A collection of the year's best essays, selected by award-winning writer Alexander Chee.

This edition, drawing from hundreds of national and regional periodicals, assembles personal essays that capture urgent private struggles during a period of national crisis.

Featured essayists, including Gary Shteyngart, Melissa Febos, and the late Anthony Veasna So, probe personal vulnerability across memoir and critique. The anthology, marking the thirty-seventh year of the series, showcases writers who examine bodily trauma and cultural inheritance.

Alexander Chee, an essayist of “virtuosity and power” (Washington Post), selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

Creative Nonfiction: Vauhini Vara prompts the artificial intelligence program GPT-3 to complete sentences about her sister’s death from Ewing sarcoma, testing whether algorithmic language can capture unvarnished grief.
Raw Honesty: Debra Gwartney recounts fleeing an Oregon wildfire with her husband, nature writer Barry Lopez, and tending to him as his final days blur into Arctic memories.
Cultural Commentary: Justin Torres traces the twenty-year history of a lost gold cross found on a Manhattan sidewalk, connecting masculine performance, family rituals, and an encounter in Berlin.
Long Form Journalism: Ryan Bradley assembles a compendium of famous disappearances and lost expeditions, pairing maritime navigation with the neurobiology of human wayfinding.
Also by This Author: How to Write an Autobiographical Novel.

Robert Atwan