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...

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.

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 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 ...

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.

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 treasure trove of myths and terror… Atmospheric as hell… Immersive."-The Times Based on the podcast with over one hundred million downloads, Fall of Civilizations brilliantly explores how a range of ancient societies rose to power and sophistication, and how they tipped over into collapse...

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

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...

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 ...

A collection of the year’s best essays, selected by award-winning writer Alexander Chee. Alexander Chee, an essayist of “virtuosity and power” (Washington Post), selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year. Supplemental...

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.

What is Australia’s place in the new global landscape? Are we ready for our post-American future? In an era of rising danger for all, and dramatic choices for Australia, Hugh White explores how the world is changing and Australia should respond. Under Donald Trump, America's retreat from global leadership has been swift and erratic. China, Russia and India are on the move. White explains the big strategic trends driving the war in Ukraine, and why America has "lost" Asia.

A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public, commonly referred to as A Modest Proposal, is a Juvenalian satirical essay written and published anonymously by Jonathan Swift in 1729. Swift suggests in his essay that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling children as food. By doing this he mocks the authority of the British officials.

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...

“America is supposed to be the land of opportunity—where any poor kid can grow up to become a millionaire. That’s the story. But I’ma tell you how it really went down.” —Ms. Pat From the author of the acclaimed memoir Rabbit and star of BET’s The Ms. Pat Show, a heartfelt, raw, and...

From New York Times reporter Jazmine Ulloa, a sweeping human history of El Paso, revealing violence, power, and privilege at play in America's most famous border town. El Paso has been called the “Ellis Island” of America’s southern border, a mountain pass cum border town cum bifurcated...

Adapted into an Academy Award-winning film and one of John Irving's most beloved novels, The Cider House Rules is the story of a kind but complex doctor and the conflicted young orphan he takes under his wing. “A novel as good as one could hope to find from any author, anywhere, anytime...

The greatest American novel ever written about obsession, the sea, and the thing that cannot be caught. This annotated edition includes an original critical essay and a full biography of Herman Melville. Herman Melville published Moby Dick in 1851 to near-total indifference. The reviews were mixed, the sales were poor, and Melville — who had poured everything he knew about whaling, philosophy, the Bible, and the darkness of the human will into 600 pages — spent the rest of his life in obscurity. He died in 1891 almost completely forgotten. Thirty years later, scholars rediscovered the ...