The Best American Essays 2019

Robert Atwan

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781328465801
• eBook ISBN:
  9781328467119
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

A collection of the year's best essays selected by Robert Atwan and guest editor Rebecca Solnit.
"Essays are restless literature, trying to find out how things fit together, how we can think about two things at once, how the personal and the public can inform each other, how two overtly dissimilar things share a secret kinship," contends Rebecca Solnit in her introduction. From lost languages and extinct species to life-affirming cosmologies and literary myths that offer cold comfort, the personal and the public collide in The Best American Essays 2019. This searching, necessary collection grapples with what has preoccupied us in the past year—sexual politics, race, violence, invasive technologies—and yet, in reading for the book, Solnit also found "how discovery can be a deep pleasure."
  The Best American Essays 2019 includes Michelle Alexander, Jabari Asim, Alexander Chee, Masha Gessen, Jean Guerrero, Elizabeth Kolbert, Terese Marie Mailhot, Jia Tolentino, and others.

Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction of 2018

SELECTED BY ROBERT ATWAN

nitsuh abebe

Necessary Evil, The New York Times Magazine, April 8

marilyn abildskov

Scotty’s: A Brief History of Expatriate Time, Colorado Review

andré aciman

In Freud’s Shadow, Granta, #145

ellen adams

The Something I Am Telling You, Ploughshares, Winter

margaret adams

Pergelation, The Blue Mesa Review, #38

kim addonizio

How to Lose Your Brother, New Letters, 85/1

ruby al-qasem

The Girls, The Baltimore Review, 2018

hilton als

Two Sister-Poets Gone Too Soon: Ntozake Shange and My Sister, The New Yorker, November 17

beth alvarado

Los Perdidos, River Teeth, Fall

m. j. Andersen

Leaving the Paper, Politics/Letters, September 17

susanne paola Antonetta

Commensuals: Theme and Variations, The Georgia Review, Fall

Hedia Anvar

How to Build an Intellectual, Slice, Spring/Summer

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Thank You for “Condescending,” The New York Times Magazine, September 2

Sara Aranda

Into the Darkness We Go, Alpinist, Summer

Amir Ahmadi Arian

Fragments from a War-Torn Childhood, Guernica, September 12

Noga Arikha

Thoughts Made Visible, Lapham’s Quarterly, Winter

Chris Arthur

Watchwords, The Literary Review, Spring

Kendra Atleework

Power Lines Are Burning the West, The Atlantic online, May

Anna Badkhen

An Anatomy of Lostness, World Literature Today, November/December

aimee baker

Factory Girl, The Cincinnati Review, Summer

Kevin Baker

The Death of a Once Great City, Harper’s Magazine, July

Rosecrans Baldwin

My Life Cleanse: One Month Inside L.A.’s Cult of Betterness, GQ online, November 1

Nick Barrowman

Why Data Is Never Raw, The New Atlantis, Summer/Fall

Megan Baxter

A Deliberate Thing I Said Once to My Skin, The Threepenny Review, Fall

Anne P. Beatty

You Don’t Have to Be Here, Creative Nonfiction, Fall

Elizabeth Becker

Report, Crazy Horse, Fall

Gwen Benaway

Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Prism, Winter

Stephen Benz

Overlooking Guantánamo, New England Review, 39/4

Erica Berry

On Worry, Colorado Review, Fall/Winter

Wendell Berry

Wild and Domestic, Orion, Summer

Reginald Dwayne Betts

Incarcerated Language, The Yale Review, October

Sven Birkerts

White Hard Hat, Solstice, Fall

Matt Blake

The Robots Are Coming, and They Want Your Job, Vice, October

Genia Blum

Slaves of Dance, Under the Sun, #6

Michael Bogan

The Unflappable, Southwest Review, ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Introduction
• RABIH ALAMEDDINE: Comforting Myths
• MICHELLE ALEXANDER: We Are Not the Resistance
• HEATHER ALTFELD: Obituary for Dead Languages
• MARIO ALEJANDRO ARIZA: Come Heat and High Water
• JABARI ASIM: Getting It Twisted
• ALEXANDER CHEE: The Autobiography of My Novel
• CAMILLE T. DUNGY: Is All Writing Environmental Writing?
• MASHA GESSEN: Stories of a Life
• JEAN GUERRERO: My Father Says He’s a “Targeted Individual.” Maybe We All Are.
• LACY M. JOHNSON: On Likability
• WALTER JOHNSON: Guns in the Family
• ELIZABETH KOLBERT: How to Write About a Vanishing World
• J. DREW LANHAM: Forever Gone
• LILI LOOFBOUROW: Men Are More Afraid Than Ever
• TERESE MARIE MAILHOT: Silence Breaking Woman
• DAWN LUNDY MARTIN: When a Person Goes Missing
• KAI MINOSH PYLE: Autobiography of an Iceheart
• GARY TAYLOR: Death of an English Major
• JIA TOLENTINO: The Rage of the Incels
• DAYNA TORTORICI: In the Maze
• Contributors’ Notes
• Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction of 2018
• Notable Special Issues of 2018
• Read More from the Best American Series
• About the Editors
• Connect with HMH
• Footnotes