top 10 best essays ever written

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The ultimate guide to finding the best essays for your academic success.

Essays are a powerful form of expression that can captivate readers with their profound insights, emotional resonance, and thought-provoking ideas. Whether you’re a literature enthusiast, a writing aficionado, or simply someone looking for inspiration, delving into some of the best essays ever written can be a transformative experience.

From the timeless wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson to the sharp wit of Joan Didion, the world of essays is filled with gems that offer a window into the human experience. These top 10 essays have stood the test of time and continue to resonate with readers across generations, sparking conversations and inspiring new perspectives on life, love, society, and the world at large.

Join us on a journey through the literary landscape as we explore the beauty and brilliance of the best essays ever penned by some of the most celebrated writers in history. Each essay is a unique masterpiece that merits your attention and reflection, offering a glimpse into the minds of the authors and the complexities of the human condition. So sit back, relax, and prepare to embark on an enlightening voyage through the world of the best essays you need to read right now.

Must-Read Essays You Can’t Miss

If you’re looking for thought-provoking essays that will challenge your perspectives and ignite your imagination, look no further. Here are some must-read essays that will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading:

• “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson : Emerson’s essay on individualism and self-reliance is a timeless classic that encourages readers to trust their own instincts and beliefs.
• “The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B. Du Bois : Du Bois’ seminal work explores the experiences of African Americans in post-Civil War America and the concept of double consciousness.
• “Shooting an Elephant” by George Orwell : In this essay, Orwell reflects on the moral dilemma he faced while serving as a colonial police officer in Burma.
• “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau : Thoreau’s essay advocates for the importance of individual conscience and peaceful resistance to unjust laws.
• “The Myth of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus : Camus’ philosophical essay delves into the concept of existential absurdity and the search for meaning in an indifferent universe.

These essays offer profound insights into the human experience and are essential reading for anyone interested in philosophy, social justice, and personal growth.

Thought-Provoking Essays Worth Your Time

• The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
• Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
• The Death of the Moth by Virginia Woolf
• The Uncanny by Sigmund Freud
• On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
• The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes
• The Will to Believe by William James
• Politics and the English Language by George Orwell
• The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill
• The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois

Insightful Essays for Intellectual Growth

Intellectual growth is a lifelong journey, and reading insightful essays can significantly contribute to this process. The following essays offer thought-provoking perspectives and valuable insights that can inspire critical thinking and expand one’s intellectual horizons.

1. “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson : This classic essay explores the importance of individualism and self-reliance in society.

2. “On Liberty” by John Stuart Mill : Mill’s essay delves into the principles of liberty and the limits of government intervention in individual freedom.

3. “The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B. Du Bois : Du Bois’ collection of essays examines race relations and the struggle for equality in America.

4. “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf : Woolf’s essay discusses the challenges faced by women in the literary world and the importance of creative independence.

5. “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman : While not a traditional essay, Kahneman’s book explores the cognitive processes that influence decision-making and offers valuable insights into human behavior.

6. “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell : Orwell’s essay examines the relationship between politics and language, highlighting the impact of language on thought and communication.

7. “The Myth of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus : Camus’ philosophical essay explores the concept of the absurd and the search for meaning in a seemingly indifferent universe.

8. “The Fire Next Time” by James Baldwin : Baldwin’s essays confront issues of racial discrimination and social injustice in America, offering powerful reflections on the African American experience.

9. “Women Who Run with the Wolves” by Clarissa Pinkola Estés : Estés’ collection of essays explores the archetype of the wild woman and the journey of self-discovery and empowerment.

10. “The Interpretation of Dreams” by Sigmund Freud : Freud’s seminal work on dream analysis and the unconscious mind revolutionized the field of psychology and continues to influence modern thought.

Mind-Blowing Essays That Will Change Your Perspective

Are you ready to have your mind expanded and your perspective shifted? These essays are guaranteed to challenge your thinking and open your eyes to new ideas.

1. “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson’s essay challenges readers to trust in themselves and follow their own path, rather than conforming to societal expectations.

2. “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf

Woolf’s feminist essay explores the importance of independence and autonomy for women in a male-dominated society.

3. “Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau’s essay advocates for nonviolent resistance to unjust laws and government actions, inspiring generations of activists.

4. “The Opposite of Loneliness” by Marina Keegan

Keegan’s poignant essay reflects on the fleeting nature of life and the importance of cherishing every moment.

5. “The Death of the Moth” by Virginia Woolf

In this essay, Woolf contemplates the transience of life and the beauty that can be found in even the smallest moments.

6. “Consider the Lobster” by David Foster Wallace

Wallace’s essay explores the ethics of eating lobster and prompts readers to question their own consumption habits.

7. “Shooting an Elephant” by George Orwell

Orwell’s essay grapples with the moral complexities of imperialism and the power dynamics inherent in colonial rule.

8. “The Fourth State of Matter” by Jo Ann Beard

This moving essay explores themes of loss, grief, and resilience in the aftermath of a tragic event.

9. “The Myth of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus

Camus’ philosophical essay contemplates the absurdity of human existence and the search for meaning in an indifferent universe.

10. “The Solitude of Self” by Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Stanton’s essay celebrates the power of individual autonomy and self-reliance, particularly for women in a patriarchal society.

These essays are sure to challenge your beliefs, spark new insights, and leave you pondering the mysteries of life. Prepare to be amazed and inspired by the transformative power of these mind-blowing works.

Engaging Essays That Capture Your Imagination

When it comes to literature and intellectual discourse, some essays have the unique ability to captivate readers and spark their imagination. These captivating essays explore a wide array of topics, from personal reflections to societal critiques, and everything in between. Here are a few remarkable essays that are sure to inspire and engage:

1. “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson – An empowering essay that encourages readers to trust their own instincts and beliefs.

2. “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf – A feminist essay that delves into the importance of women having independence and creative spaces.

3. “Consider the Lobster” by David Foster Wallace – A thought-provoking essay that questions the morality of eating animals.

4. “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” by Joan Didion – A collection of essays that provide a poignant snapshot of American society in the 1960s.

5. “The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B. Du Bois – An insightful essay that examines the African American experience in post-Civil War America.

6. “On Photography” by Susan Sontag – A groundbreaking essay that explores the cultural implications of photography.

7. “In Praise of Shadows” by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki – An evocative essay that celebrates the beauty of imperfection and darkness.

8. “The Empathy Exams” by Leslie Jamison – A compelling essay collection that delves into the complexities of human emotions and connections.

9. “Nature” by Ralph Waldo Emerson – An enlightening essay that celebrates the beauty and power of the natural world.

10. “Slavery by Another Name” by Douglas A. Blackmon – An eye-opening essay that uncovers the hidden history of forced labor after the Civil War.

These engaging essays offer unique perspectives and insights that will leave readers pondering long after they’ve finished reading.

Inspirational Essays to Motivate and Inspire You

1. The Power of Belief: Unlocking Your Potential

Discover how belief in yourself and your abilities can lead to incredible achievements.

2. Embracing Failure: Lessons in Resilience

Learn how failure can be a stepping stone to success and how resilience can help you bounce back stronger.

3. The Path to Inner Peace: Embracing Mindfulness

Explore the benefits of mindfulness and how it can lead to a more peaceful and fulfilling life.

4. Overcoming Adversity: Finding Strength in Challenges

Find inspiration in stories of individuals who have overcome tremendous adversity and emerged stronger.

5. The Beauty of Imperfection: Embracing Your Flaws

Discover the beauty in imperfection and how embracing your flaws can lead to self-acceptance and happiness.

Entertaining Essays That Will Keep You Hooked from Start to Finish

• The Joy of Eating by M.F.K. Fisher
• On Keeping a Notebook by Joan Didion
• Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
• Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell
• Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
• How to Be an Other Woman by Lorrie Moore
• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
• Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag
• The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders
• This Is Water by David Foster Wallace

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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

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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 Ten Best American Essays Since 1950, According to Robert Atwan

in Books , Literature | November 15th, 2012 3 Comments

“Essays can be lots of things, maybe too many things,” writes Atwan in his fore­ward to the 2012 install­ment in the Best Amer­i­can series, “but at the core of the genre is an unmis­tak­able recep­tiv­i­ty to the ever-shift­ing process­es of our minds and moods. If there is any essen­tial char­ac­ter­is­tic we can attribute to the essay, it may be this: that the truest exam­ples of the form enact that ever-shift­ing process, and in that enact­ment we can find the basis for the essay’s qual­i­fi­ca­tion to be regard­ed seri­ous­ly as imag­i­na­tive lit­er­a­ture and the essay­ist’s claim to be tak­en seri­ous­ly as a cre­ative writer.”

In 2001 Atwan and Joyce Car­ol Oates took on the daunt­ing task of trac­ing that ever-shift­ing process through the pre­vi­ous 100 years for  The Best Amer­i­can Essays of the Cen­tu­ry . Recent­ly Atwan returned with a more focused selec­tion for  Pub­lish­ers Week­ly :  “The Top 10 Essays Since 1950.”  To pare it all down to such a small num­ber, Atwan decid­ed to reserve the “New Jour­nal­ism” cat­e­go­ry, with its many mem­o­rable works by Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Michael Herr and oth­ers, for some future list. He also made a point of select­ing the best essays , as opposed to exam­ples from the best essay­ists. “A list of the top ten essay­ists since 1950 would fea­ture some dif­fer­ent writ­ers.”

We were inter­est­ed to see that six of the ten best essays are avail­able for free read­ing online. Here is Atwan’s list, along with links to those essays that are on the Web:

• James Bald­win, “Notes of a Native Son,” 1955 (Read it here .)
• Nor­man Mail­er, “The White Negro,” 1957 (Read it here .)
• Susan Son­tag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” 1964 (Read it here .)
• John McPhee, “The Search for Mar­vin Gar­dens,” 1972 (Read it here with a sub­scrip­tion.)
• Joan Did­ion, “The White Album,” 1979
• Annie Dil­lard, “Total Eclipse,” 1982
• Phillip Lopate, “Against Joie de Vivre,” 1986 (Read it here .)
• Edward Hoagland, “Heav­en and Nature,” 1988
• Jo Ann Beard, “The Fourth State of Mat­ter,” 1996 (Read it here .)
• David Fos­ter Wal­lace, “Con­sid­er the Lob­ster,” 2004 (Read it here  in a ver­sion dif­fer­ent from the one pub­lished in his 2005 book of the same name.)

“To my mind,” writes Atwan in his arti­cle, “the best essays are deeply per­son­al (that does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal) and deeply engaged with issues and ideas. And the best essays show that the name of the genre is also a verb, so they demon­strate a mind in process–reflecting, try­ing-out, essay­ing.”

To read more of Atwan’s com­men­tary, see his  arti­cle in Pub­lish­ers Week­ly .

The pho­to above of Susan Son­tag was tak­en by Peter Hujar in 1966.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

30 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Fos­ter Wal­lace on the Web

by Mike Springer | Permalink | Comments (3) |

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Comments (3), 3 comments so far.

Check out Michael Ven­tu­ra’s HEAR THAT LONG SNAKE MOAN: The VooDoo Ori­gins of Rock n’ Roll

Wow I think there’s oth­er greater ones out there. Just need to find them.

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The 75+ Best Essayists Of All Time, Ranked

Vote up the absolute greatest essayists.

Michel de Montaigne

George Orwell

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Francis Bacon

James Baldwin

Samuel Johnson

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The Top 10 Essays Since 1950

Robert Atwan, the founder of The Best American Essays series, picks the 10 best essays of the postwar period. Links to the essays are provided when available.

Fortunately, when I worked with Joyce Carol Oates on The Best American Essays of the Century (that’s the last century, by the way), we weren’t restricted to ten selections. So to make my list of the top ten essays since 1950 less impossible, I decided to exclude all the great examples of New Journalism--Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Michael Herr, and many others can be reserved for another list. I also decided to include only American writers, so such outstanding English-language essayists as Chris Arthur and Tim Robinson are missing, though they have appeared in The Best American Essays series. And I selected essays , not essayists . A list of the top ten essayists since 1950 would feature some different writers.

To my mind, the best essays are deeply personal (that doesn’t necessarily mean autobiographical) and deeply engaged with issues and ideas. And the best essays show that the name of the genre is also a verb, so they demonstrate a mind in process--reflecting, trying-out, essaying.

James Baldwin, "Notes of a Native Son" (originally appeared in Harper’s , 1955)

“I had never thought of myself as an essayist,” wrote James Baldwin, who was finishing his novel Giovanni’s Room while he worked on what would become one of the great American essays. Against a violent historical background, Baldwin recalls his deeply troubled relationship with his father and explores his growing awareness of himself as a black American. Some today may question the relevance of the essay in our brave new “post-racial” world, though Baldwin considered the essay still relevant in 1984 and, had he lived to see it, the election of Barak Obama may not have changed his mind. However you view the racial politics, the prose is undeniably hypnotic, beautifully modulated and yet full of urgency. Langston Hughes nailed it when he described Baldwin’s “illuminating intensity.” The essay was collected in Notes of a Native Son courageously (at the time) published by Beacon Press in 1955.

Norman Mailer, "The White Negro" (originally appeared in Dissent , 1957)

An essay that packed an enormous wallop at the time may make some of us cringe today with its hyperbolic dialectics and hyperventilated metaphysics. But Mailer’s attempt to define the “hipster”–in what reads in part like a prose version of Ginsberg’s “Howl”–is suddenly relevant again, as new essays keep appearing with a similar definitional purpose, though no one would mistake Mailer’s hipster (“a philosophical psychopath”) for the ones we now find in Mailer’s old Brooklyn neighborhoods. Odd, how terms can bounce back into life with an entirely different set of connotations. What might Mailer call the new hipsters? Squares?

Read the essay here .

Susan Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp'" (originally appeared in Partisan Review , 1964)

Like Mailer’s “White Negro,” Sontag’s groundbreaking essay was an ambitious attempt to define a modern sensibility, in this case “camp,” a word that was then almost exclusively associated with the gay world. I was familiar with it as an undergraduate, hearing it used often by a set of friends, department store window decorators in Manhattan. Before I heard Sontag—thirty-one, glamorous, dressed entirely in black-- read the essay on publication at a Partisan Review gathering, I had simply interpreted “campy” as an exaggerated style or over-the-top behavior. But after Sontag unpacked the concept, with the help of Oscar Wilde, I began to see the cultural world in a different light. “The whole point of camp,” she writes, “is to dethrone the serious.” Her essay, collected in Against Interpretation (1966), is not in itself an example of camp.

John McPhee, "The Search for Marvin Gardens" (originally appeared in The New Yorker , 1972)

“Go. I roll the dice—a six and a two. Through the air I move my token, the flatiron, to Vermont Avenue, where dog packs range.” And so we move, in this brilliantly conceived essay, from a series of Monopoly games to a decaying Atlantic City, the once renowned resort town that inspired America’s most popular board game. As the games progress and as properties are rapidly snapped up, McPhee juxtaposes the well-known sites on the board—Atlantic Avenue, Park Place—with actual visits to their crumbling locations. He goes to jail, not just in the game but in fact, portraying what life has now become in a city that in better days was a Boardwalk Empire. At essay’s end, he finds the elusive Marvin Gardens. The essay was collected in Pieces of the Frame (1975).

Read the essay here (subscription required).

Joan Didion, "The White Album" (originally appeared in New West , 1979)

Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and the Black Panthers, a recording session with Jim Morrison and the Doors, the San Francisco State riots, the Manson murders—all of these, and much more, figure prominently in Didion’s brilliant mosaic distillation (or phantasmagoric album) of California life in the late 1960s. Yet despite a cast of characters larger than most Hollywood epics, “The White Album” is a highly personal essay, right down to Didion’s report of her psychiatric tests as an outpatient in a Santa Monica hospital in the summer of 1968. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” the essay famously begins, and as it progresses nervously through cuts and flashes of reportage, with transcripts, interviews, and testimonies, we realize that all of our stories are questionable, “the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.” Portions of the essay appeared in installments in 1968-69 but it wasn’t until 1979 that Didion published the complete essay in New West magazine; it then became the lead essay of her book, The White Album (1979).

Annie Dillard, "Total Eclipse" (originally appeared in Antaeus , 1982)

In her introduction to The Best American Essays 1988 , Annie Dillard claims that “The essay can do everything a poem can do, and everything a short story can do—everything but fake it.” Her essay “Total Eclipse” easily makes her case for the imaginative power of a genre that is still undervalued as a branch of imaginative literature. “Total Eclipse” has it all—the climactic intensity of short fiction, the interwoven imagery of poetry, and the meditative dynamics of the personal essay: “This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds.” The essay, which first appeared in Antaeus in 1982 was collected in Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982), a slim volume that ranks among the best essay collections of the past fifty years.

Phillip Lopate, "Against Joie de Vivre" (originally appeared in Ploughshares , 1986)

This is an essay that made me glad I’d started The Best American Essays the year before. I’d been looking for essays that grew out of a vibrant Montaignean spirit—personal essays that were witty, conversational, reflective, confessional, and yet always about something worth discussing. And here was exactly what I’d been looking for. I might have found such writing several decades earlier but in the 80s it was relatively rare; Lopate had found a creative way to insert the old familiar essay into the contemporary world: “Over the years,” Lopate begins, “I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre , the knack of knowing how to live.” He goes on to dissect in comic yet astute detail the rituals of the modern dinner party. The essay was selected by Gay Talese for The Best American Essays 1987 and collected in Against Joie de Vivre in 1989 .

Edward Hoagland, "Heaven and Nature" (originally appeared in Harper’s, 1988)

“The best essayist of my generation,” is how John Updike described Edward Hoagland, who must be one of the most prolific essayists of our time as well. “Essays,” Hoagland wrote, “are how we speak to one another in print—caroming thoughts not merely in order to convey a certain packet of information, but with a special edge or bounce of personal character in a kind of public letter.” I could easily have selected many other Hoagland essays for this list (such as “The Courage of Turtles”), but I’m especially fond of “Heaven and Nature,” which shows Hoagland at his best, balancing the public and private, the well-crafted general observation with the clinching vivid example. The essay, selected by Geoffrey Wolff for The Best American Essays 1989 and collected in Heart’s Desire (1988), is an unforgettable meditation not so much on suicide as on how we remarkably manage to stay alive.

Jo Ann Beard, "The Fourth State of Matter" (originally appeared in The New Yorker , 1996)

A question for nonfiction writing students: When writing a true story based on actual events, how does the narrator create dramatic tension when most readers can be expected to know what happens in the end? To see how skillfully this can be done turn to Jo Ann Beard’s astonishing personal story about a graduate student’s murderous rampage on the University of Iowa campus in 1991. “Plasma is the fourth state of matter,” writes Beard, who worked in the U of I’s physics department at the time of the incident, “You’ve got your solid, your liquid, your gas, and there’s your plasma. In outer space there’s the plasmasphere and the plasmapause.” Besides plasma, in this emotion-packed essay you will find entangled in all the tension a lovable, dying collie, invasive squirrels, an estranged husband, the seriously disturbed gunman, and his victims, one of them among the author’s dearest friends. Selected by Ian Frazier for The Best American Essays 1997 , the essay was collected in Beard’s award-winning volume, The Boys of My Youth (1998).

David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster" (originally appeared in Gourmet , 2004)

They may at first look like magazine articles—those factually-driven, expansive pieces on the Illinois State Fair, a luxury cruise ship, the adult video awards, or John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign—but once you uncover the disguise and get inside them you are in the midst of essayistic genius. One of David Foster Wallace’s shortest and most essayistic is his “coverage” of the annual Maine Lobster Festival, “Consider the Lobster.” The Festival becomes much more than an occasion to observe “the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker” in action as Wallace poses an uncomfortable question to readers of the upscale food magazine: “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” Don’t gloss over the footnotes. Susan Orlean selected the essay for The Best American Essays 2004 and Wallace collected it in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (2005).

Read the essay here . (Note: the electronic version from Gourmet magazine’s archives differs from the essay that appears in The Best American Essays and in his book, Consider the Lobster. )

I wish I could include twenty more essays but these ten in themselves comprise a wonderful and wide-ranging mini-anthology, one that showcases some of the most outstanding literary voices of our time. Readers who’d like to see more of the best essays since 1950 should take a look at The Best American Essays of the Century (2000).

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50 Must-Read Contemporary Essay Collections

Liberty Hardy

Liberty Hardy is an unrepentant velocireader, writer, bitey mad lady, and tattoo canvas. Turn-ons include books, books and books. Her favorite exclamation is “Holy cats!” Liberty reads more than should be legal, sleeps very little, frequently writes on her belly with Sharpie markers, and when she dies, she’s leaving her body to library science. Until then, she lives with her three cats, Millay, Farrokh, and Zevon, in Maine. She is also right behind you. Just kidding! She’s too busy reading. Twitter: @MissLiberty

View All posts by Liberty Hardy

I feel like essay collections don’t get enough credit. They’re so wonderful! They’re like short story collections, but TRUE. It’s like going to a truth buffet. You can get information about sooooo many topics, sometimes in one single book! To prove that there are a zillion amazing essay collections out there, I compiled 50 great contemporary essay collections, just from the last 18 months alone.  Ranging in topics from food, nature, politics, sex, celebrity, and more, there is something here for everyone!

I’ve included a brief description from the publisher with each title. Tell us in the comments about which of these you’ve read or other contemporary essay collections that you love. There are a LOT of them. Yay, books!

Must-Read Contemporary Essay Collections

They can’t kill us until they kill us  by hanif abdurraqib.

“In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib’s is a voice that matters. Whether he’s attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown’s grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy and magnetism that resonates profoundly.”

Would Everybody Please Stop?: Reflections on Life and Other Bad Ideas  by Jenny Allen

“Jenny Allen’s musings range fluidly from the personal to the philosophical. She writes with the familiarity of someone telling a dinner party anecdote, forgoing decorum for candor and comedy. To read  Would Everybody Please Stop?  is to experience life with imaginative and incisive humor.”

Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds  by Yemisi Aribisala

“A sumptuous menu of essays about Nigerian cuisine, lovingly presented by the nation’s top epicurean writer. As well as a mouth-watering appraisal of Nigerian food,  Longthroat Memoirs  is a series of love letters to the Nigerian palate. From the cultural history of soup, to fish as aphrodisiac and the sensual allure of snails,  Longthroat Memoirs  explores the complexities, the meticulousness, and the tactile joy of Nigerian gastronomy.”

Beyond Measure: Essays  by Rachel Z. Arndt

“ Beyond Measure  is a fascinating exploration of the rituals, routines, metrics and expectations through which we attempt to quantify and ascribe value to our lives. With mordant humor and penetrating intellect, Arndt casts her gaze beyond event-driven narratives to the machinery underlying them: judo competitions measured in weigh-ins and wait times; the significance of the elliptical’s stationary churn; the rote scripts of dating apps; the stupefying sameness of the daily commute.”

Magic Hours  by Tom Bissell

“Award-winning essayist Tom Bissell explores the highs and lows of the creative process. He takes us from the set of  The Big Bang Theory  to the first novel of Ernest Hemingway to the final work of David Foster Wallace; from the films of Werner Herzog to the film of Tommy Wiseau to the editorial meeting in which Paula Fox’s work was relaunched into the world. Originally published in magazines such as  The Believer ,  The New Yorker , and  Harper’s , these essays represent ten years of Bissell’s best writing on every aspect of creation—be it Iraq War documentaries or video-game character voices—and will provoke as much thought as they do laughter.”

Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession  by Alice Bolin

“In this poignant collection, Alice Bolin examines iconic American works from the essays of Joan Didion and James Baldwin to  Twin Peaks , Britney Spears, and  Serial , illuminating the widespread obsession with women who are abused, killed, and disenfranchised, and whose bodies (dead and alive) are used as props to bolster men’s stories. Smart and accessible, thoughtful and heartfelt, Bolin investigates the implications of our cultural fixations, and her own role as a consumer and creator.”

Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life  by Jenny Boully

“Jenny Boully’s essays are ripe with romance and sensual pleasures, drawing connections between the digression, reflection, imagination, and experience that characterizes falling in love as well as the life of a writer. Literary theory, philosophy, and linguistics rub up against memory, dreamscapes, and fancy, making the practice of writing a metaphor for the illusory nature of experience.  Betwixt and Between  is, in many ways, simply a book about how to live.”

Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give by Ada Calhoun

“In  Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give , Ada Calhoun presents an unflinching but also loving portrait of her own marriage, opening a long-overdue conversation about the institution as it truly is: not the happy ending of a love story or a relic doomed by high divorce rates, but the beginning of a challenging new chapter of which ‘the first twenty years are the hardest.'”

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays  by Alexander Chee

“ How to Write an Autobiographical Novel  is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation’s history, including his father’s death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing—Tarot-reading, bookselling, cater-waiting for William F. Buckley—the writing of his first novel,  Edinburgh , and the election of Donald Trump.”

Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays  by Durga Chew-Bose

“ Too Much and Not the Mood is a beautiful and surprising exploration of what it means to be a first-generation, creative young woman working today. On April 11, 1931, Virginia Woolf ended her entry in A Writer’s Diary with the words ‘too much and not the mood’ to describe her frustration with placating her readers, what she described as the ‘cramming in and the cutting out.’ She wondered if she had anything at all that was truly worth saying. The attitude of that sentiment inspired Durga Chew-Bose to gather own writing in this lyrical collection of poetic essays that examine personhood and artistic growth. Drawing inspiration from a diverse group of incisive and inquiring female authors, Chew-Bose captures the inner restlessness that keeps her always on the brink of creative expression.”

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy  by Ta-Nehisi Coates

“‘We were eight years in power’ was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America’s ‘first white president.'”

Look Alive Out There: Essays by Sloane Crosley

“In  Look Alive Out There,  whether it’s scaling active volcanoes, crashing shivas, playing herself on  Gossip Girl,  befriending swingers, or squinting down the barrel of the fertility gun, Crosley continues to rise to the occasion with unmatchable nerve and electric one-liners. And as her subjects become more serious, her essays deliver not just laughs but lasting emotional heft and insight. Crosley has taken up the gauntlets thrown by her predecessors—Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron, David Sedaris—and crafted something rare, affecting, and true.”

Fl â neuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London  by Lauren Elkin

“Part cultural meander, part memoir,  Flâneuse  takes us on a distinctly cosmopolitan jaunt that begins in New York, where Elkin grew up, and transports us to Paris via Venice, Tokyo, and London, all cities in which she’s lived. We are shown the paths beaten by such  flâneuses  as the cross-dressing nineteenth-century novelist George Sand, the Parisian artist Sophie Calle, the wartime correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and the writer Jean Rhys. With tenacity and insight, Elkin creates a mosaic of what urban settings have meant to women, charting through literature, art, history, and film the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes fraught relationship that women have with the metropolis.”

Idiophone  by Amy Fusselman

“Leaping from ballet to quiltmaking, from the The Nutcracker to an Annie-B Parson interview,  Idiophone  is a strikingly original meditation on risk-taking and provocation in art and a unabashedly honest, funny, and intimate consideration of art-making in the context of motherhood, and motherhood in the context of addiction. Amy Fusselman’s compact, beautifully digressive essay feels both surprising and effortless, fueled by broad-ranging curiosity, and, fundamentally, joy.”

Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture  by Roxane Gay

“In this valuable and revealing anthology, cultural critic and bestselling author Roxane Gay collects original and previously published pieces that address what it means to live in a world where women have to measure the harassment, violence, and aggression they face, and where they are ‘routinely second-guessed, blown off, discredited, denigrated, besmirched, belittled, patronized, mocked, shamed, gaslit, insulted, bullied’ for speaking out.”

Sunshine State: Essays  by Sarah Gerard

“With the personal insight of  The Empathy Exams , the societal exposal of  Nickel and Dimed , and the stylistic innovation and intensity of her own break-out debut novel  Binary Star , Sarah Gerard’s  Sunshine State  uses the intimately personal to unearth the deep reservoirs of humanity buried in the corners of our world often hardest to face.”

The Art of the Wasted Day  by Patricia Hampl

“ The Art of the Wasted Day  is a picaresque travelogue of leisure written from a lifelong enchantment with solitude. Patricia Hampl visits the homes of historic exemplars of ease who made repose a goal, even an art form. She begins with two celebrated eighteenth-century Irish ladies who ran off to live a life of ‘retirement’ in rural Wales. Her search then leads to Moravia to consider the monk-geneticist, Gregor Mendel, and finally to Bordeaux for Michel Montaigne—the hero of this book—who retreated from court life to sit in his chateau tower and write about whatever passed through his mind, thus inventing the personal essay.”

A Really Big Lunch: The Roving Gourmand on Food and Life  by Jim Harrison

“Jim Harrison’s legendary gourmandise is on full display in  A Really Big Lunch . From the titular  New Yorker  piece about a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses, to pieces from  Brick ,  Playboy , Kermit Lynch Newsletter, and more on the relationship between hunter and prey, or the obscure language of wine reviews,  A Really Big Lunch  is shot through with Harrison’s pointed aperçus and keen delight in the pleasures of the senses. And between the lines the pieces give glimpses of Harrison’s life over the last three decades.  A Really Big Lunch  is a literary delight that will satisfy every appetite.”

Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me  by Bill Hayes

“Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at forty-eight years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city’s incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera.”

Would You Rather?: A Memoir of Growing Up and Coming Out  by Katie Heaney

“Here, for the first time, Katie opens up about realizing at the age of twenty-eight that she is gay. In these poignant, funny essays, she wrestles with her shifting sexuality and identity, and describes what it was like coming out to everyone she knows (and everyone she doesn’t). As she revisits her past, looking for any ‘clues’ that might have predicted this outcome, Katie reveals that life doesn’t always move directly from point A to point B—no matter how much we would like it to.”

Tonight I’m Someone Else: Essays  by Chelsea Hodson

“From graffiti gangs and  Grand Theft Auto  to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, in these essays, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. She asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing.”

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.: Essays  by Samantha Irby

“With  We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. , ‘bitches gotta eat’ blogger and comedian Samantha Irby turns the serio-comic essay into an art form. Whether talking about how her difficult childhood has led to a problem in making ‘adult’ budgets, explaining why she should be the new Bachelorette—she’s ’35-ish, but could easily pass for 60-something’—detailing a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father’s ashes, sharing awkward sexual encounters, or dispensing advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies who are now suburban moms—hang in there for the Costco loot—she’s as deft at poking fun at the ghosts of her past self as she is at capturing powerful emotional truths.”

This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America  by Morgan Jerkins

“Doubly disenfranchised by race and gender, often deprived of a place within the mostly white mainstream feminist movement, black women are objectified, silenced, and marginalized with devastating consequences, in ways both obvious and subtle, that are rarely acknowledged in our country’s larger discussion about inequality. In  This Will Be My Undoing , Jerkins becomes both narrator and subject to expose the social, cultural, and historical story of black female oppression that influences the black community as well as the white, male-dominated world at large.”

Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays  by Fenton Johnson

“Part retrospective, part memoir, Fenton Johnson’s collection  Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays  explores sexuality, religion, geography, the AIDS crisis, and more. Johnson’s wanderings take him from the hills of Kentucky to those of San Francisco, from the streets of Paris to the sidewalks of Calcutta. Along the way, he investigates questions large and small: What’s the relationship between artists and museums, illuminated in a New Guinean display of shrunken heads? What’s the difference between empiricism and intuition?”

One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter: Essays  by Scaachi Koul

“In  One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter , Scaachi Koul deploys her razor-sharp humor to share all the fears, outrages, and mortifying moments of her life. She learned from an early age what made her miserable, and for Scaachi anything can be cause for despair. Whether it’s a shopping trip gone awry; enduring awkward conversations with her bikini waxer; overcoming her fear of flying while vacationing halfway around the world; dealing with Internet trolls, or navigating the fears and anxieties of her parents. Alongside these personal stories are pointed observations about life as a woman of color: where every aspect of her appearance is open for critique, derision, or outright scorn; where strict gender rules bind in both Western and Indian cultures, leaving little room for a woman not solely focused on marriage and children to have a career (and a life) for herself.”

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions  by Valeria Luiselli and jon lee anderson (translator)

“A damning confrontation between the American dream and the reality of undocumented children seeking a new life in the U.S. Structured around the 40 questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation,  Tell Me How It Ends  (an expansion of her 2016 Freeman’s essay of the same name) humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear—both here and back home.”

All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers  by Alana Massey

“Mixing Didion’s affected cool with moments of giddy celebrity worship, Massey examines the lives of the women who reflect our greatest aspirations and darkest fears back onto us. These essays are personal without being confessional and clever in a way that invites readers into the joke. A cultural critique and a finely wrought fan letter, interwoven with stories that are achingly personal, All the Lives I Want is also an exploration of mental illness, the sex industry, and the dangers of loving too hard.”

Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays  by Tom McCarthy

“Certain points of reference recur with dreamlike insistence—among them the artist Ed Ruscha’s  Royal Road Test , a photographic documentation of the roadside debris of a Royal typewriter hurled from the window of a traveling car; the great blooms of jellyfish that are filling the oceans and gumming up the machinery of commerce and military domination—and the question throughout is: How can art explode the restraining conventions of so-called realism, whether aesthetic or political, to engage in the active reinvention of the world?”

Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America  by Samhita Mukhopadhyay and Kate Harding

“When 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump and 94 percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton, how can women unite in Trump’s America? Nasty Women includes inspiring essays from a diverse group of talented women writers who seek to provide a broad look at how we got here and what we need to do to move forward.”

Don’t Call Me Princess: Essays on Girls, Women, Sex, and Life  by Peggy Orenstein

“Named one of the ’40 women who changed the media business in the last 40 years’ by  Columbia Journalism Review , Peggy Orenstein is one of the most prominent, unflinching feminist voices of our time. Her writing has broken ground and broken silences on topics as wide-ranging as miscarriage, motherhood, breast cancer, princess culture and the importance of girls’ sexual pleasure. Her unique blend of investigative reporting, personal revelation and unexpected humor has made her books bestselling classics.”

When You Find Out the World Is Against You: And Other Funny Memories About Awful Moments  by Kelly Oxford

“Kelly Oxford likes to blow up the internet. Whether it is with the kind of Tweets that lead  Rolling Stone  to name her one of the Funniest People on Twitter or with pictures of her hilariously adorable family (human and animal) or with something much more serious, like creating the hashtag #NotOkay, where millions of women came together to share their stories of sexual assault, Kelly has a unique, razor-sharp perspective on modern life. As a screen writer, professional sh*t disturber, wife and mother of three, Kelly is about everything but the status quo.”

Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman  by Anne Helen Petersen

“You know the type: the woman who won’t shut up, who’s too brazen, too opinionated—too much. She’s the unruly woman, and she embodies one of the most provocative and powerful forms of womanhood today. In  Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud , Anne Helen Petersen uses the lens of ‘unruliness’ to explore the ascension of pop culture powerhouses like Lena Dunham, Nicki Minaj, and Kim Kardashian, exploring why the public loves to love (and hate) these controversial figures. With its brisk, incisive analysis,  Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud  will be a conversation-starting book on what makes and breaks celebrity today.”

Well, That Escalated Quickly: Memoirs and Mistakes of an Accidental Activist  by Franchesca Ramsey

“In her first book, Ramsey uses her own experiences as an accidental activist to explore the many ways we communicate with each other—from the highs of bridging gaps and making connections to the many pitfalls that accompany talking about race, power, sexuality, and gender in an unpredictable public space…the internet.”

Shrewed: A Wry and Closely Observed Look at the Lives of Women and Girls  by Elizabeth Renzetti

“Drawing upon Renzetti’s decades of reporting on feminist issues,  Shrewed  is a book about feminism’s crossroads. From Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign to the quest for equal pay, from the lessons we can learn from old ladies to the future of feminism in a turbulent world, Renzetti takes a pointed, witty look at how far we’ve come—and how far we have to go.”

What Are We Doing Here?: Essays  by Marilynne Robinson

“In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson’s peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display.”

Double Bind: Women on Ambition  by Robin Romm

“‘A work of courage and ferocious honesty’ (Diana Abu-Jaber),  Double Bind  could not come at a more urgent time. Even as major figures from Gloria Steinem to Beyoncé embrace the word ‘feminism,’ the word ‘ambition’ remains loaded with ambivalence. Many women see it as synonymous with strident or aggressive, yet most feel compelled to strive and achieve—the seeming contradiction leaving them in a perpetual double bind. Ayana Mathis, Molly Ringwald, Roxane Gay, and a constellation of ‘nimble thinkers . . . dismantle this maddening paradox’ ( O, The Oprah Magazine ) with candor, wit, and rage. Women who have made landmark achievements in fields as diverse as law, dog sledding, and butchery weigh in, breaking the last feminist taboo once and for all.”

The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life  by Richard Russo

“In these nine essays, Richard Russo provides insight into his life as a writer, teacher, friend, and reader. From a commencement speech he gave at Colby College, to the story of how an oddly placed toilet made him reevaluate the purpose of humor in art and life, to a comprehensive analysis of Mark Twain’s value, to his harrowing journey accompanying a dear friend as she pursued gender-reassignment surgery,  The Destiny Thief  reflects the broad interests and experiences of one of America’s most beloved authors. Warm, funny, wise, and poignant, the essays included here traverse Russo’s writing life, expanding our understanding of who he is and how his singular, incredibly generous mind works. An utter joy to read, they give deep insight into the creative process from the prospective of one of our greatest writers.”

Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race by Naben Ruthnum

“Curry is a dish that doesn’t quite exist, but, as this wildly funny and sharp essay points out, a dish that doesn’t properly exist can have infinite, equally authentic variations. By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own upbringing, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity. With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta’s  Karma Cola  and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford’s  Heat , Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavor calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters.”

The River of Consciousness  by Oliver Sacks

“Sacks, an Oxford-educated polymath, had a deep familiarity not only with literature and medicine but with botany, animal anatomy, chemistry, the history of science, philosophy, and psychology.  The River of Consciousness  is one of two books Sacks was working on up to his death, and it reveals his ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless project to understand what makes us human.”

All the Women in My Family Sing: Women Write the World: Essays on Equality, Justice, and Freedom (Nothing But the Truth So Help Me God)  by Deborah Santana and America Ferrera

“ All the Women in My Family Sing  is an anthology documenting the experiences of women of color at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It is a vital collection of prose and poetry whose topics range from the pressures of being the vice-president of a Fortune 500 Company, to escaping the killing fields of Cambodia, to the struggles inside immigration, identity, romance, and self-worth. These brief, trenchant essays capture the aspirations and wisdom of women of color as they exercise autonomy, creativity, and dignity and build bridges to heal the brokenness in today’s turbulent world.”

We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America  by Brando Skyhorse and Lisa Page

“For some, ‘passing’ means opportunity, access, or safety. Others don’t willingly pass but are ‘passed’ in specific situations by someone else.  We Wear the Mask , edited by  Brando Skyhorse  and  Lisa Page , is an illuminating and timely anthology that examines the complex reality of passing in America. Skyhorse, a Mexican American, writes about how his mother passed him as an American Indian before he learned who he really is. Page shares how her white mother didn’t tell friends about her black ex-husband or that her children were, in fact, biracial.”

Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith

“Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world’s preeminent fiction writers, but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to  The New Yorker  and the  New York Review of Books  on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.”

The Mother of All Questions: Further Reports from the Feminist Revolutions  by Rebecca Solnit

“In a timely follow-up to her national bestseller  Men Explain Things to Me , Rebecca Solnit offers indispensable commentary on women who refuse to be silenced, misogynistic violence, the fragile masculinity of the literary canon, the gender binary, the recent history of rape jokes, and much more. In characteristic style, Solnit mixes humor, keen analysis, and powerful insight in these essays.”

The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays  by Megan Stielstra

“Whether she’s imagining the implications of open-carry laws on college campuses, recounting the story of going underwater on the mortgage of her first home, or revealing the unexpected pains and joys of marriage and motherhood, Stielstra’s work informs, impels, enlightens, and embraces us all. The result is something beautiful—this story, her courage, and, potentially, our own.”

Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms  by Michelle Tea

“Delivered with her signature honesty and dark humor, this is Tea’s first-ever collection of journalistic writing. As she blurs the line between telling other people’s stories and her own, she turns an investigative eye to the genre that’s nurtured her entire career—memoir—and considers the price that art demands be paid from life.”

A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause  by Shawn Wen

“In precise, jewel-like scenes and vignettes,  A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause  pays homage to the singular genius of a mostly-forgotten art form. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and meticulously observed performances, Wen translates the gestural language of mime into a lyric written portrait by turns whimsical, melancholic, and haunting.”

Acid West: Essays  by Joshua Wheeler

“The radical evolution of American identity, from cowboys to drone warriors to space explorers, is a story rooted in southern New Mexico.  Acid West  illuminates this history, clawing at the bounds of genre to reveal a place that is, for better or worse, home. By turns intimate, absurd, and frightening,  Acid West  is an enlightening deep-dive into a prophetic desert at the bottom of America.”

Sexographies  by Gabriela Wiener and Lucy Greaves And jennifer adcock (Translators)

“In fierce and sumptuous first-person accounts, renowned Peruvian journalist Gabriela Wiener records infiltrating the most dangerous Peruvian prison, participating in sexual exchanges in swingers clubs, traveling the dark paths of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris in the company of transvestites and prostitutes, undergoing a complicated process of egg donation, and participating in a ritual of ayahuasca ingestion in the Amazon jungle—all while taking us on inward journeys that explore immigration, maternity, fear of death, ugliness, and threesomes. Fortunately, our eagle-eyed voyeur emerges from her narrative forays unscathed and ready to take on the kinks, obsessions, and messiness of our lives.  Sexographies  is an eye-opening, kamikaze journey across the contours of the human body and mind.”

The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative  by Florence Williams

“From forest trails in Korea, to islands in Finland, to eucalyptus groves in California, Florence Williams investigates the science behind nature’s positive effects on the brain. Delving into brand-new research, she uncovers the powers of the natural world to improve health, promote reflection and innovation, and strengthen our relationships. As our modern lives shift dramatically indoors, these ideas—and the answers they yield—are more urgent than ever.”

Can You Tolerate This?: Essays  by Ashleigh Young

“ Can You Tolerate This?  presents a vivid self-portrait of an introspective yet widely curious young woman, the colorful, isolated community in which she comes of age, and the uneasy tensions—between safety and risk, love and solitude, the catharsis of grief and the ecstasy of creation—that define our lives.”

What are your favorite contemporary essay collections?

10 of the Greatest Essays on Writing Ever Written

If there’s one topic that writers can be counted on to tackle at least once in their working lives, it’s writing itself. A good thing too, especially for all those aspiring writers out there looking for a little bit of guidance. For some winter inspiration and honing of your craft, here you’ll find ten great essays on writing, from the classic to the contemporary, from the specific to the all-encompassing. Note: there are many, many, many great essays on writing. Bias has been extended here to personal favorites and those available to read online. Also of note but not included: full books on the subject like Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird , Stephen King’s On Writing , and Ron Carlson’s Ron Carlson Writes a Story , or, in a somewhat different sense, David Shields’ Reality Hunger , for those looking for a longer commitment. Read on, and add your own favorite essays on writing to the list in the comments.

“Not-Knowing,” Donald Barthelme, from Not Knowing: the Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme . Read it here .

In which Barthelme, a personal favorite and king of strange and wonderful stories, muses on not-knowing, style, our ability to “quarrel with the world, constructively,” messiness, Mallarmé, and a thief named Zeno passed out wearing a chastity belt.

“The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.”

“Fairy Tale Is Form, Form Is Fairy Tale,” Kate Bernheimer, from The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays From Tin House . Read it here .

Bernheimer is a constant champion of the fairy tale and its influence on literature at large (not least as editor of The Fairy Tale Review ), and a writer we couldn’t do without. This essay unpacks the formal elements of fairy tales, and does a fair bit more than hint at their essentialness to writers of all kinds.

“Fairy tales hold a key to the door fiercely locked between so-called realism and nonrealism, convention and experimentalism, psychology and abstraction. A key for those who see these as binaries, that is… Every writer is like a topsy- turvy doll that on one side is Red Riding Hood and on the other side the Wolf, or on the one side is a Boy and on the other, a Raven and Coffin. The traditional techniques of fairy tales—identifiable, named—are reborn in the different ways we all tell stories.”

“Reflections on Writing,” Henry Miller, from The Wisdom of the Heart . Read a few excerpts here .

A characteristically wonderful exploration of Miller’s own emotional, psychological, and technical struggles with writing.

“I had to grow foul with knowledge, realize the futility of everything; smash everything, grow desperate, then humble, then sponge myself off the slate, as it were, in order to recover my authenticity. I had to arrive at the brink and then take a leap in the dark.”

“The Figure a Poem Makes,” Robert Frost, from Collected Poems . Read it here .

A gorgeous mini-essay from an American giant that is equally relevant to writers of poetry or prose, and is almost a poem itself.

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.”

“On Style,” Susan Sontag, from Against Interpretation . Read it here .

As much about criticism as it is about writing (and perhaps more), Sontag dissects style versus form versus content versus the conceptions of all these things that we have in our heads.

“In other words, what is inevitable in a work of art is the style. To the extent that a work seems right, just, unimaginable otherwise (without loss or damage) , what we are responding to is a quality of its style. The most attractive works of art are those which give us the illusion that the artist had no alternatives, so wholly centered is he in his style. Compare that which is forced, labored, synthetic in the construction of Madame Bovary and of Ulysses with the ease and harmony of such equally ambitious works as Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Kafka’s Metamorphosis . The first two books I have mentioned are great indeed. But the greatest art seems secreted, not constructed.”

“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot, from The Sacred Wood . Read it here .

Whether or not you subscribe to Eliot’s “impersonal theory” of poetry, or his conception of the artist’s inevitable “self-sacrifice” to the past, there’s no arguing that this essay is a barn-burner.

“If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how completely any semi-ethical criterion of “sublimity” misses the mark. For it is not the “greatness,” the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts.”

“The Ecstasy of Influence,” Jonathan Lethem, from The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, etc. . Read it here .

Here, Lethem discusses not just the shifty concept of plagiarism in fiction, but the anxiety of appropriating pop culture, copyright, Disney, the power of a gift economy, the idea of a “commons of cultural materials,” art of all forms. A must-read for any contemporary creator, especially if you’ve ever nicked a line from a favorite book.

“Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.”

“How to Write with Style,” Kurt Vonnegut, from How to Use the Power of the Written Word . Read it here .

Vonnegut is an enduring treasure trove of literary advice — everyone you know has seen this excellent video of the man explaining the shapes of stories — and this little essay is no different: clever, whip-smart, and told with joy.

“Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your reader will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an ego maniac or a chowderhead — or, worse, they will stop reading you.”

“Why I Write,” George Orwell. Read it here .

It’s hard to put together a list of great essays without including something from Orwell. So why not this one, forever quoted by anyone who has ever tried to write a novel, or wanted to?

“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.”

“On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan Didion, from Slouching Towards Bethlehem . Read it here .

But of course: the essay that has launched a thousand notebook-keepers.

“Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”

10 Examples of Great College Essays (With Links)

The ticket to your dream college can be a piece of paper – your college essay. Picture yourself walking the halls of your ideal school, surrounded by opportunities and a bright future. Want to ensure your essay stands out? Dive into this guide. Beyond grades and test scores, the college decision process is influenced by recommendations, achievements, and extracurriculars. However, your college essay can be the ace up your sleeve. Explore the best essays of all time , and delve into how to craft your own . This list spotlights exemplary essays that unlocked the doors of top institutions. Discover what makes them shine, and let them guide your narrative. Need even more insights? Consider College Essay Essentials , a comprehensive resource packed with 24 standout essays.

10 Best Examples Of College Essays:

1. four examples of standout college application essays (2017 edition), 2. five examples of college application essays (2018 edition).

Once again, the team from the NY Times selected the best college admission essays from high school students. Out of over 300 submitted pieces of work, only these five were ultimately cut. Read them and see why.

3. 147 College Essays That Worked

The essays from this list are not your usual literary masterpieces, but they did the job and  allowed students to get access to some great universities such as UC Berkeley, Stanford, or Harvard. Read just a couple of them to fill your inspiration tank.

4. Eight Exceptional Essays From The Hamilton College

Here you can find some  nice examples of eight essays of successful applicants to Hamilton College. They were selected by Hamilton Alumni Review Magazine and showcased with the permission of students from various backgrounds.

5. A Single Sample College Application Essay (With Critique)

6. numerous essays that worked at the johns hopkins university.

Every year, the admissions committee selects some of the best and most creative essays that allow students to get enrolled in the university. As stated on the page, the most important thing about creating your statement is originality and the ability to share your own story uniquely. Demonstrating your precocious thought process matters the most. The best thing about these lists is that below each essay, you can find the actual comments from the admission committee. For example: We liked Stephen’s essay because it catches your attention right away and continues to show critical thinking, initiative, and problem-solving. His personality comes through as he naturally conveys humor. Through his anecdotes from growing up, we got a sense of how he might approach his studies here at Hopkins.”

7. Essays That Worked At Tufts University

Here’s another edition of examples that ultimately helped to enroll the students in the University. This list is great because it comes with videos, where the members of the admissions committee discuss different aspects of each essay and what made them so great.

8. Three Examples of Top College Essays

Writing a college essay may seem like a scary task, especially if you still don’t know where are you going to apply. You need to check some examples of inventive statements just to get a feel of what is expected. Then you can make up your mind and base your work on your unique circumstances.

9. An Essay Which Got The Student Into 14 Colleges (including Harvard and Princeton)

10. bonus: notes from top college officials about what makes a successful application essay.

This is not an example, but it’s still worth a read, as it will enable you to see essays from the admission officer’s perspective. Follow their suggestions and you can’t go wrong. I hope you enjoyed this list and that you’ve gained some valuable information from it. Applying for college and writing your essay is always stressful but hopefully, now you’re prepared. Please let me know about your struggles in the comments section below.

Rafal Reyzer

Hey there, welcome to my blog! I'm a full-time entrepreneur building two companies, a digital marketer, and a content creator with 10+ years of experience. I started RafalReyzer.com to provide you with great tools and strategies you can use to become a proficient digital marketer and achieve freedom through online creativity. My site is a one-stop shop for digital marketers, and content enthusiasts who want to be independent, earn more money, and create beautiful things. Explore my journey here , and don't miss out on my AI Marketing Mastery online course.

Make Lists, Not War

The meta-lists website, best essays of all time – chronological.

A reader suggested I create a meta-list of the best essays of all time, so I did.  I found over 12 best essays lists and several essay anthologies and combined the essays into one meta-list.  The meta-list below includes every essay that was on at least two of the original source lists. They are organized chronologically, by date of publication. For the same list organized by rank, that is, with the essays on the most lists at the top, go HERE .

Note 1:  Some of the essays are actually chapters from books.  In such cases, I have identified the source book.

Note 2: Some of the essays are book-length, such as Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own .  One book listed as an essay by two listers – Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet – is also regularly categorized as a work of fiction.

11 th Century Sei Shonagon – Hateful Things (from The Pillow Book ) (1002) (on 2 lists)

14 th Century Yoshida Kenko – Essays in Idleness (1332) (on 2 lists)

16 th Century Michel de Montaigne – On Some Verses of Virgil (1580) (on 2 lists)

17 th Century Robert Burton – Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) (on 2 lists) John Milton – Areopagitica (1644) (on 2 lists)

18 th Century Jonathan Swift – A Modest Proposal  (1729) (on 3 lists)

19 th Century William Hazlitt – On Going a Journey (1822) (on 2 lists) Charles Lamb – The Superannuated Man (1823) (on 2 lists) William Hazlitt – On the Pleasure of Hating (1823) (on 4 lists) Ralph Waldo Emerson – Self-Reliance (1841) (on 4 lists) Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience (1849) (on 2 lists) Henry David Thoreau – Where I Lived, and What I Lived For (from  Walden ) (1854) (on 2 lists)Henry David Thoreau – Economy (from  Walden ) (1854) (on 2 lists) Henry David Thoreau – Walking (1861) (on 2 lists) Robert Louis Stevenson – The Lantern-Bearers (1888) (on 2 lists)

20 th Century Zora Neale Hurston – How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928) (on 2 lists) Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own (1928) (on 4 lists) Virginia Woolf – Street Haunting: A London Adventure (1930) (on 3 lists) George Orwell – A Hanging (1931) (on 2 lists) Junichiro Tanizaki – In Praise of Shadows (1933) (on 2 lists) Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet (1935) (on 2 lists) George Orwell – Shooting an Elephant (1936) (on 6 lists) E.B. White – Once More to the Lake (1941) (on 6 lists) James Agee and Walker Evans – Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) (on 2 lists) Virginia Woolf – The Death of a Moth (1942) (on 4 lists) Simone Weil – On Human Personality (1943) (on 2 lists) M.F.K. Fisher – The Flaw (1943) (on 2 lists) Vladimir Nabokov – Speak, Memory (1951, revised 1966) (on 2 lists) George Orwell – Such, Such Were the Joys (1952) (on 4 lists) Mary McCarthy – Artists in Uniform: A Story (1953) (on 2 lists) James Baldwin – Notes of a Native Son (1955) (on 11 lists) E.B. White – Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street (1957) (on 2 lists) Martin Luther King, Jr. – Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963) (on 2 lists) Joseph Mitchell – Joe Gould’s Secret (1964) (on 2 lists) Susan Sontag – Against Interpretation (1966) (on 2 lists) Joan Didion – Goodbye To All That (1968) (on 6 lists) Joan Didion – On Keeping A Notebook (1968) (on 5 lists) Joan Didion – In Bed (1968) (on 4 lists) Edward Hoagland – The Courage of Turtles (1970) (on 2 lists) John McPhee – The Search for Marvin Gardens (1972) (on 3 lists) Annie Dillard – Seeing (from  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek ) (1974) (on 2 lists) Maxine Hong Kingston – No Name Woman (from The Woman Warrior ) (1976) (on 2 lists) Joan Didion – The White Album (1968-1978) (on 3 lists) Eudora Welty – The Little Store (1978) (on 3 lists) Annie Dillard – Total Eclipse (1982) (on 5 lists) Annie Dillard – Living Like Weasels (1982) (on 2 lists) Roland Barthes – Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1982) (on 2 lists) Gloria E. Anzaldúa – How to Tame a Wild Tongue (1987) (on 2 lists) Italo Calvino – Exactitude (1988) (on 2 lists) Phillip Lopate – Against Joie de Vivre (1989) (on 3 lists) Richard Rodriguez – Late Victorians (1990) (on 2 lists) Amy Tan – Mother Tongue (1991) (on 4 lists) Seymour Krim – To My Brothers & Sisters in the Failure Business (1991) (on 2 lists) David Wojnarowicz – Being Queer in America: A Journal of Disintegration (1991) (on 2 lists) Anne Carson – The Anthropology of Water (1995) (on 2 lists) Jo Ann Beard – The Fourth State of Matter (1996) (on 5 lists) David Foster Wallace – A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again (1996) (on 5 lists)

21 st Century Susan Sontag – Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) (on 2 lists) David Foster Wallace – Consider The Lobster (2005) (on 4 lists) Etel Adnan – In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005) (on 2 lists) Paul LaFarge – Destroy All Monsters (2006) (on 2 lists) Brian Doyle – Joyas Voladoras (2012) (on 2 lists)

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The Women's Movement by Joan Didion

Bad feminist by roxane gay, what the hell am i (and who the hell cares) by neko case, 10 more great articles about feminism, men explain things to me by rebecca solnit, the end of men by hanna rosin, 10 more great articles about men, linguistics/language, who decides what words mean by lane greene, the world’s most efficient languages by john mcwhorter, tense present by david foster wallace, 40 more great articles about linguistics, pigeon wars by jon mooallem, violence of the lambs by john j. sullivan, 25 more great articles about animals, quitting the paint factory by mark slouka, nickel and dimed by barbara ehrenreich, shop class as soul craft by matthew b. crawford, 40 more great articles about work, to have is to owe by david graeber, why does it feel like everyone has more money than you by jen doll, the austerity delusion by paul krugman, the blind side by michael lewis, 25 more great articles about money, science & technology, how life (and death) spring from disorder by philip ball, a compassionate substance by philip ball, your handy postcard-sized guide to statistics by tim harford, on being the right size by j. b. s. haldane, 100 more great science & tech. articles, the environment, the fate of earth by elizabeth kolbert, state of the species by charles c. mann, the real reason humans are the dominant species by justin rowlatt and laurence knight, 30 more great reads about the environment, climate change, losing earth by nathaniel rich, sixty years of climate change warnings by alice bell, beyond catastrophe by david wallace wells, we should fix climate change — but we should not regret it by thomas r. wells, 35 more great climate change articles, the tinkering of robert noyce by tom wolfe, creation myth by malcolm gladwell, mother earth mother board by neal stephenson, i saw the face of god in a semiconductor factory by virginia heffernan, 50 more great articles about computers, the internet, forty years of the internet by oliver burkeman, escape the matrix by virginia heffernan, you are the product by john lanchester, a nation of echo chambers by will leitch, the long tail by chris anderson, 50 more articles about the internet.

Social Media

The machine always wins by richard seymour, my instagram by dayna tortorici, why the past 10 years of american life have been uniquely stupid by jonathan haidt, 15 more articles about social media, m by john sack, blackhawk down by mark bowden, hiroshima by john hersey, the ai-powered, totally autonomous future of war is here by will knight, 35 more great articles about war, the hinge of history by joan didion, how america lost its mind by kurt andersen, the problem with facts by tim harford, constant anxiety won't save the world by julie beck, 75 more great articles about politics, crime & punishment, the caging of america by adam gopnik, the crooked ladder by malcolm gladwell, cruel and unusual punishment by matt taibbi, 20 more great articles about crime, the body in room 348 by mark bowden, the art of the steal by joshua bearman, true crime by david grann, the crypto trap by andy greenberg, 35 more great true crime stories, does it help to know history by adam gopnik, 1491 by charles c. mann, a history of violence by steven pinker, the worst mistake in history by j. diamond, 25 more great articles about history, notes of a native son by james baldwin, how to slowly kill yourself and others in america by kiese laymon, magic actions by tobi haslett, 30 more great essays about race, cities and ambition by paul graham, here is new york by e. b. white, 25 more great articles about cities, we are all confident idiots by david dunning, fantastic beasts and how to rank them by kathryn schulz, the problem with p-values by david colquhoun, what is the monkeysphere by david wong, 100 more great psychology articles, love & relationships, love by lauren slater, masters of love by emily esfahani smith, this is emo by chuck klosterman, 50 more great articles about relationships, what makes us happy by joshua shenk, social connection makes a better brain by emily esfahani smith, the real roots of midlife crisis by jonathan rauch, 20 more great articles about happiness, success & failure, you can do it, baby by leslie garrett, what drives success by amy chua and jed rubenfeld, the fringe benefits of failure, and the importance of imagination by j.k. rowling, 10 more great articles about success, health & medicine, somewhere worse by jia tolentino, race to the vaccine by david heath and gus garcia-roberts, an epidemic of fear by amy wallace the score by atul gawande, 50 more great articles about health, mental health, darkness visible by william styron, the epidemic of mental illness by marcia angell, surviving anxiety by scott stossel, 50 more great articles about mental health, the moral instinct by steven pinker, not nothing by stephen cave, the greatest good by derek thompson, 15 more great articles about ethics, getting in by malcolm gladwell, learning by degrees by rebecca mead, the end of the english major by nathan heller, 20 more great articles about education, the string theory by david foster wallace, the istanbul derby by spencer hall, the kentucky derby is decadent and depraved by hunter s. thompson, 50 more great sports articles, why does music make us feel good by philip ball, one more time by elizabeth margulis, how to be a rock critic by lester bangs, 50 more great music articles, the arts & culture, inhaling the spore by lawrence weschler, death by harry potter by chuck klosterman, a one-man art market by bryan aappleyard, welcome to airspace by kyle chayka, 35 more great articles about the arts, fx porn by david foster wallace, flick chicks by mindy kaling, the movie set that ate itself by michael idov, 15 more great articles about movies, the last meal by michael paterniti, if you knew sushi by nick tosches, consider the lobster by david foster wallace, 50 more great articles about food.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

The last american hero is junior johnson. yes by tom wolfe, masters of the universe go to camp by philip weiss, what is glitter by caity weaver.

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Top 5 Methods to Detect AI-Written Papers

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Quick summary, understanding artificial intelligence in writing, how ai writes like humans, challenges of spotting ai writing.

AI's increasing use in making content has changed the way we create and read written work. Even though AI gives fantastic advantages, it also presents hurdles in maintaining the uniqueness and truthfulness of the content. This piece seeks to teach readers ways to spot papers written by AI. This allows them to make knowledgeable decisions on where the content came from.

AI plays a big role in creating content these days. So, it's crucial to make sure what's written is real. This piece looks into five top ways to spot AI-authored articles. They are: studying how complex the language is, looking at how sentences are formed, seeing if the text makes sense, checking if work is copied, and using AI detection tools. Through these methods, you'll be better equipped to decide where content comes from. Plus, you'll help keep school and work material honest.

AI writing means using artificial intelligence to produce written work. It relies on machine learning, the part of AI that helps computers learn and act like humans.

AI writing systems use large samples of language to produce text that appears to have been written by a human. This is done by responding to the user’s request.

These systems have improved, resulting in smoother and more natural AI writing means using artificial intelligence to produce written work. It relies on machine learning, the part of AI that helps computers learn and behave like humans.

AI has the ability to compose text similar to humans by studying complex language models and then producing sentences from patterns it recognizes in massive data groups. These models shine in crafting uniform, context-dependent material, which is typically liked by users due to its clearness and simplicity. However, even if people accept AI-created content, it doesn't fully replicate the insightful comprehension and originality of human authors.

Also read this article : A list of 10 AI content detection tools

Getting to grips with AI coding involves knowing the subtle aspects of language that AI can copy. Sure, AI can mirror our writing style. But, it usually falls short in catching the smart, inventive, and heartfelt tones in texts written by us humans. Studying the art of writing with AI needs a good eye for detail and the ability to think things through.

Method 1: Analyzing Language Complexity

One way to analyze the effects of AI is to analyze the complexity of the language used in the text. Let’s explore how this approach works.

• Understanding Language Patterns

AI can use common patterns or complex vocabulary that differs from conventional human writing. This means that if you read a text and see unusually complex language or repeated patterns of structure, it could mean artificial intelligence is responsible for its content.

• Tools for Language Complexity Analysis

Several online tools can help analyze the complexity of the data and identify potential AI effects. These tools can take into account word count, sentence structure, and language structure in general to determine whether a text exhibits characteristics typically associated with AI-generated text.

Method 2: Examining Sentence Structure

Spotting AI in writing can be as simple as observing sentence structures. If sentences feel a bit too stiff or odd, it could be AI's handiwork. These lines often miss the easy-going rhythm and subtle details of human writing, possibly hinting at computer origin.

• Comparing Variations in Sentence Types

One method to tell if writing comes from AI is examining sentence variety. AI often depends on set guidelines and formats, resulting in an absence of different sentences. Studying the makeup of sentences in a document can highlight any rigid or recurring trends that suggest an artificial intelligence origin.

Method 3:Checking for Logical Coherence

Clear thinking is crucial in writing. This guarantees the writer’s thoughts glide easily, clear to readers. Spotting AI-created content? Keep an eye out for this logical flow.

• Inconsistencies in Argumentation

Spotting AI-made content can be as simple as scrutinizing the pointed arguments. AI tends to weave text with logically muddled arguments or thoughts that seem off-track. This jumbled coherence could be a tip-off that the content is a computer's creation, not human-crafted.

• Evaluation of Flow and Connectivity

Checking if ideas flow well and seeing how paragraphs are linked might reveal if a text is made by AI. If there are holes in the logic or sudden jumps in thought, it might mean a computer created the content. Humans usually link their ideas in an order that makes sense, so any weird breaks might point to AI's handiwork.

Method 5: Employing AI Detection Software

Tools like specialized AI detection software are super helpful when trying to spot AI-produced content. These software pieces have clever formulas built to find artificial intelligence in writing. This gives us a dependable way to tell the difference between text written by a person and text crafted by a computer.

• Functionality of AI Detection Tools

How do AI detection tools work? Simple, they scan the unique features of text to check if an AI wrote it. These tools look at patterns, how words are used, and style details. This way, they can tell if a robot, not a human, crafted the words.

• Integration of AI Detection Software

Experts and scholars can easily merge AI recognition programs into their routine tasks. This adds a check for validating the realness of articles or texts. By using these aids, people can boost their skills in spotting text created by AI. This helps in preserving the honesty of their work.

Obtaining AI-powered documents requires a multi-pronged approach. The integration of linguistic complexity analysis, sentence structure analysis, semantic consistency analysis, plagiarism analysis, and AI recognition software can improve the recognition accuracy of AI-generated content As AI technologies evolve , informed adjustments to ensure data accuracy are critical.

Protect Your Content's Integrity. Our AI detection tool safeguards your website by uncovering hidden AI-generated content. Trustworthy, reliable, and always up-to-date.

1. How do I check if a letter was written by an AI?

Use AI identification tools, analyze complex language, and check logical coherence to identify AI products.

2. What tools can help identify AI-encoded content?

Tools like GPTZero, Copyleaks, Hemingway Editor, and plagiarism checkers are effective at identifying AI-authored articles.

3. How does AI writing differ from human writing?

AI writing can lack emotional depth, creativity, and sentence structures, making it different from human writing.

4. Can AI products be stolen?

Yes, AI models can inadvertently recreate existing objects, leading to unintentional theft.

5. Why is it important to analyze AI-authored documents?

To maintain integrity, it is important to ensure content is authentic and original in academic and professional settings.

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Tiny Memoir Contest for Students: Write a 100-Word Personal Narrative

We invite teenagers to tell a true story about a meaningful life experience in just 100 words. Contest dates: Nov. 6 to Dec. 4, 2024.

By The Learning Network

Illustrations from Modern Love’s Tiny Love Stories , the inspiration for this contest.

Can you tell a meaningful and interesting true story from your life in just 100 words? That’s the challenge we pose to teenagers with our 100-Word Personal Narrative Contest, a storytelling form popularized by Modern Love’s Tiny Love Stories series .

After running this contest for two years, receiving a total of more than 25,000 entries, and honoring dozens of excellent miniature teen-written memoirs, we have discovered the answer is a resounding yes .

So, we challenge you to try it yourself.

We’re not asking you to write to a particular theme or to use a specific structure or style, but we are looking for short, powerful stories about a particular moment or event in your life. We want to hear your story, told in your unique voice, and we hope you’ll experiment with style and form to tell a tale that matters to you, in a way you enjoy telling it.

And, yes, it’s possible to do all that in only 100 words. For proof, just look at last year’s 15 winning entries . We also have a step-by-step guide full of advice that is grounded in 25 excellent 100-word mentor texts, as well as a rehearsal space , published for our first year’s contest, that has over 1,000 student-written mini memoirs. Because that space was so successful, we’re keeping it open for this year’s contest. We hope students will use it to get inspiration, experiment and encourage each other.

Take a look at the full guidelines and related resources below. Please post any questions you have in the comments and we’ll answer you there, or write to us at [email protected]. And, consider hanging this PDF one-page announcement on your class bulletin board.

Here’s what you need to know:

• Resources for Teachers and Students
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Submission Form

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The 10 Best Memoirs of the Decade

And then some.

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , and the best poetry collections of the decade, and we have now reached the fourth list in our series: the best memoirs published in English between 2010 and 2019 (not for nothing: 2015 was a very good year for memoirs).

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Patti smith, just kids (2010).

In 1967, 20-year old aspiring poet Patti Smith moved to New York City, where she expected to make ends meet by working as a waitress, got a job instead at a bookstore, met budding artist Robert Mapplethorpe, and embarked with him upon the kind of bohemian late-twentieth century life that defined downtown during the city’s last great period of artistic foment. More than fifty years later, with CBGBs now a shoe store and Velvet Underground t-shirts available in toddler sizes, the counter-culture has become the culture, and it’s near impossible to differentiate the baby-boom mythology from fact. Those wishing to know how it was, though—or at least how it felt—can do no better than turning to Smith’s 2010 National Book Award-winning memoir, Just Kids , a masterpiece of social observation and self-scrutiny, exhilaratingly alive with what it is to be young and to love someone and to want things. The book flows through the city in all its energy and squalor, from mornings at the Chelsea Hotel to nights at Max’s Kansas City, until, one by one, Smith and Mapplethorpe get famous. Throughout, she is good company, by turns shrewd chronicler of the hard work that goes into building an artist’s career and disbelieving observer of her own success. Plus she’s an excellent, often hilarious portraitist, with a seemingly endless supply of captivating subjects, from Burroughs to Warhol, to Mapplethorpe, whom she is endlessly tender about and loyal to and infatuated with, and whose passing elicits one of the most raw-nerve eulogies you’re ever likely to read. Most importantly, Smith is possessed of that quality that sets apart the truly great work of autobiography from the merely good: she knows herself. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped (2013)

Most readers of contemporary American fiction know Jesmyn Ward (the prodigiously talented McArthur Genius Fellowship-winning Mississippi writer who, at barely forty years old, became the first woman to win  two National Book Awards for Fiction) for  Salvage the Bones  (2011) and  Sing, Unburied, Sing  (2017)—a pair of haunted, lyrical novels, subtly infused with the mythic, which examined southern black communities ravaged by unimaginable disaster and generational trauma. Her harrowing 2013 memoir,  Men We Reaped —in which Ward considers the premature deaths, over just four years, of five men in her life (including her beloved brother), as well as the terrible risks inherent in just trying to simply live as a young black man in the rural south—deserves to stand right alongside these magnificent novels. Ward is drawing from a deep and shimmering well of sorrow here, describing with exquisite tenderness the lives these doomed men lived—who they were, the people they aspired to become, and what they meant to their families and friends—before poverty and the eroding nature of systemic racism wore away at their defenses and left them vulnerable. Having navigated a childhood of familial instability and extreme financial hardship, Ward became the first member of her family to attend college, leaving behind a community that was full of both nourishing love and wearying strife, and some of the most heartbreaking writing in  Men We Reaped  juxtaposes her warm memories of joyful Mississippi nights back home with the intense feeling of survivor’s guilt that washes over her in the wake of these terrible losses. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (2015)

Creative nonfiction already redefines, for many readers and writers alike, what nonfiction can do; as nonfiction that uses the mechanical techniques of fiction, it allows us to create expansive, experimental writing that may look, at a glance, almost indistinguishable from a short story, novel, or lyrical prose poem. Maggie Nelson’s  The Argonauts  takes this to heart. It is a beautiful, astonishing memoir—a piece of “autotheory,” really, meaning a work that applies literary and philosophical theory to the writer’s own life—that reimagines what a memoir can look like.

Told non-linearly in sharp fragments, it explores desire, what it means to be cis or trans, the limits of the gender binary itself for people who are non-binary, sexist and heteronormative expectations, and what it means to exist as a woman in the world broadly—and it does all this in one of the most devastatingly gorgeous bits of prose I’ve seen in a while. Its exploration of queer desire is poignant and powerful. The Argonauts pushes creative nonfiction to its limits, and I can’t recommend it enough as an example of how some memoirs—particularly ones like these—can only be written out of order, because that, in reality, is just the right order for it.  –Gabrielle Bellott, Lit Hub staff writer

Helen Macdonald, H is For Hawk (2015)

Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk was, to say the least, a surprise phenomenon in America. An erudite, lyric, very British memoir that describes the simultaneous grieving of a beloved parent, the mourning of a particular version of the English countryside, and the attempt to cohabitate with a ferocious raptor? Not what most publishers would consider a license to print money; add to that the embedded retelling of T.H. White’s own deeply troubled account of life with a fractious goshawk and “bestseller” seems unlikely at best. And though a book’s sales should factor fairly low (if at all) when considering its worthiness, one is tempted to make an exception for memoir, the genre that most wants to be read.

But it is neither the familiarity of the circumstances (they are decidedly not) nor the plainness of the language (this is the memoir of a poet!) that makes Macdonald’s memoir so universally accessible—it is the unrelenting honesty of a writer grappling on the page with the hard stuff most of us reserve for 4am: the finality of death, the paralysis of self-doubt, the loss of the natural world, and… the winged killing machine lurking in the other room. That Macdonald manages literary biography, pastoral meditation, grief diary, and falconry how-to all in one book is a true marvel, and will remain so as this nearly perfect memoir takes its rightful place in the canon.    –Jonny Diamond, Lit Hub Editor-in-Chief

William Finnegan, Barbarian Days (2015)

“They were silhouettes, backlit by low sun, and they danced silently through the glare, their boards like big dark blades, slashing and gliding, swift beneath their feet.” Not the type of language we’ve come to associate with sporting memoirs, but as anyone who has picked up this extraordinary work—which Alice Gregory, writing in the  New York Review of Books , astutely described as “an utterly convincing study in the joy of treating seriously an unserious thing”—will attest, this is no ordinary sporting memoir.  New Yorker  staff writer William Finnegan has lived an impassioned and peripatetic life that would be the envy of even the most seasoned vagabond reporter. For over forty years he has been roaming the world’s outer reaches, chronicling everything from journalists in Apartheid South Africa to youth poverty in the United States, from drug cartels in Mexico to billionaire mining tycoons in Australia. Throughout it all, though, his great love, his obsession, his savior and muse, his sin and his soul and his North star, has been that most solitary and mystical of pastimes: surfing.  Barbarian Days  is Finnegan’s ode to a life spent slaying liquid dragons, meeting bodacious kindred spirits, and finding contentment inside the tubes of some of the most awesome waves on the face of the earth. Finnegan is a magnificent, humane writer, as adept at conjuring thirty-year-old swells and breaks from memory as he is at describing the unique, and often tender, bonds that are forged between dreamy acolytes of the ocean. With  Barbarian Days , he has given us a genuinely moving and profound meditation on an elemental existence.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Margo Jefferson, Negroland (2015)

The title of Margo Jefferson’s  Negroland , her memoir of growing up in Chicago in the 1950s and 60s, is her nickname for the space in which she grew up: not just a physical location, but a state of mind. “Negroland” is, in Jefferson’s words, her “name for a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty.” Jefferson’s father was a prominent physician, and her mother was a socialite. She grew up as a member of the black upper-middle-class—experiencing greater wealth and better education, and living a life of greater refinement than most of the white people she encountered while also immersed in a culture that insisted on exceptionalism among the national black community. “Children in Negroland,” she writes, “were warned that few Negroes enjoyed privilege or plenty and that most whites would be glad to see them returned to indigence, deference and subservience. Children there were taught that most other Negroes ought to be emulating us when too many of them (out of envy or ignorance) went on behaving in ways that encouraged racial prejudice.”

Jefferson’s mission, in this magnificent account, is to unfurl all the different, painful, awkward, damaging, and sometimes quasi-empowering components of this highly complicated mass mindset, as well unpack the cultural forces that begat this specific crystallization. Besides that Jefferson’s reflections are so movingly written, her book clearly fulfills a critical need: so rarely do scholars approach issues of race and class simultaneously to such productive ends. Jefferson’s memoir is useful in expressing that the black experience in America is not unilaterally one of inequality and persecution—but that these are components of a larger, varied, more nuanced national identity which also incorporates excellence, achievement, and status.

Negroland additionally offers essential considerations about how oppression manifests within specific groups and grows as forms of self-love and hate. It is also about identification and alienation: who do you identify with, Jefferson asks herself, and why?  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Susan Faludi, In the Darkroom (2016)

I borrowed this one from work, and, afraid of doing damage to its white binding, I bought a cloth cover, originally no doubt intended for bibles, to protect the book from smudges or anything else untoward. That covering became symbolic as I dived into this memoir of hiding, transformation, and reversals. In the Darkroom follows feminist scholar Susan Faludi as she reunites with her estranged father, who is now living as a woman in the Budapest of her youth. Her father survived the Holocaust through disguises and subterfuge, then found refuge after the war in depictions of women on film; she is proud to show her daughter the life she has made in Budapest, even as right wing nationalism grows around her. Susan Faludi frankly discusses her struggle to accept her father, both in her estrangement and in her new life as woman, and reading the memoir of an old school feminist figure out how to be trans-inclusive is one of the most heartwarming things you’ll ever come across.

The book also serves as a snapshot of the entire Jewish century—Faludi’s father survived the Holocaust as a boy, then strived to be the most American of Americans after starting a family in the US; Susan Faludi came to an appreciation of her heritage more through history and her family’s lived experience rather than through religion, and the whole family embraced artistic expression of some kind or other.

In the Darkroom is brilliant, beautiful, and very difficult to describe, but I do hope you’ll read it.  –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Annie Ernaux, tr. Alison L. Strayer, The Years (2017)

There’s a revolution happening in life writing and the French novelist Annie Ernaux deserves far more credit than she’s received for showing how a depth of style and tone can situate a life within the larger rivers of time. Ernaux was born in 1940 in the heart of the France’s working class Normandy. Since that time period, up until 2006, when this book ends, France has lived through the war, the pill, the rise of consumer culture and a whole blizzard of idea-fads, which she threads her life through and around—a boat traveling down a current of past-ness. Along the way Ernaux became a public person, a famous person even, in small circles, and this book comes to grip with the loss of singularity that entails. Mostly, though, to read The Years is to re-experience, as if anew, what the past feels like. Not just what it is made of, what rocks around which a times flow, but how it feels to be traveling upon a before . In an era when nostalgia is so rapidly commodified—witness the 1970s—Ernaux’s attempt to forge a way of considering life as singular and collective is strangely moving, unfashionable, and dignified.    –John Freeman, Executive Editor, Lit Hub

Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House (2019)

Before I picked it up, Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House was intriguing to me precisely because it blends memoir with so many other forms. In her review of the books, Angela Flournoy describes it as “part oral history, part urban history, part celebration of a bygone way of life.”

The oral history component is drawn from Broom’s interviews with her mother and her 12 siblings about their lives in New Orleans East, an area of the city once vaunted as “a ‘new frontier,’ ripe for development,” which by the time Broom was coming of age there had been largely abandoned by the city. Her brothers and mother tell their stories of Katrina, “the Water,” which Broom experienced from New York, in one of the most wrenching sections of the book. The hurricane destroys the titular Yellow House and scatters the Broom family across the country. Broom herself lives for some months in Burundi before returning to New Orleans to work as a speechwriter for the mayor, then back to New York, then to New Orleans once more.

Broom is a master of sentences, but she also knows precisely when to hand over the floor. The result is a gorgeous pastiche of histories that is at once deeply personal and incredibly wide-ranging. Home—both the physical and the intangible sorts—are at the center of the story. The question of who gets to have a home in America, in the face of vast income inequality, institutional racism, and climate change, is ever-present. In his review, Dwight Garner predicts that The Yellow House “will come to be considered among the essential memoirs of this vexing decade.” I couldn’t agree more.    –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Naja Marie Aidt, tr. Denise Newman, When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back (2019)

This remarkable memoir is easily one of the best of any kind published in the last decade. On a fundamental level, it paints a warm, vivid portrait of Danish writer  Aidt ’s son, a chef and searcher who died tragically in his early twenties when a home-made batch of hallucinogenics led to a terrible accident. Drawing on the author’s diaries in the aftermath, poets of lacunae like Anne Carson and Ingrid Christensen, and narrating the boy’s life and upbringing, it is also a powerful formal assertion of the heartbreaking illegibility of loss, even as all one wants to do with the missing is keep them alive, present, somehow. Watching Aidt pull it off is akin to watching Philippe Petit walk a tight-rope between the Twin Towers. There’s such dexterity and joy even line by line in her prose. Yet the gap over which Aidt strings her lines is terrifying. It’s not just a grief this book narrates, it’s how to rethread time’s projector when an accident has caused a sudden tear in the reel. In Denmark, Aidt has long been read as an essential poet, and her fiction, Baboon , is taught in high schools. This book secures her role in a very small collection of writers who have taken the form of a memoir and revealed how much thought and loss live in the same ventricle of the heart’s true accounts.    –John Freeman, Executive Editor, Lit Hub

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City (2015)

In an essay for the  Village Voice  in 1973, Vivian Gornick described her engagement with contemporary feminist thought as a process of redefining what it meant to move through life as a woman. “It is a journey of unimaginable pain and loneliness, this journey, a battle all the way, one in which the same inch of emotional ground must be fought for over and over again, alone and without allies, the only soldier in the army the struggling self,” she wrote. “But on the other side lies freedom: self-possession.”  The Odd Woman and the City, her memoir published in 2015, shows part of Gornick’s long road of self-examination and is filled with the sharply self-aware observations and insights that have marked her as one of our most important memoir writers. The book showcases Gornick as an incredible documentarian of the emotional worlds that collide throughout the course of a day in New York City; her book focuses in particular on her friendship with a man named Leonard, but also on all the other small interactions that fill city life and all the minuscule, passing ways in which humans seek connection with one another. Describing these with clarity and compassion is one of Gornick’s biggest strengths; this memoir is a model of self-reflection and a mirror for those of us that have not yet fully arrived in ourselves, but are on the way. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Oliver Sacks, On the Move (2015)

There are many records of Oliver Sacks’s life and work, but none marries the two subjects quite so powerfully as his memoir, On the Move , a book published just a few short months before his death in 2015. Sacks was one of the century’s great intellects, a mind alive to experience, nuance, the unknown, experimentation, and, above all, communication. Few scientists have ever been so gifted in the art of storytelling. Over the years, Sacks expanded our notions of the world, our bodies, and our minds. Those were the stories of his professional work. But the story of his own life was just as compelling. In On the Move , he grapples with his past, his sexuality, his literary craft, his medical achievements, his failures, and his many, many experiments of all stripes and colors. We may come to a book like this one for the medicine tales, but we stay for the stories of cross-country motorcycle rides, self-administered experiments with powerful drugs, struggles with addiction, bodily transformations, and affairs of the heart. Throughout it all, Sacks maintains the intense, at times wrenching intimacy of his prose. In a perfect encapsulation of the storytelling approach that made him legendary, Sacks writes, “All sorts of generalizations are made possible by dealing with populations, but one needs the concrete, the particular, the personal too.” With those particulars, those personal items, Sacks made a kind of magic. On the Move is that rare memoir written by an author whose life experiences and ideas are the match for his literary talents. He was the consummate storyteller. His stories had rigor and power, and they served to make the world seem like larger place, and ever more curious. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Sally Mann, Hold Still (2015)

I remember the first time I saw a Sally Mann portrait in real life—I nearly walked by, but something caught me and held me there, for much longer than I expected. The eyes, the pose, the exposure, the cobwebby Southern trees—I still can’t put my finger on it, can’t explain, a phenomenon that for me is the mark of artistic genius.

In this exquisite memoir, the widely lauded and highly controversial Mann unpacks her family’s history in her beloved Virginia, telling her own tales as well as shaking out old boxes of photographs and letters that point towards “deceit and scandal, alcohol, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land . . . racial complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of the prodigal son, and maybe even bloody murder.”

All that is about as fun as it sounds, but Hold Still stands out most of all for being a true photographer’s memoir: in weaving her photographs throughout, Mann both showcases her art and uses it to illustrate her story—and sometimes her point. She responds to her critics with a sort of bemused tolerance, and shows shots taken fractions of seconds apart, in which her children’s faces break from hard-edged vamping into goofy smiles. But she also grapples with the fear that they might, in some sense, be right—that she has put her children in danger by making them her subjects. It’s complicated, and ultimately unresolved, which feels like truth. Read an excerpt here . –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature (2017)

“I am, in the deepest sense, colored,” writes naturalist and wildlife biologist J. Drew Lanham, in a memoir whose masterful opening sections bring to mind Jean Toomer’s descriptions of Georgia in  Cane  (1923). The Home Place  is on one level about lives not easily categorized, a man who watches the people and landscapes of his childhood shift and disappear as often as he watches the birds he so dearly prizes. Lanham is as much a poet as an academic. He writes not only in homage to the family that made him who he is, but also to decouple nature and environmental literature from academia, which he accuses of alienating readers who might otherwise find a way in. The “in-between place” that the title refers to is a 200-acre inholding in the tiny county of Edgefield, South Carolina, where Lanham grows up with his parents, siblings and grandmother. Lanham aptly writes with the precision of an agriculturalist; his prose is circuitous, humorous, and often understated: “There were three or four old crepe myrtles in the yard that erupted in purple and white blooms in April and May. Little copses of lemon-yellow daffodils and nodding snowdrops preceded the crepe myrtles in the new warmth of march.” Or: “[R]oving gangs of noisy blue jays conducted morning raids to gather a share of nuts.” Though lingering in this kind of descriptive prose is the book’s greatest pleasure, Lanham also speaks to the difficulties he’s encountered throughout his career. He’s aware that, unfortunately, a black man in his profession is relatively rare, and Lanham’s private experiences in and beyond the Home Place are always circumscribed by this knowledge. Coincidentally,  The Home Place  was published just months before the election of a president whose administration would roll back key legislation meant to protect endangered species. Lanham took a more placid approach than the post-2016 “doomsday” mode of ecological writing, though we must now wonder what Lanham might say in an introduction if the book ever gets another printing. –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Nora Krug, Belonging (2018)

Reading Nora Krug’s Belonging is like watching a mind unfold in front of you. It’s classified as a graphic memoir (and it won the 2019 National Book Critic Circle Award for Autobiography!), but it feels like a scrapbook. (You can see what I mean here, in this excerpt on homesickness and heimat, or “the place that a person is born into.”) Belonging is Nora Krug’s honest attempt to reckon with her German heritage. Born decades after the Holocaust but surrounded by a familial silence about it, she boldly interrogates her family’s role in this terrible history. Belonging doesn’t just tell Nora Krug’s story. Yes, there are plenty of her own handwritten notes and beautiful illustrations, but she also cobbles together family photographs and letters to tell this story through the generations. Belonging reads like a home video and a history textbook rolled into one. On one page, you’ll have an anecdote about mushroom-foraging with her family. On another, you’ll trace the history of a particular kind of German bandage, which her mother used to patch up her six-year-old knee after a skating accident. But on the next, she’ll include some of her uncle’s journal, complete with anti-Semitic rhetoric and his drawings of swastikas. (Random and hodge-podge as it may sound, trust me: the curation feels organic. These things are connected, is what Nora Krug seems to be saying.) There is something unbelievably generous about the way she offers these bits of history to us. The story isn’t brought to us as an olive branch or a request for forgiveness for her family. It’s an open-ended question. This is perhaps why the graphic memoir/collage medium is the perfect one in which to tell this story; there is no posturing or justification or attempt at explanation. She can leave us with an image and let us sit with the complicated discomfort. We join her in the midst of her reckoning.  –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House (2019)

It feels appropriate that describing Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House —comprised of the tellings and retellings of Machado’s relationship with an abusive ex-girlfriend—falls to the three of us who loved this memoir so much that we all had to have a say. This is a story with many forms, all centered on the Dream House: a real place where Machado and her ex-girlfriend lived, but also a series of mental fortifications forged through emotional abuse, physical violence, gaslighting, and suspicion. Machado calls on a series of narrative traditions in recounting this story, one for which there is little to no existing narrative precedent, since abusive queer relationships have so rarely been addressed in popular culture; the result is a dizzying, monumental achievement. So many of us have our own versions of this story, and reading through hers feels intensely personal and powerfully affirmative, the equivalent of a friend looking you in the eye and saying, over and over, you’re not crazy. I needed this book; I think a lot of us do. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

The dedication page to In the Dream House goes: “If you need this book, it is for you.” Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir does something I’ve never seen done before, which is to examine an abusive queer relationship from many different angles, to hold it in many different lights. She uses footnotes to call upon tropes in mythology and taboos in literature. She references queer theory. It’s all in an attempt to situate the story in a different context, to find a way to tell it that can help us make sense of what’s happening. In the Dream House is a dizzying, raw, and deeply personal story and with her experimental structure, she is casting lines out, trying to find (and helping others find) the structure that holds. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Kier-la Janisse, House of Psychotic Women: A Personal Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012)

I’ve always been of the mind that the best way to get to know someone is not through their experience so much as their taste, a little-explored topic in the wide world of recorded lives—until now.

In her brilliant and bizarre memoir, Kier-la Janisse reinvents film criticism as memoir, and tells the story of her life through the horror and exploitation films she enjoyed growing up and which later became her life’s passion. Anecdotal musings and harrowing life accounts mix together with astute criticism incorporating a quarter-century of thought on horror cinema; the chapter on films of teenage rebellion goes together with Janisse’s account of her baby delinquency, while Janisse’s relationship with her father, always fraught, leads into discussions of family, gender and sexuality as represented by exploitation cinema. Janisse isn’t making the case that these films are valuable works of art, so much as windows into the modern psyche, and occasionally (as in the case of rape and revenge cinema) a narrative form to be reclaimed by feminists despite its original prurient intent. House of Psychotic Women is what I hope all works of pop culture criticism to be in the future— erudite, personal, intense, mind-bending, and refusing to draw a line between literary merit and personal taste. Plus, the design is awesome!  –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22 (2010) · Binyavanga Wainaina, One Day I Will Write About This Place (2011) · Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011) · Emmanuel Carrère, tr. Linda Coverdale, Lives Other Than My Own (2011) · Gabrielle Hamilton, Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef (2011) · Meghan O’Rourke, The Long Goodbye (2011) · Tony Judt, The Memory Chalet (2011) · Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water (2011) · Joan Didion, Blue Nights (2011) · Joshua Cody, [Sic]: A Memoir (2011) · Mira Bartók, The Memory Palace (2011) · Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother? (2012) · Anthony Shadid, House of Stone (2012) · Héctor Abad, tr. Anne McLean and Rosalind Harvey, Oblivion (2012) · Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies (2012) · Cheryl Strayed, Wild (2012) · Edna O’Brien, Country Girl (2013) · Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb, I Am Malala (2013) · Liao Yiwu, tr. Wenguang Huang, For a Song and a Hundred Songs (2013) · Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave (2013) · Amy Wilentz, Farewell, Fred Voodoo (2013) · Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (2014) · Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. (2014) · Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy (2014) · Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch (2014) · Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock (2015) · Tracy K. Smith, Ordinary Light (2015) · Patrick Modiano, tr. Mark Polizzotti, Pedigree (2015) · Lacey Johnson, The Other Side (2015) · Mohamedou Ould Slahi, ed. Larry Siems, Guantanamo Diary (2015) · Jenny Diski, In Gratitude (2016) · Scholastique Mukasonga, tr. Jordan Stump, Cockroaches (2016) · Hisham Matar, The Return (2016) · Hope Jahren, Lab Girl (2016) · Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy (2017) · Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey (2017) · Xiaolu Guo, Nine Continents (2017) · Annie Ernaux, tr. Alison L. Strayer, The Years  (2017) · Kiese Laymon, Heavy (2018) · Lisa Brennan-Jobs, Small Fry (2018) · Sarah Smarsh, Heartland (2018) ·  Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River (2018) · Leslie Jamison, The Recovering (2018) · Terese Marie Mailhot, Heart Berries (2018) · T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls (2019).

Emily Temple

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