" which is...a classic college feminist essay about an eating disorder tied directly to confrontations with a sexualizing patriarchy. You could have found this essay in any college literary journal in the 1990s but in 2023 everything old is new again and feminism is rediscovered?
So in about 20 pages we go from 'white feminism is awful and capitalism is awful' (gotta love a woman whose net worth is easily over $1 million ranting against capitalism) we have a 'feminism is kinda necessary because this kind of thing happens way too much to adolescent women.' Huh. HUH. Square that circle, please, Ms Gornick?
It's a good start trying to resteer the collection to something that won't age worse than an open box of Frosted Flakes. And that's been the real problem with the last two or three years of this collection--it's not that the essays were poorly written so much as they have already outlived their 'best by' date by a long shot. There's nothing tradwife or christofascist nationalist or right wing or whatever in thinking that a good essay can capture a moment, but also still speak to the eternal truths of human existence.
February 26, 2024
I'll state my complaint about this volume right up front: it tolerates the use of past participles instead of the past tense of some verbs. (sprung instead of sprang) Some folks call this North American usage. I call it illiterate.
The split in contributors this year seems to be 60/40 female to male. The term "Brooklyn" comes up a lot in the bios and texts.
In Gornick's Introduction she noted the thematic connection of her choices: "What all, however, have in common is the strong, clear sound of a narrating voice." I immediately flipped through the volume to see if that meant heavily first-person, and it does. Only one of the twenty pieces is primarily in objective third-person. I then worried that we would get just one kind of first-person confessional, which is what some folks mean by a "strong voice."
I shouldn't have worried. In fact, I was recommending the book to friends and online after finishing only the first two entries.
Those two are Ciara Alfero's "When We Were Boys" that is almost a prose poem, and Jillian Barnet's "Any Kind of Leaving." They both relate a change of perception and understanding between childhood and adulthood, and both are rather brilliant in how this is handled. I gave the first an exclam in the TOC, and the second one a triple exclam. They are worth the book.
But wait, there's more. I gave two exclams to Debra Gwartney's second essay turning on the fire that took the office of Barry Lopez, and his subsequent death. The earlier one was in a previous volume, I believe. This one is "Siri Tells a Joke."
I found Sigrid Nunez's "Life and Story" so useful that I had to extract bits of it to go into three different teaching workshops of mine. George Estreich's "Concision: A Sprawl" [I note that this may be the Year of the Title Colon. I see two in the Table of Contents, and I stopped counting at a dozen in the also-ran list in the back.] is a stitch, and goes on my Suggested List for colleagues and writing students. I adore the run-on sentence that begins one of the sections of it.
Having experienced a decade without dental insurance, I felt the pain of Angelique Stevens's oh-so-much-worse memoir of cockroaches, tooth decay, and the burdens we carry with us. I really liked its metaphorical level, as well as the scientific observations about how our teeth record our lives.
The Gerber amused, the Treuer enlightened, and I treasure the Schultz inquest into Bambi and his creator and the revelation (I had not known) that Whittaker Chambers was the main translator into English.
Which brings me to what will probably be the most controversial choice in the collection, on its own account and due to other issues. I am not informed about that, and only learned about it after I'd read the piece and tried to form an opinion. Here's all that I'm going to say. I can see why Gornick chose it, because the voice is very strong, very focused, very conflicted, and the piece packs a punch. But I felt the strong presence of pathology while reading it, though I can't be utterly sure. I see the thing as a description of a circle of Inferno, as described by a resident. There are a few Purgatorial nods to possible ways of escaping the reductionist worldview, but they are disavowed. I admire the power of the piece, but cannot tacitly endorse its claims.
The split in contributors this year seems to be 60/40 female to male. The term "Brooklyn" comes up a lot in the bios and texts.
In Gornick's Introduction she noted the thematic connection of her choices: "What all, however, have in common is the strong, clear sound of a narrating voice." I immediately flipped through the volume to see if that meant heavily first-person, and it does. Only one of the twenty pieces is primarily in objective third-person. I then worried that we would get just one kind of first-person confessional, which is what some folks mean by a "strong voice."
I shouldn't have worried. In fact, I was recommending the book to friends and online after finishing only the first two entries.
Those two are Ciara Alfero's "When We Were Boys" that is almost a prose poem, and Jillian Barnet's "Any Kind of Leaving." They both relate a change of perception and understanding between childhood and adulthood, and both are rather brilliant in how this is handled. I gave the first an exclam in the TOC, and the second one a triple exclam. They are worth the book.
But wait, there's more. I gave two exclams to Debra Gwartney's second essay turning on the fire that took the office of Barry Lopez, and his subsequent death. The earlier one was in a previous volume, I believe. This one is "Siri Tells a Joke."
I found Sigrid Nunez's "Life and Story" so useful that I had to extract bits of it to go into three different teaching workshops of mine. George Estreich's "Concision: A Sprawl" [I note that this may be the Year of the Title Colon. I see two in the Table of Contents, and I stopped counting at a dozen in the also-ran list in the back.] is a stitch, and goes on my Suggested List for colleagues and writing students. I adore the run-on sentence that begins one of the sections of it.
Having experienced a decade without dental insurance, I felt the pain of Angelique Stevens's oh-so-much-worse memoir of cockroaches, tooth decay, and the burdens we carry with us. I really liked its metaphorical level, as well as the scientific observations about how our teeth record our lives.
The Gerber amused, the Treuer enlightened, and I treasure the Schultz inquest into Bambi and his creator and the revelation (I had not known) that Whittaker Chambers was the main translator into English.
Which brings me to what will probably be the most controversial choice in the collection, on its own account and due to other issues. I am not informed about that, and only learned about it after I'd read the piece and tried to form an opinion. Here's all that I'm going to say. I can see why Gornick chose it, because the voice is very strong, very focused, very conflicted, and the piece packs a punch. But I felt the strong presence of pathology while reading it, though I can't be utterly sure. I see the thing as a description of a circle of Inferno, as described by a resident. There are a few Purgatorial nods to possible ways of escaping the reductionist worldview, but they are disavowed. I admire the power of the piece, but cannot tacitly endorse its claims.
January 19, 2025
There are some very good essays here
To me the standout is care credit by Angelique Stevens, which tells a personal story of poverty through the lens of dentistry in a way that feels deeply intimate but also places the author in the context of the archeological record.
Other essays that stood out to me:
Any kind of leaving - Jillian Barnet - what is family and what does it mean to be loved by imperfect people?
Bidders of the din - Eric borsuk - a story about friendship and surviving prison that uncovers capricious injustice along the way
Ms daylily - xujun eberlein - who are our parents without us? With a view in the process into a disturbing part of Chinese history
Revelation at the food bank - Merrill Joan gerber - very distinct voice, I could read this writer talk about anything
An archaeological inquest - Philip lopate - unexpectedly fascinating - the author looks at an old magazine and draws conclusion about the literary scene of the time, then relates this to the literary scene of the present
A thousand gentle smotherings - Celeste Marcus - this is the one I would tell people to just read. An exploration of being female and religion and food that is just stunning
A fist of muscle - Sam meekings - a poignant and unique explanation of grief that nails the universal and personal quality that the greatest essays have
Eat prey love - Kathryn Schulz - a surprisingly fascinating essay about Bambi
Dreamers awaken - Scott Spencer - the author was put in blackface for a school performance as a child. An honest account of this experience, with a sense that the adults involved knew they were doing wrong
***
Given that I name so many standouts, why only four stars? For one thing, it irritates me when people review collections by saying something along the lines of unevenness being expected. I have read collections where every piece comes after the other with a sense of revelation and discovery. There can be a flow to the editing that makes the whole experience a joy, like visiting a wonderfully curated museum.
This was a very cool museum but I didn’t quite lift off into that sense of wonder. I think what held it back was a certain density and sameness in style among the selected essays. Each one had a thickness to it that made the experience feel like walking through a landscape with little variation in gait. (There are a few exceptions to this, but this was my overall feeling). That “thickness” made it easy to bog down. More conscious variation in voice and style could have made the reading experience go more smoothly and include more excitement.
My other issue is that the forward (a major tone setter for the book) is a sort of pedantic piece about censorship and free expression that struck me oddly amid the culture wars. I think maybe the series editor was trying to plant a flag outside the culture wars and say these essays aren’t serving an agenda, but it felt like a weird note to start on.
That said I’m glad I read this and I appreciate collections like this and what they help me discover
To me the standout is care credit by Angelique Stevens, which tells a personal story of poverty through the lens of dentistry in a way that feels deeply intimate but also places the author in the context of the archeological record.
Other essays that stood out to me:
Any kind of leaving - Jillian Barnet - what is family and what does it mean to be loved by imperfect people?
Bidders of the din - Eric borsuk - a story about friendship and surviving prison that uncovers capricious injustice along the way
Ms daylily - xujun eberlein - who are our parents without us? With a view in the process into a disturbing part of Chinese history
Revelation at the food bank - Merrill Joan gerber - very distinct voice, I could read this writer talk about anything
An archaeological inquest - Philip lopate - unexpectedly fascinating - the author looks at an old magazine and draws conclusion about the literary scene of the time, then relates this to the literary scene of the present
A thousand gentle smotherings - Celeste Marcus - this is the one I would tell people to just read. An exploration of being female and religion and food that is just stunning
A fist of muscle - Sam meekings - a poignant and unique explanation of grief that nails the universal and personal quality that the greatest essays have
Eat prey love - Kathryn Schulz - a surprisingly fascinating essay about Bambi
Dreamers awaken - Scott Spencer - the author was put in blackface for a school performance as a child. An honest account of this experience, with a sense that the adults involved knew they were doing wrong
***
Given that I name so many standouts, why only four stars? For one thing, it irritates me when people review collections by saying something along the lines of unevenness being expected. I have read collections where every piece comes after the other with a sense of revelation and discovery. There can be a flow to the editing that makes the whole experience a joy, like visiting a wonderfully curated museum.
This was a very cool museum but I didn’t quite lift off into that sense of wonder. I think what held it back was a certain density and sameness in style among the selected essays. Each one had a thickness to it that made the experience feel like walking through a landscape with little variation in gait. (There are a few exceptions to this, but this was my overall feeling). That “thickness” made it easy to bog down. More conscious variation in voice and style could have made the reading experience go more smoothly and include more excitement.
My other issue is that the forward (a major tone setter for the book) is a sort of pedantic piece about censorship and free expression that struck me oddly amid the culture wars. I think maybe the series editor was trying to plant a flag outside the culture wars and say these essays aren’t serving an agenda, but it felt like a weird note to start on.
That said I’m glad I read this and I appreciate collections like this and what they help me discover
December 27, 2023
This was one of my favorite reads of the year. Some of the more notable essays from this collection were:
* Any Kind of Learning - by Jillian Barnet
* Bidders of the Din - by Eric Borsuk
* Concision: A Sprawl - by George Estreich
* Revelation at the Food Bank - by Merrill Joan Gerber
* Eat Prey Love - by Kathryn Schulz
*The Americas They Left Me - by David Treuer
I've been reading essays more recently and have come to find it a very enjoyable experience. The tiny glimpses into someone's world and the insight into their thoughts and opinions on some topic, when done well, can have a very impactful effect on me.
Not every essay in this collection spoke to me, and that's fine. I think some of the other commenters who seem to expect that are missing the point, somewhat. You don't have to necessarily like an essay to see why the author thought it was worth writing (or why the editor thought it was worth including). Hell, you don't even have to agree with the author's premise or conclusion. The point is often did it make you think more critically about the topic at hand and help you to better understand your own thoughts on the topic. I think most of these succeeded in that endeavor, several masterfully so.
* Any Kind of Learning - by Jillian Barnet
* Bidders of the Din - by Eric Borsuk
* Concision: A Sprawl - by George Estreich
* Revelation at the Food Bank - by Merrill Joan Gerber
* Eat Prey Love - by Kathryn Schulz
*The Americas They Left Me - by David Treuer
I've been reading essays more recently and have come to find it a very enjoyable experience. The tiny glimpses into someone's world and the insight into their thoughts and opinions on some topic, when done well, can have a very impactful effect on me.
Not every essay in this collection spoke to me, and that's fine. I think some of the other commenters who seem to expect that are missing the point, somewhat. You don't have to necessarily like an essay to see why the author thought it was worth writing (or why the editor thought it was worth including). Hell, you don't even have to agree with the author's premise or conclusion. The point is often did it make you think more critically about the topic at hand and help you to better understand your own thoughts on the topic. I think most of these succeeded in that endeavor, several masterfully so.
February 1, 2024
Not my favorite batch but a few stand outs. Always worth picking up.
May 13, 2024
“‘let me die with my family at least. we’re brothers almost, you and i.’”
i’m so glad i read this!! if you’re into nonfiction and memoir, i highly recommend. so many beautiful stories of the human existence and what it means to love another, to love yourself, to love and lose and love again. personal favorites include “we were hungry,” “a thousand gentle smotherings,” and “thirteen ways of listening to the rain.”
i’m so glad i read this!! if you’re into nonfiction and memoir, i highly recommend. so many beautiful stories of the human existence and what it means to love another, to love yourself, to love and lose and love again. personal favorites include “we were hungry,” “a thousand gentle smotherings,” and “thirteen ways of listening to the rain.”
November 28, 2023
Really enjoyed this essay collection that I picked up in October while visiting Yale University. It made me want to read a lot more essays and get a New Yorker subscription!
My favorite essays were:
1. Eric Borsuk’s Bidders of the Din (my top contender! Loved the concept of rebirth in prison)
2. Chris Denis’s We Were Hungry (how a McDonald’s can feel like home)
3. Xujun Eberlein’s Ms. Dailily (Lesbianism in Cultural Revolution China? Give me more😩)
4. George Estreich’s Concision: A Sprawl (I especially enjoyed this one- a meditation on the concept of concision)
5. Sam Meeking’s A Fist of Muscle (absolutely loved the narrative style)
6. Kathryn Schulz’s Eat Prey Love (the obscure history of Bambi- who knew?!)
7. Robert Anthony Siegel’s Thirteen Ways of Listening to the Rain (for its originality in prose)
Looking forward to reading the 2024 edition !
July 2, 2025
If you are someone that likes a buffet so you can try different things then Essays is for you. Here are 20 or so curated essays for sampling. Generally, they are personal experience based with a handful of observational or critical essays. I was anticipating more of the latter, but found the personal stories to be of unique interest.
The best ones for me were ones where there was a hook. For example, one starts with the line: “Did you ever have sex with another woman?”, which was asked by an 80+ year old woman to her husband of 60+ years. Or, “Dear McDonalds” - a letter from someone who had a difficult homeless, drug-addled youth and wrote to the corporation to express his gratitude.
The essays in the are all true, which renders them powerful and they run the gamut.
The most interesting observational one to me explores the history of Bambi and the original author and story.
While there is info about the authors in the appendix, I thought it would have been better to include the author info and other works at the end of each essay. That way, if I found one to be especially well-written, I could flag additional works to review or pursue.
A decent composition and an interesting collection.
The best ones for me were ones where there was a hook. For example, one starts with the line: “Did you ever have sex with another woman?”, which was asked by an 80+ year old woman to her husband of 60+ years. Or, “Dear McDonalds” - a letter from someone who had a difficult homeless, drug-addled youth and wrote to the corporation to express his gratitude.
The essays in the are all true, which renders them powerful and they run the gamut.
The most interesting observational one to me explores the history of Bambi and the original author and story.
While there is info about the authors in the appendix, I thought it would have been better to include the author info and other works at the end of each essay. That way, if I found one to be especially well-written, I could flag additional works to review or pursue.
A decent composition and an interesting collection.
September 27, 2024
I must say I’ve been wanting to read this for a long time, interested in writing essays myself but also because I enjoy reading essays, there’s something unique about them—to tell a true story, say it like it is, and marvelling at the universality of human emotions through the uniqueness of experience. And then there are those essays that challenge worldview, that pose an argument, and I must say those ones hit the mark too. And all of them, told with beautiful sentences and wit, astounded me. I loved this anthology. I have read many Vivian Gornick books so knowing she’d selected these essays sold me. I didn’t finish the 2022 anthology and thought I might not go through with this one either (a loooooot of essays) but it wasn’t that difficult, they each drew me in quite well after the first sentence. They’re brilliant, really.
December 1, 2024
there are some really beautiful essays here, essays that remind me of how much i love the form, essays that stretch the boundaries of the genre and make me want to read essays all day. there are also essays in here that bored me to tears, that felt wholly ungrounded in their own ideas that it felt like a first draft.
here are some i loved:
fat man and little boy
bidders of the din
any kind of learning
ms. daylily
siri tells a joke
here are some i loved:
fat man and little boy
bidders of the din
any kind of learning
ms. daylily
siri tells a joke
February 22, 2024
Excellent collection. The editors really knocked it out of the park with this one. I really appreciate the range of perspectives and topics covered here.
March 20, 2024
overall solid, a few some of the best i’ve ever read, a few laughably and perplexingly bad. idk if i trust vivian gornick’s taste
great:
Bidders of the Din
We Were Hungry
Revelation at the Food Bank
Siri Tells a Joke
Life and Story
Eat Prey Love
The Americas They Left Me
good:
When We Were Boys
Any Kind of Leaving
Ms. Daylily
On Aging
An Archeological Inquest
A Thousand Gentle Smotherings
A Fist of Muscle
Thirteen Ways of Listening to the Rain
Dreamers Awaken
Care Credit
not good:
Fat Man and Little Boy
The Rough Ride
Gender: A Melee
great:
Bidders of the Din
We Were Hungry
Revelation at the Food Bank
Siri Tells a Joke
Life and Story
Eat Prey Love
The Americas They Left Me
good:
When We Were Boys
Any Kind of Leaving
Ms. Daylily
On Aging
An Archeological Inquest
A Thousand Gentle Smotherings
A Fist of Muscle
Thirteen Ways of Listening to the Rain
Dreamers Awaken
Care Credit
not good:
Fat Man and Little Boy
The Rough Ride
Gender: A Melee
April 27, 2025
Pretty skippable year of essays if you ask me
July 20, 2025
A great collection of thought-provoking and informative essays.
October 27, 2024
IMO, one of the strengths of this essay collection is the diversity of ages of the writers; you have essays by Edward Hoagland (90s), Merrill Joan Gerber (80s) and Sigrid Nunez (70s). While this is a testament that people at any age can produce an essay that's worth being included in a "Best American Essays" collection, what stood out to me is that how much the style of essays have changed. Hoagland's essay "On Aging," for instance, especially felt old school, and Merrill Joan Gerber's essay "Revelation at the Food Bank" works because it was written by someone in her 80s who has accumulated decades of different life experiences.
Beyond that there were a number of essays that I really enjoyed, such as Xujun Eberlin's "Ms.Daylily," Jillian Barnet's "Any Kind of Leaving," Angelique Stevens "Care Credit," and David Treuer's "The Americans They Left Me." And with any essay collections, there were a handful I thought were underbaked, rambling and even naive; the kind of essays that make you wonder how they got chosen for inclusion in this collection.
Beyond that there were a number of essays that I really enjoyed, such as Xujun Eberlin's "Ms.Daylily," Jillian Barnet's "Any Kind of Leaving," Angelique Stevens "Care Credit," and David Treuer's "The Americans They Left Me." And with any essay collections, there were a handful I thought were underbaked, rambling and even naive; the kind of essays that make you wonder how they got chosen for inclusion in this collection.
January 7, 2024
Conclusion: I want and need to write. The couple of essays on death/grief were really really good.
August 10, 2023
Have you ever watched the sun set over the Pacific Ocean, hoping to see an elusive green flash as the sun slips into the water’s horizon? It is simultaneously painful and beautiful. Your eyes hurt from the sun’s glare, but you keep watching because you want to witness something beautiful. Reading this essay collection is like that—you are witnessing pain and beauty fused.
This year’s edition, The Best American Essays 2023, is edited by Vivian Gornick, an immensely talented memoirist, journalist and essayist with a deep understanding and appreciation for expressing the human condition. If you’re not a nonfiction writer, you might not know what a big deal it is that Vivian Gornick is the guest editor. I’ll try to explain. If Lee Gutkind is the godfather of creative nonfiction writing, then Vivian Gornick is the godmother. Her book on writing personal narrative, The Situation and the Story (2001) instructs and informs every nonfiction writer I’ve met. Her memoir Fierce Attachments (1987) was a brutally honest journey of self-discovery framed by her relationship with her mother. The things she despised in her mother were the very things that formed who she became. That feeling of contradiction is present in many of the essays Gornick selected for this year’s essay collection.
Gornick said she chose essays with real, honest voices. These stories are intimate stories of human suffering and survival. They push against pain while seeking understanding of the world in which we live.
Ciara Alfaro’s “When We Were Boys” addresses familial relationships and the dangers of being female in a voice that reminds me of Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine. Jill Barnet’s “Any Kind of Leaving” explores the meaning of care and love while being raised by flawed humans with a limited capacity to express feelings. Angelique Stevens “Care Credit” examines the ongoing burden of her childhood spent in roach-infested apartments with little to no medical or dental care.
Eric Borsuk’s “Bidders of the Din” is a story of surviving incarceration, including a horribly unfair time in solitary confinement. Kathryn Schulz’s “Eat Prey Love” delves into the horror of Bambi and the lessons in its allegory. Sylvia Baumgartel’s “Fat Man and Little Boy” is a timely essay about Los Alamos, Oppenheimer and atomic bombs.
Each year a different guest editor creates the collection from submitted essays published in literary periodicals that year. This is the last edition that Series Editor Robert Atwan will edit. He began editing The Best American Essays collection in 1985 and will pass the reins to Kim Dana Kupperman.
The fact that this collection of 21 essays has been curated by Vivian Gornick should be reason enough to read it. Gornick knows great writing. The fact that the essays are expertly crafted will make you want to re-read them.
Thank you #netgalley , #marinerbooks and #harpercollins for an ACR of The Best American Essays 2023.
This year’s edition, The Best American Essays 2023, is edited by Vivian Gornick, an immensely talented memoirist, journalist and essayist with a deep understanding and appreciation for expressing the human condition. If you’re not a nonfiction writer, you might not know what a big deal it is that Vivian Gornick is the guest editor. I’ll try to explain. If Lee Gutkind is the godfather of creative nonfiction writing, then Vivian Gornick is the godmother. Her book on writing personal narrative, The Situation and the Story (2001) instructs and informs every nonfiction writer I’ve met. Her memoir Fierce Attachments (1987) was a brutally honest journey of self-discovery framed by her relationship with her mother. The things she despised in her mother were the very things that formed who she became. That feeling of contradiction is present in many of the essays Gornick selected for this year’s essay collection.
Gornick said she chose essays with real, honest voices. These stories are intimate stories of human suffering and survival. They push against pain while seeking understanding of the world in which we live.
Ciara Alfaro’s “When We Were Boys” addresses familial relationships and the dangers of being female in a voice that reminds me of Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine. Jill Barnet’s “Any Kind of Leaving” explores the meaning of care and love while being raised by flawed humans with a limited capacity to express feelings. Angelique Stevens “Care Credit” examines the ongoing burden of her childhood spent in roach-infested apartments with little to no medical or dental care.
Eric Borsuk’s “Bidders of the Din” is a story of surviving incarceration, including a horribly unfair time in solitary confinement. Kathryn Schulz’s “Eat Prey Love” delves into the horror of Bambi and the lessons in its allegory. Sylvia Baumgartel’s “Fat Man and Little Boy” is a timely essay about Los Alamos, Oppenheimer and atomic bombs.
Each year a different guest editor creates the collection from submitted essays published in literary periodicals that year. This is the last edition that Series Editor Robert Atwan will edit. He began editing The Best American Essays collection in 1985 and will pass the reins to Kim Dana Kupperman.
The fact that this collection of 21 essays has been curated by Vivian Gornick should be reason enough to read it. Gornick knows great writing. The fact that the essays are expertly crafted will make you want to re-read them.
Thank you #netgalley , #marinerbooks and #harpercollins for an ACR of The Best American Essays 2023.
August 25, 2024
bye
my favorite essays:
we were hungry
revelations at the food bank
a thousand gentle smotherings
my favorite essays:
we were hungry
revelations at the food bank
a thousand gentle smotherings
January 21, 2024
I’m a week or two late with my annual dive into this anthology, still the best place I know to get a full load of the best creative nonfiction out there.
I have to admit that the first thing to floor me here was the Foreword by Bob Atwan whom I’ve had the chance to work with and whom I very much admire. Bob created this series 37 years ago and, in doing so, he gave a focus to the practice of essay writing that has – along with the trio of creative-nonfiction-only journals: Creative Nonfiction (now sadly gone), Fourth Genre, and Riverteeth – given the genre a new way to conceive of itself.
And Bob ends this year’s foreword with a mic drop – he’s giving up the series editorship and, I hope, writing off into the sunset.
I take consolation in knowing that he’s handing the reins off to Kim Dana Kupperman, someone I proudly call a friend, and someone who’s well qualified in temperament and skill to take over.
Still, it’s a big change, and – for me, at least – it hovers over another strong entry in this series.
I admit to a bias when I read these anthologies. I favor the personal essay, the self exploring the self, over the critical essay that explores a cultural or political phenomenon. Some years lean one way or the other. This one, thoughtfully curated by Vivian Gornick does a little of both, showing preference to personal essays that reflect larger cultural forces.
I’d say that works well; it’s Gornick giving a consistent vision of what’s possible in the essay. The result is possibly fewer that blow me away but, and this is a different barometer of success, none that make me say, “why the hell is this included?”
I see three that I really love – out of the collection where I like almost everything.
Sam Meeking’s “A Fist of Muscle” always hovers in the almost-gorgeous realm. It opens with him thinking he sees his recently dead brother walking in the grocery store, and then it moves into a meditation on the nature of the heart as a muscle. His brother was a bodybuilder whose death came as a result of heart trouble – whether as a result of that bodybuilding (something I got a hint of) or from childhood illness is never quite clear.
In the way the best creative nonfiction manages, Meekings draws us from one way of reflecting on the death to another, never settling, never letting us see this as ‘merely’ a beautiful memory or ‘merely’ a sad story. It’s always both – like the heart as muscle itself, always flexing between one state and the other, beating in its own way.
Edward Hoagland – who’s one of the old pros of the genre – gives a perfectly cluttered short piece “On Aging.” There’s not much coherence to it other than the flavor of a mind that’s spent a lot of time in reflection. It’s filled with near aphorisms, some to make you laugh and others to make you think. It’s a near mess, yet it all works.
When I finished this, I thought of what Picasso said about its taking him a lifetime to learn again to draw like a child. This has that same sensation; it has the meandering feel of someone just shooting the breeze, yet its turns of phrase and an insistent and well-worn voice hold it all together.
And Celeste Marcus, whom I’d never heard of before, offers the unsettling “A Thousand Gentle Smotherings.” In it, she describes her high school years in an orthodox Jewish setting when, coming from a less observant world into one more ‘frum,’ she worked to fit in.
As she describes herself, though, she shows the double-consciousness challenge all women face in distinguishing how they see themselves from how the world sees them. And, for Marcus, there’s the consistent and troubling fact that men seem generally to see her as sexually provocative. She tells us she did nothing to cause that; it’s just that there was something about her that suggested sex to many of the men in her orbit. (In one of many troubling moments, she’s called into the principal’s office for dressing provocatively even though she is exactly within the proper bounds – something the principal acknowledges even as he reproaches her for being…herself.)
Marcus emerges from all of this with a cool anger and a fierce pride. She does not apologize for her particular beauty – and, of course, she should not. Even more to her credit, she does not capitulate to seeing herself too fully in light of that beauty. As she ends her story, it feels like a beginning (and I have begun looking into some of her other work). She’s sharpened her mind as an instrument for sorting through not just the questions of her own identity and the cultural forces that seemed bent on shaping her but for analyzing our culture as a whole.
I see that she’s an editor with Leon Wesseltier’s new journal Liberties, and it makes me wonder (especially after reading Philip Lopate’s “An Archeological Inquest” about the Partisan Review crowd) whether she might become one of the key voices of a new wave of Jewish cultural critics.
There are a lot of other strong ones here as well. Sandra Hager Eliason’s “The Rough Ride,” George Estreich’s “Concision: A Sprawl,” Merrill Joan Gerber’s “Revelation at the Food Bank,” Debra Gwertney’s “Siri Tells a Joke,” “Angelique Stevens’s “Care Credit,” and David Treuer’s “The America’s They Left Me” all explore that space that Gornick has defined. They’re essays in a grand tradition of measuring the communal through the lens of the self.
As I say, there’s an unusual consistency to this volume of the series. Well done by Gornick, and well done – over close to four decades – by Bob Atwan.
I have to admit that the first thing to floor me here was the Foreword by Bob Atwan whom I’ve had the chance to work with and whom I very much admire. Bob created this series 37 years ago and, in doing so, he gave a focus to the practice of essay writing that has – along with the trio of creative-nonfiction-only journals: Creative Nonfiction (now sadly gone), Fourth Genre, and Riverteeth – given the genre a new way to conceive of itself.
And Bob ends this year’s foreword with a mic drop – he’s giving up the series editorship and, I hope, writing off into the sunset.
I take consolation in knowing that he’s handing the reins off to Kim Dana Kupperman, someone I proudly call a friend, and someone who’s well qualified in temperament and skill to take over.
Still, it’s a big change, and – for me, at least – it hovers over another strong entry in this series.
I admit to a bias when I read these anthologies. I favor the personal essay, the self exploring the self, over the critical essay that explores a cultural or political phenomenon. Some years lean one way or the other. This one, thoughtfully curated by Vivian Gornick does a little of both, showing preference to personal essays that reflect larger cultural forces.
I’d say that works well; it’s Gornick giving a consistent vision of what’s possible in the essay. The result is possibly fewer that blow me away but, and this is a different barometer of success, none that make me say, “why the hell is this included?”
I see three that I really love – out of the collection where I like almost everything.
Sam Meeking’s “A Fist of Muscle” always hovers in the almost-gorgeous realm. It opens with him thinking he sees his recently dead brother walking in the grocery store, and then it moves into a meditation on the nature of the heart as a muscle. His brother was a bodybuilder whose death came as a result of heart trouble – whether as a result of that bodybuilding (something I got a hint of) or from childhood illness is never quite clear.
In the way the best creative nonfiction manages, Meekings draws us from one way of reflecting on the death to another, never settling, never letting us see this as ‘merely’ a beautiful memory or ‘merely’ a sad story. It’s always both – like the heart as muscle itself, always flexing between one state and the other, beating in its own way.
Edward Hoagland – who’s one of the old pros of the genre – gives a perfectly cluttered short piece “On Aging.” There’s not much coherence to it other than the flavor of a mind that’s spent a lot of time in reflection. It’s filled with near aphorisms, some to make you laugh and others to make you think. It’s a near mess, yet it all works.
When I finished this, I thought of what Picasso said about its taking him a lifetime to learn again to draw like a child. This has that same sensation; it has the meandering feel of someone just shooting the breeze, yet its turns of phrase and an insistent and well-worn voice hold it all together.
And Celeste Marcus, whom I’d never heard of before, offers the unsettling “A Thousand Gentle Smotherings.” In it, she describes her high school years in an orthodox Jewish setting when, coming from a less observant world into one more ‘frum,’ she worked to fit in.
As she describes herself, though, she shows the double-consciousness challenge all women face in distinguishing how they see themselves from how the world sees them. And, for Marcus, there’s the consistent and troubling fact that men seem generally to see her as sexually provocative. She tells us she did nothing to cause that; it’s just that there was something about her that suggested sex to many of the men in her orbit. (In one of many troubling moments, she’s called into the principal’s office for dressing provocatively even though she is exactly within the proper bounds – something the principal acknowledges even as he reproaches her for being…herself.)
Marcus emerges from all of this with a cool anger and a fierce pride. She does not apologize for her particular beauty – and, of course, she should not. Even more to her credit, she does not capitulate to seeing herself too fully in light of that beauty. As she ends her story, it feels like a beginning (and I have begun looking into some of her other work). She’s sharpened her mind as an instrument for sorting through not just the questions of her own identity and the cultural forces that seemed bent on shaping her but for analyzing our culture as a whole.
I see that she’s an editor with Leon Wesseltier’s new journal Liberties, and it makes me wonder (especially after reading Philip Lopate’s “An Archeological Inquest” about the Partisan Review crowd) whether she might become one of the key voices of a new wave of Jewish cultural critics.
There are a lot of other strong ones here as well. Sandra Hager Eliason’s “The Rough Ride,” George Estreich’s “Concision: A Sprawl,” Merrill Joan Gerber’s “Revelation at the Food Bank,” Debra Gwertney’s “Siri Tells a Joke,” “Angelique Stevens’s “Care Credit,” and David Treuer’s “The America’s They Left Me” all explore that space that Gornick has defined. They’re essays in a grand tradition of measuring the communal through the lens of the self.
As I say, there’s an unusual consistency to this volume of the series. Well done by Gornick, and well done – over close to four decades – by Bob Atwan.
February 12, 2024
This is a superb collection of essays.
Read
January 11, 2024The Edward Hoagland essay is pure bliss. Some of the best writing there is.
June 27, 2024
Editorial choice always involves tradeoffs, and Vivian Gornick apparently decided to lean heavily into raw human accounts of aging, alienation, and poverty for a good proportion of her 2023 essay selections. Many are powerful, yet hardly subtle: they tend to club you over the head rather than slice you with a literary stiletto.
Two pieces are strong entries in the “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” category. Merrill Joan Gerber find herself furious at her aging self, as well as her husband of sixty-two years, in “Revelation at the Food Bank.” She works herself into a wonderful froth of anger, salted with humor, at the prospect of old age leaving them isolated and dependent in their small town, both comforted and oppressed by the sheer weight of all the possessions they have accumulated over the years.
Gerber shares a sense of humor with a more modest entry, “On Aging,” by Edward Hoagland, who hasn’t let blindness or infirmities deter him from his appointed rounds of writing and coping with the world. “Aging is a skid,” he writes, “and as in driving, when you turn in the direction of the slide, don’t wrench the wheel toward being a youngster again.”
For pure feminist rage, we have “A Thousand Gentle Smotherings” by Celeste Marcus, whose teenage body rebels against the oppression of men and her Modern Orthodox Jewish upbringing with starvation and anorexia. “And it was the old system of womanly impurity,” she writes, “the old myth of female responsibility for male behavior, that dictated how I interpreted those violations. Inside my own mind, I was already guilty.”
Several essays deal with the toll of poverty, especially in childhood. Jillian Barnet’s “Any Kind of Learning” is deeply moving in its portrayal of Kathleen, her impoverished nanny. Kathleen loved and cared for Jillian unconditionally, even while living in a hovel of a trailer park with an abusive husband. But the story takes an unexpected turn at the end, after Jillian has grown, which complicates the husband’s legacy, if not entirely redeeming him.
In “Care Comfort,” Angelique Stevens shrewdly depicts her unstable, hardscrabble childhood through the history of her teeth, from youthful neglect to adult humiliation. The toll of growing up on a diet of processed foods and soda proves to be a heavy and expensive one. But Stevens carries an even more visceral trauma into adulthood: a fear and disgust of cockroaches that infested several of the family homes. For Stevens, ridding herself of poverty equated with ridding herself of cockroaches, and vice versa.
“Ms. Daylily,” by Xujun Eberlein, is a delicate revelatory examination of the hidden life of the author’s mother, a school administrator who survived both China’s “Anti-Rightist” campaign in the 1950s and the traumatic Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. But her mother’s greatest secret was a hidden love affair, barely hinted at in journals salvaged by her daughter, now a teacher of creative writing in the United States.
Several purely literary exercises do make appearances. “Eat Prey Love,” by Kathryn Schulz offers a fascinating account of the origins of Disney’s “Bambi” as a bleak, even “existential” novel by Austrian writer Felix Salten. “When We Were Boys” (Ciara Alfaro) is a rhapsodic account of running wild with a gang of children, while Robert Anthony Siegel adopts a meditative stance towards communicating with his mother in “Thirteen Ways of Listening to the Rain.”
What about the essays that miss the mark, at least for me? “The Rough Ride” (Sandra Hager Eliason), a grim tale of a physician treating a woman who is a chronic alcoholic and drug abuser, never rises above the level of a medical case study. At the end, the author/doctor is futilely writing yet more prescriptions for someone who is inexorably spiraling downward, Eliason’s good intentions notwithstanding.
“Fat Man and Little Boy” (Sylvie Baumgartel), a portrayal of contemporary Los Alamos, feels like the essay of a bright high school student. Good effort but banal results: “The atomic bombs might have kept us and the Soviets safer, but they certainly didn’t keep the Japanese safer.”
Taken together, the 2023 essay edition is a memorable but mixed volume.
Two pieces are strong entries in the “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” category. Merrill Joan Gerber find herself furious at her aging self, as well as her husband of sixty-two years, in “Revelation at the Food Bank.” She works herself into a wonderful froth of anger, salted with humor, at the prospect of old age leaving them isolated and dependent in their small town, both comforted and oppressed by the sheer weight of all the possessions they have accumulated over the years.
Gerber shares a sense of humor with a more modest entry, “On Aging,” by Edward Hoagland, who hasn’t let blindness or infirmities deter him from his appointed rounds of writing and coping with the world. “Aging is a skid,” he writes, “and as in driving, when you turn in the direction of the slide, don’t wrench the wheel toward being a youngster again.”
For pure feminist rage, we have “A Thousand Gentle Smotherings” by Celeste Marcus, whose teenage body rebels against the oppression of men and her Modern Orthodox Jewish upbringing with starvation and anorexia. “And it was the old system of womanly impurity,” she writes, “the old myth of female responsibility for male behavior, that dictated how I interpreted those violations. Inside my own mind, I was already guilty.”
Several essays deal with the toll of poverty, especially in childhood. Jillian Barnet’s “Any Kind of Learning” is deeply moving in its portrayal of Kathleen, her impoverished nanny. Kathleen loved and cared for Jillian unconditionally, even while living in a hovel of a trailer park with an abusive husband. But the story takes an unexpected turn at the end, after Jillian has grown, which complicates the husband’s legacy, if not entirely redeeming him.
In “Care Comfort,” Angelique Stevens shrewdly depicts her unstable, hardscrabble childhood through the history of her teeth, from youthful neglect to adult humiliation. The toll of growing up on a diet of processed foods and soda proves to be a heavy and expensive one. But Stevens carries an even more visceral trauma into adulthood: a fear and disgust of cockroaches that infested several of the family homes. For Stevens, ridding herself of poverty equated with ridding herself of cockroaches, and vice versa.
“Ms. Daylily,” by Xujun Eberlein, is a delicate revelatory examination of the hidden life of the author’s mother, a school administrator who survived both China’s “Anti-Rightist” campaign in the 1950s and the traumatic Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. But her mother’s greatest secret was a hidden love affair, barely hinted at in journals salvaged by her daughter, now a teacher of creative writing in the United States.
Several purely literary exercises do make appearances. “Eat Prey Love,” by Kathryn Schulz offers a fascinating account of the origins of Disney’s “Bambi” as a bleak, even “existential” novel by Austrian writer Felix Salten. “When We Were Boys” (Ciara Alfaro) is a rhapsodic account of running wild with a gang of children, while Robert Anthony Siegel adopts a meditative stance towards communicating with his mother in “Thirteen Ways of Listening to the Rain.”
What about the essays that miss the mark, at least for me? “The Rough Ride” (Sandra Hager Eliason), a grim tale of a physician treating a woman who is a chronic alcoholic and drug abuser, never rises above the level of a medical case study. At the end, the author/doctor is futilely writing yet more prescriptions for someone who is inexorably spiraling downward, Eliason’s good intentions notwithstanding.
“Fat Man and Little Boy” (Sylvie Baumgartel), a portrayal of contemporary Los Alamos, feels like the essay of a bright high school student. Good effort but banal results: “The atomic bombs might have kept us and the Soviets safer, but they certainly didn’t keep the Japanese safer.”
Taken together, the 2023 essay edition is a memorable but mixed volume.
January 2, 2025
"Read a good part of this book while on a trip to Front Royal VA with the four bros for labor day weekend. Looking at this book cover reminds me of that fun trip. We watched so much Antiques Roadshow during that trip.
On the overall curation of the essays I was not terribly impressed. I felt that the overall tone of the works were small, moody, depressive, self-regarding, psychoanalytic. This is the problem I have with a lot what I read, actually. Why is it that all stories have to document a problem, or a terrible flaw in the human soul (redeemed only by love, surely). Why can't we feel hopeful, or happy, or grand? Is it because things are not hopeful and happy and grand? Perhaps. I hope you don't think I'm coming at this with a secret agenda (unless my agenda is secret to myself as well). But even if there are huge bad things to tackle at the biggest levels, isn't the general flow of life beautiful? Love, and family, and parties, and beer, and sunny days, and food, and growing things, and children. Why do we seek out the evil and magnify it? I think it may make us less actionable than we should be. Are happy people necessarily conservative, or unable to do good? I don't think so at all. I think guilt and bad feelings may inhibit good action - well, assuming your inaction is good. Anyways, that's enough musing on the state of literature. Time to turn my attention to the essays themselves.
I did have some favorites in the collection. I will discuss them here. When We Were Boys recalls the authors childhood growing up among a pack of male cousins, of which she was the only female. She recalls that feeling of unity, before the awareness of gender tore them apart. The childhood scenes were immediate and impactful, and they conveyed that sense of roving and serious play that is childhood.
Any Kind of Leaving tells the story of the authors unique relationship with a former nanny and that nanny's partner. As an adopted child, she felt drawn to a somewhat rough nanny of hers, and would often spend weeks at the nanny's trailer in the summers. The nanny's life and partner are rough around the edges but they are both vibrant in the author's retelling. Then the nanny's partner beats her nearly to death when he is drunk, and the saga ends there. Except for one surprise. Later when all is said and done, the nanny's partner leaves her a small fortune that he had hidden away. I don't normally recount plot, but this one was so fantastic and real and strange that I couldn't help but relive it. We can't choose our family, nor the gifts we inhereit from them.
Bidders of the Din tells the story of the authors imprisonment after a heist gone awry. The 2004 heist was infamous due to the perpetrators being while college males, and choosing to steal rare books from their college's library. But the story told here is of the author's imprisonment afterwards, which takes place with most of his co-conspirators. Together, they construct a course of self improvement in lieu of the education they had spurned. Somehow, the author makes jail seem fun - obstacles to be overcome and routines to comfort and solitude to clarify. The energy and vision of the author jumps off of the page.
A Fist of Muscle documents the author's grief at losing their little brother. Little brother dies as an adult from getting too much into bodybuilding and creating an unhealthy body (or maybe his heart was just too big from birth? I forget). Even though my little brother is still alive, the process of watching someone you grew up with turn into a different person from afar is something I identify with. I love who my brother is now, but to see him become something so independent of me, to watch my world change, to grow distant, is always sad. "
On the overall curation of the essays I was not terribly impressed. I felt that the overall tone of the works were small, moody, depressive, self-regarding, psychoanalytic. This is the problem I have with a lot what I read, actually. Why is it that all stories have to document a problem, or a terrible flaw in the human soul (redeemed only by love, surely). Why can't we feel hopeful, or happy, or grand? Is it because things are not hopeful and happy and grand? Perhaps. I hope you don't think I'm coming at this with a secret agenda (unless my agenda is secret to myself as well). But even if there are huge bad things to tackle at the biggest levels, isn't the general flow of life beautiful? Love, and family, and parties, and beer, and sunny days, and food, and growing things, and children. Why do we seek out the evil and magnify it? I think it may make us less actionable than we should be. Are happy people necessarily conservative, or unable to do good? I don't think so at all. I think guilt and bad feelings may inhibit good action - well, assuming your inaction is good. Anyways, that's enough musing on the state of literature. Time to turn my attention to the essays themselves.
I did have some favorites in the collection. I will discuss them here. When We Were Boys recalls the authors childhood growing up among a pack of male cousins, of which she was the only female. She recalls that feeling of unity, before the awareness of gender tore them apart. The childhood scenes were immediate and impactful, and they conveyed that sense of roving and serious play that is childhood.
Any Kind of Leaving tells the story of the authors unique relationship with a former nanny and that nanny's partner. As an adopted child, she felt drawn to a somewhat rough nanny of hers, and would often spend weeks at the nanny's trailer in the summers. The nanny's life and partner are rough around the edges but they are both vibrant in the author's retelling. Then the nanny's partner beats her nearly to death when he is drunk, and the saga ends there. Except for one surprise. Later when all is said and done, the nanny's partner leaves her a small fortune that he had hidden away. I don't normally recount plot, but this one was so fantastic and real and strange that I couldn't help but relive it. We can't choose our family, nor the gifts we inhereit from them.
Bidders of the Din tells the story of the authors imprisonment after a heist gone awry. The 2004 heist was infamous due to the perpetrators being while college males, and choosing to steal rare books from their college's library. But the story told here is of the author's imprisonment afterwards, which takes place with most of his co-conspirators. Together, they construct a course of self improvement in lieu of the education they had spurned. Somehow, the author makes jail seem fun - obstacles to be overcome and routines to comfort and solitude to clarify. The energy and vision of the author jumps off of the page.
A Fist of Muscle documents the author's grief at losing their little brother. Little brother dies as an adult from getting too much into bodybuilding and creating an unhealthy body (or maybe his heart was just too big from birth? I forget). Even though my little brother is still alive, the process of watching someone you grew up with turn into a different person from afar is something I identify with. I love who my brother is now, but to see him become something so independent of me, to watch my world change, to grow distant, is always sad. "
August 21, 2023
The Best American Essays 2023, edited by Vivian Gornick, collects twenty-one of the best essays, all of which give the reader some insight into life, often life as we may not ever experience it.
Any anthology is a representation of the editor's tastes, even when she may be open to including an essay because it is "so indisputably well written." I tend to think of this as a positive since it usually leads to a cohesion that isn't based solely on theme or topic. This collection is an ideal example. These are based, as most good essays are, on lived experience. That lived experience is always within a society, a family, and/or other imposed structures, so they reflect those structures as well as the person.
I saw someone claim there was too much grief in this collection. Don't accept such a basic overstatement and oversimplification. There is some grief here, but there is also a lot of hopefulness, another quality that same person didn't see here. We all understand narratives differently, such is the nature of humanity. When a weakness or flaw in society is highlighted through personal experience, especially that which questions one's own role, I find hopefulness as well as sadness, or in a few cases anger. When someone comes to understand something better, even if through less than events, there is a positive there. And by sharing that, it becomes a positive for all of us to grow from. Unless you insist you want just rose-colored glasses types of essays, in which case you just lament you didn't leave every essay feeling great. Go figure.
Not every essay will speak to every reader the same, so I won't claim you'll love all of them. I will say that if you approach each one with an open mind and open heart, you will be moved by all of them. Some more than others, but they all offer us the opportunity to step outside whatever our norm is and try to understand a different shading to our world. Embrace it, and maybe even think about ways to make things better, or at least not contribute to making them worse.
If you use collections, whether of essays or stories, as brief daily excursions when you don't have time to dive back into a longer work you're reading, this will be an excellent option. I found myself thinking about what I read as I went back to my other tasks or going to bed. I appreciate an essay that doesn't end for me when I finish reading.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
Any anthology is a representation of the editor's tastes, even when she may be open to including an essay because it is "so indisputably well written." I tend to think of this as a positive since it usually leads to a cohesion that isn't based solely on theme or topic. This collection is an ideal example. These are based, as most good essays are, on lived experience. That lived experience is always within a society, a family, and/or other imposed structures, so they reflect those structures as well as the person.
I saw someone claim there was too much grief in this collection. Don't accept such a basic overstatement and oversimplification. There is some grief here, but there is also a lot of hopefulness, another quality that same person didn't see here. We all understand narratives differently, such is the nature of humanity. When a weakness or flaw in society is highlighted through personal experience, especially that which questions one's own role, I find hopefulness as well as sadness, or in a few cases anger. When someone comes to understand something better, even if through less than events, there is a positive there. And by sharing that, it becomes a positive for all of us to grow from. Unless you insist you want just rose-colored glasses types of essays, in which case you just lament you didn't leave every essay feeling great. Go figure.
Not every essay will speak to every reader the same, so I won't claim you'll love all of them. I will say that if you approach each one with an open mind and open heart, you will be moved by all of them. Some more than others, but they all offer us the opportunity to step outside whatever our norm is and try to understand a different shading to our world. Embrace it, and maybe even think about ways to make things better, or at least not contribute to making them worse.
If you use collections, whether of essays or stories, as brief daily excursions when you don't have time to dive back into a longer work you're reading, this will be an excellent option. I found myself thinking about what I read as I went back to my other tasks or going to bed. I appreciate an essay that doesn't end for me when I finish reading.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
November 17, 2023
TL; DR: A lot of good writing, not a lot of good essays.
Vivian Gornick chose persona as the theme of this year’s collection, and I think she succeeded in selecting a set of unique narrative voices (her own introduction is a fantastic example of this). I didn’t love a lot of the essays as essays, but almost all of them were defined by a consistent and strong narrator. Different readers will likely take to completely different sets of essays, even regardless of content, simply because the tones are so varied. But that’s part of what makes this particular collection cool - there’s some(one)thing for everyone. I enjoyed a handful of these writers so much that I will actively be seeking out their other works.
The highlights, especially as far as voice is concerned:
● “Revelation at the Food Bank” by Merrill Joan Gerber
● “Gender: A Melee” by Laura Kipnis
● “A Thousand Gentle Smotherings” by Celeste Marcus
● “Eat Prey Love” by Kathryn Schulz
Grade: C+
Vivian Gornick chose persona as the theme of this year’s collection, and I think she succeeded in selecting a set of unique narrative voices (her own introduction is a fantastic example of this). I didn’t love a lot of the essays as essays, but almost all of them were defined by a consistent and strong narrator. Different readers will likely take to completely different sets of essays, even regardless of content, simply because the tones are so varied. But that’s part of what makes this particular collection cool - there’s some(one)thing for everyone. I enjoyed a handful of these writers so much that I will actively be seeking out their other works.
The highlights, especially as far as voice is concerned:
● “Revelation at the Food Bank” by Merrill Joan Gerber
● “Gender: A Melee” by Laura Kipnis
● “A Thousand Gentle Smotherings” by Celeste Marcus
● “Eat Prey Love” by Kathryn Schulz
Grade: C+
December 28, 2023
I love reading about the different experiences these essayists write about because there are so different from my own experience. My favorite essay is "Bidders of The Din" This essay is about how a young man's prison sentence provided him the impetus to become a short story writer. My other favorite essay is "We Were Hungry". This essay is about a McDonald restaurant can be a sanctuary for two former homeless siblings addicted to drugs.
"A Fist of Muscle" and "Siri Tells A Joke" are two essays about accepting the death of a family member. I love the sentiments in these two essays even though I have experienced the death of close family member yet. These two pieces remind me to cherish the time I spend with my family. I like the essays entitled "Life And Story" and "Concission" because they inspire me to keep writing. I don't know if I will reach the heights of success these writers have, but I think becoming a writer is a goal I can aspire to in the future.
"A Fist of Muscle" and "Siri Tells A Joke" are two essays about accepting the death of a family member. I love the sentiments in these two essays even though I have experienced the death of close family member yet. These two pieces remind me to cherish the time I spend with my family. I like the essays entitled "Life And Story" and "Concission" because they inspire me to keep writing. I don't know if I will reach the heights of success these writers have, but I think becoming a writer is a goal I can aspire to in the future.
June 10, 2024
This is a witty collection of essays with quick little lovely remarks that translate sharp, biting humor delivered in a rigorous manner. I especially like the final one, The Americans They Left Me (David Treuer), with the combination of ambivalent feelings that the author constantly juxtaposes for readers to ponder how America nurtures some but destructs the others. "We chose this country, and it saves us. This is the deal; this is the bargain."
My second favorite goes to the We Were Hungry by Chris Dennis. What a sad and painful essay that made my heart wrenched. The way he regrets what hunger has made the bumpy route to define his destiny, his precious relationship with his sister, and the deep-down craving for a lovely home that can truly take him with no doubt. A short and "bittersweet" essay that made me cry!
My third favorite is Sigrid Nunez's Life and Story. Words cannot explain my admiration for her endeavor in realizing writing in the era of the digital screen. Why do we write? In researching this question, she presented a village of writers with diverse reasons and ended with the best answer, in my opinion!
The rest of the collection shows a powerful wolfpack of writers. I like Care Credits (Angelique Stevens), Fat Man & Little Boy (Sylvie Baumgartel), and so on. Sip your latte and enjoy. The power of essay is the pain of knowing how people suffer and being stabbed by social disparities, while feeling powerless to change it :(
My second favorite goes to the We Were Hungry by Chris Dennis. What a sad and painful essay that made my heart wrenched. The way he regrets what hunger has made the bumpy route to define his destiny, his precious relationship with his sister, and the deep-down craving for a lovely home that can truly take him with no doubt. A short and "bittersweet" essay that made me cry!
My third favorite is Sigrid Nunez's Life and Story. Words cannot explain my admiration for her endeavor in realizing writing in the era of the digital screen. Why do we write? In researching this question, she presented a village of writers with diverse reasons and ended with the best answer, in my opinion!
The rest of the collection shows a powerful wolfpack of writers. I like Care Credits (Angelique Stevens), Fat Man & Little Boy (Sylvie Baumgartel), and so on. Sip your latte and enjoy. The power of essay is the pain of knowing how people suffer and being stabbed by social disparities, while feeling powerless to change it :(
November 6, 2023
I only liked two of the essays, "Revelation at the Food Bank" from Merrill Joan Gerber about old age and creeping death and "Eat Prey Love" by Kathryn Shultz about the original author and story of Bambi. The latter was the only essay in the whole collection that wasn't a personal/autobiographical essay. The rest I really couldn't stand. They're mostly sentimental. So much nostalgic writing about childhoods. And then there's the one from the guy from American Animals writing about prison life (and if you're going to include an essay about prison life, really the guy from American Animals was the BEST?), which was so out-of-place and different from all the others (and the Bambi essay) that it made it glaringly apparent how samey the rest of the essays were. Hope next year's iteration is more diverse.
November 29, 2024
The 2023 edition of this series was ok. Most of the essays were fine but unremarkable. Common themes were aging, grief and writing. There was one essay that was absolutely terrific. That one is called "Revelation at the Food Bank" by Merrill Joan Gerber whom I'd never heard of before. Gerber writes about life with her husband during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Both were in their 70 (maybe 80s?) at the time, so this one was also about aging. Gerber's essay is strange, tender, sad, and sometimes really funny. There were one or two points when I was reading that that I truly laughed out loud. She has an amazing sense of humor. Nothing else in this edition really jumped out at me though none of the essays were awful.
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