American Essays

“The essay has taught me how to live,” writes Jia Tolentino, this year’s Best American Essays guest editor. In a time of escalating authoritarianism and disinformation, we turn to artists and writers to make sense of the world around us. The twenty-one authors featured in this collection...

A collection of the year’s best essays, selected by Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Wesley Morris and series editor Kim Dana Kupperman. “Imparting some piece of yourself—any part—is arduous and warrants some kind of commendation,” writes guest editor Wesley Morris in his introduction...

A collection of the year’s best essays, selected by critically acclaimed author of The Future Is History and How to Survive Totalitarianism and New York Times columnist, M. Gessen. The Best American series, launched in 1915, is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short...

The text that inspired Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and movements of peaceful resistance around the world—now in a new accessible edition with introduction and notes by Henry Bugalho. In 1849, Henry David Thoreau published one of the most influential essays in the history of political thought. Jailed for refusing to pay taxes that would finance the war against Mexico and the maintenance of slavery, Thoreau transformed his night in prison into a devastating reflection on the limits of obedience to the State. When the law is unjust, to obey is to collaborate with injustice. Civil ...

A new rip-roaring essay collection from the smart, edgy, hilarious, unabashedly raunchy, and bestselling Samantha Irby. Irby is forty, and increasingly uncomfortable in her own skin despite what Inspirational Instagram Infographics have promised her. She has left her job as a receptionist at a...

Jimmy Lee Hickam grew up along Red Dog Road, a dead-end strip of gravel and mud buried deep in the bowels of Appalachian Ohio. It is the poorest road, in the poorest county, in the poorest region of the state. To make things worse, the name Hickam is synonymous with trouble. Jimmy Lee hails from a heathen mix of thieves, moonshiners, drunkards, and general anti-socials that for decades have clung to both the hardscrabble hills and the iron bars of every jail cell in the region. This life, Jimmy Lee believes, is his destiny, someday working with his drunkard father at the sawmill, or sitting next to his arsonist brother in the penitentiary.

The complete Oz — all fourteen novels by L. Frank Baum in one volume, with a critical essay you will not find in any other edition Edited with a critical essay by Henry Bugalho — philosopher, writer, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Published by Erato Press. In 1900, L. Frank Baum created something unprecedented: an American fairy tale. Not an imitation of Grimm or Andersen, but something native to the prairies, the dust, the vast democratic optimism of a country that believed it was inventing the future. A girl from Kansas is carried by a tornado to a land where scarecrows ...

In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time...

With great originality and wit, Orwell unfolds his views on subjects ranging from a revaluation of Charles Dickens to the nature of Socialism, from a comic yet profound discussion of naughty seaside postcards to a spirited defense of English cooking. Displaying an almost unrivalled mastery of English plain prose, Orwell’s essays created a unique literary manner from the process of thinking aloud and continue to challenge, move, and entertain.

A collection of twenty pieces that represent the best science and nature writing published the previous year and explores our ever-changing world. The Best American series, launched in 1915, is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction, and it is the...

Every novel Louisa May Alcott wrote about growing up — all eight, in one edition. Plus two critical essays that read them the way they deserve to be read. Louisa May Alcott published Little Women in 1868 under pressure: from her publisher, from her readers, from a market that wanted girls to behave. She spent the rest of her career writing around that pressure — eight novels, dozens of stories, a body of work that kept asking the same question in different ways: what does it cost a woman to become herself in a world designed to prevent it? This edition collects all eight novels and ...

Hear some of the greatest American essays ever written! This unabridged collection covers a multitude of subjects, including philosophy, politics, turkeys, and dogs.

The four novels that gave American literature its voice — and two essays that explain why one of them changed everything. Mark Twain invented American literature twice. The first time was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876 — a boy's world of summer, caves, and the Mississippi River, told with the warmth of a man who remembered childhood as a country you could never return to. The second time was Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884, where the same river becomes a moving argument about freedom, race, and the cost of conscience. Hemingway said all modern American literature comes from...

What was the real significance of William James's breakdown? Of the anti-Semitism in T.S. Eliot's writing? At each step in his latest journey through American cultural history, Menand has an original point to make.

In this powerful and wide-ranging collection of essays, Rebecca Solnit turns her attention to the war at home. This is a war, she says, "[W]ith so many casualties that we should call it by its true name, this war with so many dead by police, by violent ex-husbands and partners and lovers, by people pursuing power and profit at the point of a gun or just shooting first and figuring out who they hit later."  

This audiobook compiles Ralph Waldo Emerson's most important works: "The American Scholar", "The Divinity School Address", "Self-Reliance", "The Over-Soul", "The Poet", and "Thoreau". The audiobook is expertly read by Daniel Adam Day. Published by American Renaissance Books.

Introduction by New York Times bestselling author Henry Louis Gates Jr. Spanning more than 35 years of work, the first comprehensive collection of essays, criticism, and articles by the legendary author of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston, showcasing the evolution of her distinctive...

An inclusive and landmark history, emphasizing how essential Asian American experiences are to any understanding of US history Original and expansive, Asian American Histories of the United States is a nearly 200-year history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the US...

In this moving biography and memoir, Blair Underwood, acclaimed star of film, stage, and television, pays homage to his mother, sharing her well-lived life, and key lessons learned as a fashion designer, mother, and soldier’s wife. Born in Buffalo, New York, Marilyn Ann Scales Underwood...

A 50th anniversary hardcover edition of Kerouac’s classic novel that defined a generation Few novels have had as profound an impact on American culture as On the Road. Pulsating with the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, illicit drugs, and the mystery and promise of the open...