best american essays 2021 notable

The Best American Essays

Ponder life. Read an essay today.

Sunday, July 25, 2021

Richard wright.

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

Edmund Wilson

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

Eudora Welty

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

Alice Walker

John updike.

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

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

James Thurber

Lewis thomas.

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

Gertrude Stein

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

Richard Rodriguez

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

Adrienne Rich

Katherine anne porter.

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

S.J. Perelman

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

Vladimir Nabokov

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

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

N. Scott Momaday

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

H.L. Mencken

John mcphee.

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

Mary McCarthy

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

William Manchester

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

Maxine Hong Kingston

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

Martin Luther King, Jr.

William james.

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

Zora Neale Hurston

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

Langston Hughes

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

Michael Herr

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

Ernest Hemingway

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

Robert Frost

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

Loren Eiseley

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

W.E.B. Du Bois

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

Joan Didion

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

John Jay Chapman

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

Rachel Carson

Randolph bourne.

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

Saul Bellow

James baldwin.

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

Maya Angelou

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

Monday, June 21, 2021

Jane addams.

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

Henry Adams

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

Wednesday, May 19, 2021

Tracy kidder.

- The Best American Essays 1994 .

Ian Frazier

- The Best American Essays 1997 .

Edward Hoagland

- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 1999 .

Stephen Jay Gould

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

- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2002 .

Louis Menand

- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2004 .

Susan Orlean

- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2005 .

Lauren Slater

- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2006 .

David Foster Wallace

- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2007 .

Kathryn Schulz

- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 2021 .

Sunday, May 9, 2021

Bernard farai matambo.

- p. , The Best American Essays 2018 .

Greg Marshall

Emily maloney, alan lightman.

- The Best American Essays 2000 .

Steven Harvey

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

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

Friday, February 12, 2021

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

Geoffrey C. Ward

- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 1996 .

Calvin Trillin

Robert stone, scott russell sanders.

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

Phyllis Rose

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

Gregor Von Rezzori

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

Barry Lopez on Amazon

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

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

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

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

Phillip Lopate

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

Donald Hall

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

Gary Giddins

Daniel mark epstein, gretel ehrlich.

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

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

John Gregory Dunne

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

https://theamericanscholar.org/

• JOSEPH EPSTEIN .     They Said You Was High Class

The Best American Essays 1986

• John Wain .     JULIA

Southwest Review

http://southwestreview.com/

• Frederick Turner .    VISIONS OF THE PACIFIC    240

Foreign Affairs

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/

• George F. Kennan .    MORALITY AND FOREIGN POLICY    188

The New Republic

https://newrepublic.com/

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

Natural History

https://naturalhistorymag.com/

• Stephen Jay Gould .    NASTY LITTLE FACTS    161

House & Garden

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

• William Gass .    CHINA STILL LIFES    152

https://www.thenation.com/

• Kai Erikson .    OF ACCIDENTAL JUDGMENTS AND CASUAL SLAUGHTERS    116

The Kenyon Review

https://kenyonreview.org/

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

Grand Street

http://www.grandstreet.com/

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

The New York Times Book Review

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

• Julian Barnes .    THE FOLLIES OF WRITER WORSHIP    1

- p. 285, The Best American Essays 1986 .

Frederick Turner

Edward rothstein, cynthia ozick.

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

- Back Cover, The Best American Essays 1998 .

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

George F. Kennan

- p. 284, The Best American Essays 1986 .

Anne Hollander

William h. gass.

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

Robert Fitzgerald

Kai erikson.

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

Gerald Early

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

- p. 283, The Best American Essays 1986 .

Alexander Cockburn

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

How to be an Obedient Asian in America

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

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

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

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

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

Lionel Shriver

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

- p. 276, The Best American Essays 2020 .

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The Best American Essays 2021

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“The world is abundant even in bad times; it is lush with interestingness, and always, somewhere, offering up consolation or beauty or humor or happiness, or at least the hope of future happiness,” writes guest editor Kathryn Schulz in the introduction to The Best American Essays 2021 . Featuring essays by Elizabeth Alexander, Molly McCully Brown, Dawn Lundy Martin, and Wesley Morris, to name a few, this installment of the annual anthology captures writers at work during a historic year of grief and tumult. From an intimate account of nursing a loved one during the pandemic to an exploration of the political and aesthetic history of a mustache, this collection demonstrates what it is to be writing during an unprecedented time, offering readers and writers solace and inspiration through rigorous prose.  

Nonfiction Books » Essays

The best essays: the 2021 pen/diamonstein-spielvogel award, recommended by adam gopnik.

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

Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

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

Interview by Benedict King

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

Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays by Robert Michael Pyle

Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé

Maybe the People Would be the Times by Luc Sante

1 Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is she a novelist or journalist, as well?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 18, 2021

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]

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Adam Gopnik

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

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The Best American Essays 2021

A collection of the year’s best essays, selected by award-winning journalist and  New Yorker  staff writer Kathryn Schulz

“The world is abundant even in bad times,”guest editor Kathryn Schulz writes in her introduction, “it is lush with interestingness,and always, somewhere, offering up consolation or beauty or humor or happiness, or at least the hope of future happiness.”

The essays Schulz selected are a powerful time capsule of 2020, showcasing that even if our lives as we knew them stopped, the beauty to be found in them flourished. From an intimate account of nursing a loved one in the early days of the pandemic, to a masterful portrait of grieving the loss of a husband as the country grieved the loss of George Floyd, this collection brilliantly shapes the grief, hardship, and hope of a singular year.

The Best American Essays 2021 includes ELIZABETH ALEXANDER • HILTON ALS • GABRIELLE HAMILTON • RUCHIR JOSHI • PATRICIA LOCKWOOD• CLAIRE MESSUD • WESLEY MORRIS • BETH NGUYEN • JESMYN WARD and others

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The Best American Essays 2021

Description.

A collection of the year’s best essays, selected by award-winning journalist and New Yorker  staff writer Kathryn Schulz “The world is abundant even in bad times,” guest editor Kathryn Schulz writes in her introduction, “it is lush with interestingness, and always, somewhere, offering up consolation or beauty or humor or happiness, or at least the hope of future happiness.” The essays Schulz selected are a powerful time capsule of 2020, showcasing that even if our lives as we knew them stopped, the beauty to be found in them flourished. From an intimate account of nursing a loved one in the early days of the pandemic, to a masterful portrait of grieving the loss of a husband as the country grieved the loss of George Floyd, this collection brilliantly shapes the grief, hardship, and hope of a singular year. The Best American Essays 2021 includes ELIZABETH ALEXANDER • HILTON ALS • GABRIELLE HAMILTON • RUCHIR JOSHI • PATRICIA LOCKWOOD• CLAIRE MESSUD • WESLEY MORRIS • BETH NGUYEN • JESMYN WARD and others

• Kathryn Schulz - Editor
• Robert Atwan - Author

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• Release date: April 16, 2024

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• ISBN: 9780358381228
• File size: 2863 KB

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Publisher: HarperCollins

Kindle Book Release date: April 16, 2024

OverDrive Read ISBN: 9780358381228 Release date: April 16, 2024

EPUB ebook ISBN: 9780358381228 File size: 2863 KB Release date: April 16, 2024

• Formats Kindle Book OverDrive Read EPUB ebook
• Languages English

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Longreads : The best longform stories on the web

Nine Longreads Stories Recognized Across This Year’s ‘Best American’ and ‘Year’s Best’ Series

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Our team is thrilled to announce four anthology inclusions and five notable mentions across the 2021 Best American and Year’s Best series. Congratulations to the following Longreads contributors — and to all the writers featured in these editions — for their exceptional, memorable work.

The Best American Essays 2021

Notable mentions:

“ On Solitude (and Isolation and Loneliness [and Brackets]) ” by Sarah Fay

Sarah Fay reflects on four years spent in solitude (and isolation [and loneliness]), viewing it through the lens of punctuation. An adapted version of Sarah’s essay will be included in her forthcoming memoir, Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses .

“ How to Learn Everything: The MasterClass Diaries ” by Irina Dumitrescu

Irina Dumitrescu , an essayist and professor of medieval English literature, binged for six months on online courses led by celebrities like RuPaul, Anna Wintour, and Gordon Ramsay. Her piece on MasterClass is a delightful take on discovery, the power of celebrity, and learning new things.

“ Through a Glass, Tearfully ” by Maureen Stanton

This heartfelt and illuminating essay by Maureen Stanton recounts her history of crying in inappropriate moments while also considering tears from gender-based and political perspectives. Read it and weep.

“ (Who Gets to) Just Up and Move ” by Nicole Walker

In a poignant personal piece on climate change and the erasure of the Ute and Shoshone Tribes from Utah’s Salt Lake Valley, Nicole Walker beautifully contemplates the nature of migration.

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2021

Included in the anthology:

“ An Atlas of the Cosmos ” by Shannon Stirone

How do you map the entirety of the cosmos? Shannon Stirone ‘s feature explores our deep need as humans to understand exactly where we are within the vastness of space. This is the third year in a row that Shannon’s features have been included in this series; read “ The Hunt for Planet Nine” and “ Welcome to the Center of the Universe ” for more of her science writing.

The Best American Food Writing 2021

“ Soli/dairy/ty ” by Liza Monroy

“What is human responsibility to other species?” In a piece about going vegan, nursing mother Liza Monroy reconsiders the dairy cow — and questions the meaning of compassion.

Notable mention:

“ Marmalade: A Very British Obsession ” by Olivia Potts

In this charming, delightfully nerdy deep dive into a beloved fruit preserve, Olivia Potts explores why marmalade holds a central role in British life and British culture. (This piece was also shortlisted for the 2021 Fortnum & Mason Food and Drink Awards .)

The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2021

“ Out There: On Not Finishing ” by Devin Kelly

What happens if the stories we tell ourselves about our lives leave us lonely, wrestling with meaning? Poet and teacher Devin Kelly contemplates the act of running, the emptiness of accomplishment, and the loneliness of obsession.

“ Shades of Grey ” by Ashley Stimpson

In 2018, Floridians voted overwhelmingly to end greyhound racing, a sport they were told was archaic and inhumane. But what if they were wrong? Ashley Stimpson offers a fascinating, nuanced look at the controversial sport — and the future of the breed in a world without it.

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Eaton Hamilton

Best American Essays 2021 Notable!

By eatonhamilton.

Well, well, well. I came home from my kid’s house tonight to the news on twitter that my essay “The Dead Green Man,” which won Event Magazine’s cnf contest last year, is a Notable in this year’s Best American Essays, ed Kathryn Schulz. Thank you to Robert Atwan, series editor, who is the magician who makes these things happen (or so I assume)!

I should mention that this essay doesn’t appear online, so to get a copy you’d need to contact Event Magazine in BC, Canada.

I didn’t imagine this essay had a chance of being a Notable, because it’s an essay looking at guns from a Canadian’s perspective, which I thought would read as pretty naive from the US experience.

After I heard the news, I ate a late dinner I’d cooked earlier and rubbed spicy bbq sauce in my eye. Thank you very much, life, for keeping me waaaaaaay humble.

[As a point of interest for those curious, it’s really, *really* hard to see this with my deadname.]

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Awards and Accolades

National Magazine Award 2024 General Excellence: Literature, Science and Politics

PUSHCART PRIZE XLVII, 2023 EDITION Brandon Taylor, “ Colonial Conditions ” Idra Novey, “ The Glacier ” Jean Garnett, “ There I Almost Am ” Shangyang Fang, “ Satyr’s Flute ” NATIONAL MAGAZINE AWARD, Finalist 2023 ASME Award for Fiction

BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2022 Melissa Febos, “ The Wild, Sublime Body "

BEST AMERICAN POETRY 2022 Robin Myers, “ Diego de Montemayor ” Prageeta Sharma, “ Widowing ”

National Magazine Award, Finalist 2022 Jeremy Atherton Lin, " The Wrong Daddy " BEST NEW POETS ANTHOLOGY 2022 Madeleine Mori, " Tachistoscope " BEST SHORT STORIES 2022: THE O. HENRY PRIZEWINNERS Christos Ikonomou, translated by Karen Emmerich, “ Where They Always Meet ” Pushcart Prize XLVI, 2022 Edition Raven Leilani, " Breathing Exercise "

DISTINGUISHED STORIES OF 2021 Olivia Clare, “ Some Agonies Over and Over ” Brandon Taylor, “ Colonial Conditions ”

NOTABLE ESSAYS AND LITERARY NONFICTION OF 2021 Victor Brombert, “ On Rereading ” Jean Garnett, “ There I Almost Am ” Douglas Kearney, “ I Killed, I Died ” Namwali Serpell, “ Race Off: The Fantasy of Race Transformation ” Mairead Small Staid, “ What Space Is For ”

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The Essential Joan Didion

Her distinctive prose and sharp eye were tuned to an outsider’s frequency, telling us about ourselves in essays that are almost reflexively skeptical. Here’s where to start.

Credit... John Bryson/Getty Images

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By Alissa Wilkinson

Alissa Wilkinson is a movie critic at The Times. Her book “We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine” will be published by Liveright next year.

• Published April 26, 2024 Updated April 27, 2024, 3:01 a.m. ET

The Joan Didion many people know is constructed from a few artifacts the real writer left behind when she died in 2021 . There’s her much-imitated (and sometimes parodied) 1967 essay “Goodbye to All That,” about leaving New York. There’s the packing list enumerated in her essay “The White Album,” written between 1968 and 1978, which is sometimes cited as aspirational , even instructional . There are the iconic photographs of Didion taken by Julian Wasser in 1968, commissioned for a profile in Time — particularly one in which she’s smoking while leaning against her Stingray, cooler than anyone has ever been, a vibe echoed in the 2003 ad Didion shot for the fashion brand Celine . And, of course, there’s her most famous line — “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” — which opens “The White Album” and is frequently invoked, wrongly, for inspiration.

Didion was not really out to inspire us. She was looking at us and telling us what she saw, including our compulsion to weave myths for survival. Her distinctive prose and sharp eye were always tuned to an outsider’s frequency, even when she was actually an insider (as with most of her writing on Hollywood). Her essays are almost reflexively skeptical; she wrote with authority borne not so much from experience as from a refusal to give in to dogma.

And her work, which spanned well over a half-century, reads like an account of a country careering toward a cliff. Didion may be best known as the California writer who chronicled midcentury cultural decay, but her body of work is much wider and deeper. She wrote on Hollywood and Washington, New York and Sacramento, Terri Schiavo and Martha Stewart, grief and hypocrisy and Latin American politics, and somehow it all drove toward the same point: Narratives are coping mechanisms. If we want to truly understand ourselves, we have to understand not just the stories we make up together, but the tales behind them.

In the years since her death, Didion’s star has only risen, with a museum exhibit , revivals of her play , a buzzed-about estate sale and the New York Public Library’s forthcoming unveiling of her joint archive with her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, who died in 2003. In the meantime, the state of the world has felt ever more confusing, and the line between reality and make-believe more blurred. So there’s never been a better time to dip your toe — or plunge your whole self — into the work of one of the finest, most perceptive writers in American letters.

I want to start with the foundational text.

“Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968) was Didion’s second book — her first was the 1963 novel “Run River,” written in her 20s as a Vogue staffer in New York. But even though 13 books of nonfiction and four novels followed it, “Slouching,” published when she was 33, remains fundamental to Didion’s oeuvre, and helped establish her reputation as a practitioner of the New Journalism.

Like all of her collections, the book consists of essays written on assignment for a variety of outlets: The New York Times Magazine, The American Scholar, Holiday, Vogue and The Saturday Evening Post. Taken together, they start to convey a portrait of the cultural critic as a young woman, and especially her sense, nurtured from a very young age, that the world was coming apart at the seams.

The book’s title comes from one of its essays, about the decaying vibes in late ’60s Haight-Ashbury. That’s in turn plucked from a Yeats poem, quoted as an epigraph. In the preface she writes that the essay was reported and drafted in an attempt to beat a despairing writer’s block: “If I was to work again at all,” she writes, “it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder.”

Didion often spoke of writing as the way she figured out what she thought, which makes the title essay a must-read for understanding the author. But “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is a jewel chest, and the shiniest gem inside it might be “Goodbye to All That,” Didion’s classic essay about falling in and out of love with New York City.

The often-quoted “On Self-Respect,” which also appears in this collection, has a funny origin story: Didion wrote it as a Vogue staffer because the editors had put the headline on the cover without assigning a writer, and she happened to be around.

Was there a sequel?

Not exactly. But “The White Album” (1979) is kind of a follow-up to “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” though it also works all on its own. The book’s title essay is somewhat autobiographical, an account of Didion’s life in Los Angeles during the 1960s, when she and Dunne were raising their daughter, Quintana Roo, and spending a great deal of their time with movie stars and rockers. Written as a series of vignettes, the essay floats from Didion’s psychological trouble to her encounters with familiar figures — the Black Panthers, the Doors, the Manson family. There’s a sense in which the essay is responsible for the way many of us born later “remember” the late 1960s; you could spot its DNA, for instance, in certain seasons of “Mad Men,” or in Quentin Tarantino’s film “ Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood .”

On the whole, the essays in “The White Album” feel more descriptive of Didion’s life than earlier writings, but she expertly toed a fine line that made her readers (especially women) feel they knew her, even though she never really revealed a lot about herself in her writing. Other standouts in the collection include “The Women’s Movement,” which will give you a sense for Didion’s reluctance to call herself a feminist, and “Holy Water,” which becomes a personal history by way of California history.

I want to read Didion at her most vicious.

The cattiest (and thus maybe the funniest) essay Didion ever wrote was “Pretty Nancy,” a portrait of Nancy Reagan when she was the first lady of California. Didion, part of the fifth generation of a well-off Sacramento family, had absolutely no use for either Reagan from the moment the Gipper stepped into politics. For her, the Reagans became the prevailing metaphor for everything that was wrong with the American political scene, because she believed they thought, acted, campaigned and governed like Hollywood figures. “She has told me that the governor never wore makeup even in motion pictures, and that politics is rougher than the picture business because you do not have the studio to protect you,” Didion writes near the end of the profile, when the tone of irritated disdain is practically dripping off the page.

Despite inflicting a significant sting — Nancy Reagan mentions the essay in her own memoirs — “Pretty Nancy” wasn’t collected in any of Didion’s books until the final one, “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” (2021). It’s a perfect glimpse into a young, irritated writer who knew exactly what she was doing.

Did she ever get swoony?

Words like “unsparing” and “cleareyed” are usually applied to Didion’s cultural analysis, but if you want to see her in full weak-kneed mode, read the essay “John Wayne: A Love Story.” (It’s collected in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”) In 1965, she finally landed a pitch she’d been longing for: The Saturday Evening Post commissioned Didion to travel to northern Mexico, where “The Sons of Katie Elder” — a western she’d later brush off in a paragraph-long review in Vogue — was shooting. The star was John Wayne, whom Didion had worshiped since watching him in a converted aircraft hangar on the Army base where her father was stationed during World War II. He became her idea of manhood, safety, strength.

Wayne-like characters pop up across Didion’s fiction, as does her longing for the kind of security this line represented to her. But Wayne as an actual person was important to her, too. When she finally met her hero on set, he was just coming off a lung cancer scare; she mentions his “bad cold and a racking cough, so tired by late afternoon that he kept an oxygen inhalator on the set.” Famously, he’d used his diagnosis, and his tough-guy stature, to encourage people in the smoke-filled era to get screened for the disease.

John Wayne is key to Didion’s story for more than just entertainment reasons. Her political views, until well into adulthood, were sternly conservative, not as right wing as Wayne’s but nearly so — she used to announce at Hollywood dinner parties, seemingly for shock value, that she had voted for Barry Goldwater. She switched affiliations after the California Republican Party embraced Richard Nixon, but as late as the 1990s she was still saying she’d have voted for Goldwater in every election since, had he run.

Didion also ended up working in the movie industry, in one way or another, for her entire life, and it’s not hard to believe she was hooked on the business by her love of Wayne.

How much of a Hollywood insider was Didion, really?

Didion and Dunne considered themselves novelists first and journalists second, but they really paid their bills by writing and doctoring scripts. Their first produced movie was the 1971 addict drama “The Panic at Needle Park,” starring Al Pacino in his first leading role, and Kitty Winn, who won Best Actress at Cannes for the role. The pair wrote a number of scripts together, including “Play It as It Lays,” “A Star Is Born” (the Barbra Streisand one), “True Confessions,” “Up Close and Personal” and the HBO short film “Hills Like White Elephants.” If you really want a great overview of Hollywood through their eyes, you can’t do better than two of Dunne’s books: “The Studio” (1969), about life on the back lot at 20th Century Fox, and “Monster” (1997), about the travails they experienced getting “Up Close and Personal” made.

But Didion wrote about Hollywood, too. One of her most astute essays, “Hollywood: Having Fun,” was first published in The New York Review of Books in 1973, then lightly revised and published as “In Hollywood” in “The White Album.”

“Hollywood: Having Fun” is a careening tour through the wheeling and dealing of the movie business, and also a way for Didion to take out-of-touch East Coast movie critics to task. (She specifically names Pauline Kael of The New Yorker, with whom Didion had briefly shared a movie review column at Vogue. By 1973, Kael was arguably the most powerful movie critic in America; Didion airily suggests she’s full of hogwash.) Didion believes that “much of what is written about pictures and about picture people approaches reality only occasionally and accidentally,” because if you don’t experience Hollywood directly then you can’t possibly understand how the sausage gets made and, thus, understand what you’re really seeing up on the screen.

What’s clear is that, having worked as a movie critic herself for a while, she’s not particularly interested in critics’ thoughts anymore, which leads to this brilliant line: “Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lecture fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.” You said it, Joan.

What about Didion’s fiction?

Most people will tell you to read “Play It as It Lays” (1970), her second novel, and they’re not wrong. Like the screenplay version she and Dunne later wrote, Didion’s novel is a bleak tale of a melting-down actress in a tumultuous 1960s Hollywood.

But of her five novels, the best is “Democracy” (1984). Occasionally I think it might be the Great American Novel. Narrated by a journalist named Joan Didion, it’s mostly the story of Inez Victor, the wife of a Kennedy-style senator who ran a failed campaign for president. But Inez has been in love since she was a teenager with a man named Jack Lovett, whose occupation is unclear (C.I.A. agent? War profiteer?) but who, for her, represents safety. He is the John Wayne figure in the book. He can’t keep bad things away, but he can fix them.

“Democracy” ends tragically — all of Didion’s novels end tragically — yet with a note of romantic hope that turns the whole thing into a sweeping epic. You can almost hear the strings swelling.

I want to understand Didion’s politics.

Good luck. She did start out very conservative, and trended leftward into adulthood after getting fed up with Nixon and Reagan. Yet she remained very difficult to pin down. Her early work is full of takedowns of idealism on the right and the left, as if she is always looking at these matters through narrowed eyes.

But if you want to see, roughly, where she landed, then the place to go is her book “Political Fictions,” a collection of essays that had the misfortune to be published on Sept. 11, 2001. They’re mostly reporting from campaigns of figures like Michael Dukakis and Jesse Jackson, or the travails of an impeached Bill Clinton, and the eye she casts is clearly one that wears Hollywood-colored glasses. Everything in a campaign or a presidency, she writes, is carefully choreographed in much the same way as a movie set. This is a sign, to her, of political decline, a category error that renders politics as flat, useless and commodified. The candidate is a product being sold to the public, just like a movie star. Don’t miss the review of Newt Gingrich’s work in “Political Fictions,” which she manages to take apart by simply listing his metaphors and references.

Once you’re done with “Political Fictions,” pick up “Where I Was From,” published a few years later, in which Didion retreads her own work and life story. It’s a re-evaluation, after both her parents’ deaths, of the myths and ideas she absorbed as a young girl in California, and thus a re-evaluation more broadly of American myths and legends. (She does some of the same work in the slim book “Fixed Ideas: America Since 9/11,” which fiercely questions dogma that arose in the wake of the attacks and, in particular, ideas and articles published by The New York Times.)

What is one Didion essay that can’t be missed?

Didion’s most consequential essay may be “Sentimental Journeys, ” first published in The New York Review of Books in 1991 and later collected in “After Henry” (1992). It concerns the infamous case of the Central Park jogger and the railroaded confessions of the so-called Central Park Five, five teenagers wrongfully accused of the crime and sent to prison. In a full-page ad he personally paid to place in four local papers, Donald J. Trump, then a local businessman, called for their execution . In 2002, their convictions were vacated. (One of them, Yusef Salaam, is now a New York City councilman.)

In “Sentimental Journeys,” Didion comes at the case sideways, examining the stories that New Yorkers tell themselves about the city and its inhabitants. She writes about how racism distorts this story, and questions whether the jogger’s name should have been released to the public. And she explores how a single case such as this one, though hardly the only of its kind, can be wound up by the news media, politicians and opportunists into representing something much bigger and much less logical.

Her diagnosis has aged breathtakingly well. “In a city in which grave and disrupting problems had become general — problems of not having, problems of not making it, problems that demonstrably existed, among the mad and the ill and the underequipped and the overwhelmed, with decreasing reference to color — the case of the Central Park jogger provided more than just a safe, or structured, setting in which various and sometimes only marginally related rages could be vented,” she wrote. In typical Didion fashion, that could have been written yesterday.

What was she thinking about near the end of her life?

Didion’s final two decades were filled with loss. On Dec. 30, 2003, Dunne and Didion returned home from visiting their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, in the hospital, where she was in a coma. Dunne suddenly dropped dead from a heart attack. Didion told the story of her year of grief in “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), which won the National Book Award. Just before the book was published, Quintana died. Didion toured in the midst of her grief, then wrote a theatrical adaptation, which opened on Broadway in March 2007, starring Didion’s longtime friend Vanessa Redgrave as the author.

“The Year of Magical Thinking” is intense and cyclical, evoking the mind caught in a state of grief as much through its form as its content. Many who have read it in the middle of grief (including me) have found it profoundly cathartic. It’s representative of a writer who has turned her famously perceptive gaze upon herself, something she continued in “Blue Nights” (2011), which reflects on her daughter’s life.

It’s often overlooked, but as a supplement to reading these late Didion books, don’t miss her essay “ The Case of Theresa Schiavo ,” published several months before Quintana died. In it she wrestles fervently with the fate of Schiavo, a woman on life support who had become a source of national political debate. Once you know from her books what she went through while Quintana was on life support, the essay takes on a whole new meaning. Didion made the personal both cultural and political — a practice she’d honed over a storied career.

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the woman known as the Central Park jogger. She survived the attack; she was not murdered.

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Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005. More about Alissa Wilkinson

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