contemporary essay collections

50 Must-Read Contemporary Essay Collections

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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

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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.”

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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?

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The best essay collections to read now

From advice on friendship and understanding modern life to getting a grasp on coronavirus, these books offer insight on life. 

The best essay collections including Zadie Smith's Intimations, James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son and Nora Ephron's The Most of Nora Ephron.

What better way to get into the work of a writer than through a collection of their essays? 

These seven collections, from novelists and critics alike, address a myriad of subjects from friendship to how colleges are dealing with sexual assaults on campus to race and racism. 

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino (2019)

As a staff writer at The New Yorker , Jia Tolentino has explored everything from a rise in youth vaping to the ongoing cultural reckoning about sexual assault. Her first book Trick Mirror takes some of those pieces for The New Yorker as well as new work to form what is one of the sharpest collections of cultural criticism today.

Using herself and her own coming of age as a lens for many of the essays, Tolentino turns her pen and her eye to everything from her generation’s obsession with extravagant weddings to how college campuses deal with sexual assault.

If you’re looking for an insight into millennial life, then Trick Mirror should be on your to-read list.

In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens by Alice Walker (1983)

Sometimes essays collected from a sprawling period of a successful writer’s life can feel like a hasty addition to a bibliography; a smash-and-grab of notebook flotsam. Not so In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens , from which one can truly understand the sheer range of the Pulitzer Prize winner’s range of study and activism. From Walker’s first published piece of non-fiction (for which she won a prize, and spent her winnings on cut peonies) to more elegiac pieces about her heritage, Walker’s thoughts on feminism (which she terms “womanism”) and the Civil Rights Movement remain grippingly pertinent 50 years on.

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (2000)

That David Sedaris’s ascent to literary stardom happened later in his life – his breakthrough collection of humour essays was released when he was 44 – suited the author’s writing style perfectly. Me Talk Pretty One Day is both a painfully funny account of his childhood and an enduring snapshot of mid-forties malaise. First story ‘Go Carolina’, about his attempt to transcend a childhood lisp, is told from a perfect distance and with all the worldliness necessary to milk every drop of tragic, cringeworthy humour from his childhood. It never falters from there: by the book’s second half, in which Sedaris is living in France, he’s firmly established his niche, writing about the ways that even snobs experience utter humiliation ­– and Me Talk Pretty One Day is all the more human for it. 

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contemporary essay collections

10 Contemporary American Essayists You Should Be Reading Right Now

Today marks the release of celebrated novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson’s newest collection of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books . We’ve been excited about this book for a while now, so if you’ve been reading our books coverage with any regularity you probably already know we think it’s something worth picking up. Great as it is, Robinson’s collection only whet our appetites for more essays by contemporary writers, so in case it does the same for you, we’ve put together a list of contemporary essayists we think everyone should be reading right now (or, you know, whenever you finish watching Downton Abbey ). We’ve tried to stick to authors who are still alive — so David Foster Wallace and Christopher Hitchens are off the table, though they both would have made this list with flying colors were they still with us — and limited ourselves to American writers, but even with those caveats, there is enough in these writers’ oeuvres to keep you up and thinking for weeks on end. Click through to read our list, and please do add your own suggestions for top-notch essayists we should all be reading in the comments.

contemporary essay collections

Marilynne Robinson

Though Robinson is much lauded for her fiction (she won the Pulitzer Prize for her second novel, Gilead ), she is equally adored for her incisive essays, which often take hard looks at Americanism and the social political system writ both large and very small. Dorris Lessing called her 1998 collection, The Death of Adam , “a useful antidote to the increasingly crude and slogan-loving culture we inhabit,” and we’re comfortable expanding that statement to Robinson’s work at large — always challenging, always thought provoking, always making us want to be better.

contemporary essay collections

John Jeremiah Sullivan

Sullivan’s recent collection, Pulphead , has had everyone raving since it hit shelves in October — and with good reason. With exacting, witty prose, Sullivan tackles pop culture and history with equal ability, writing about everything from Real World alumni to Christian rock festivals in the Ozarks to Constantine Rafinesque, a nineteenth-century genius struggling for a foothold. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll wonder about modern existence — and what else are essays for?

contemporary essay collections

Cynthia Ozick

Though David Foster Wallace was disqualified from this list, he lives on in Ozick, whom he listed (alongside Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo) as one of the country’s best living fiction writers. From the king of the contemporary essay, that’s a ringing endorsement. Not that she really needs it, however — Ozick has no less than seven essay collections to her name, alongside a host of novels and short fiction, and writes on almost every subject, though she tends to favor the Jewish American lens. Her prose is perfectly self-conscious, sharp and crystal clear, she is witty and definitely smarter than you. Which is really never bad.

contemporary essay collections

John D’Agata

D’Agata, already a celebrated essayist, has been in the news recently due to the release of The Lifespan of a Fact , a years-long conversation between D’Agata and his fact checker about the very nature of essay-writing. The book must itself, of course, be a semi-fiction, proving its own point, in a way — but that just makes the whole thing all the more interesting. But if for no other reason, you should read D’Agata because he’s tackling questions that have long stumped both readers and writers, and will probably continue to for some time. Better get acquainted.

contemporary essay collections

An important social equality activist and scholar, bell hooks’ writings are must-reads for anyone. Incredibly prolific both in the academic and essay format (and in many other types of media as well), hooks writes about race, gender, feminism, class, art, and the world at large, often through a postmodern lens. She is fiery and unabashed about her beliefs, as every intelligent woman should be, and though this has of course caused some to criticize her, it has caused many more to love her. Obviously, we’re in the latter camp.

contemporary essay collections

Sarah Vowell

The author of six nonfiction books on American history and culture as well as many essays, Vowell is practiced at cultural criticism. A frequent contributor to This American Life , where many of her essays get their starts, she comes at the contemporary social world with a supreme understanding of our country’s past. After all, she does write a lot about assassinated presidents. Fun fact: she’s also a voice actor, best known for her portrayal as Violet Parr in The Incredibles . Though she doesn’t really need it, we admit that makes us like her more.

contemporary essay collections

Elif Batuman

Elif Batuman’s first collection of essays, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them , published last year, reveals her to be a complete nerd — in the best of ways, of course. Unpretentiously in love with literature and blessed with a relentlessly charming voice, almost everything we read by Batuman sends us scrambling back to our bookshelves for that novel she’s reminded us we’re dying to dive into. And that, friends, is always a good thing.

contemporary essay collections

Touré sort of has a hand in everything — he writes essays and short stories, has a novel under his belt, is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and hosts hip-hop shows on Fuse. Constant through all his mediums, however, are his insightful, intimate — and often hilarious — observations about race, class, and the wild and crazy world of pop culture. In his most recent book, Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now , he explores race as “a completely liquid shape-shifter that can take any form” and aims “to attack and destroy the idea that there is a correct or legitimate way of doing blackness.” Provocative and brilliant, we think this is a guy who’ll keep changing the cultural landscape for years to come.

contemporary essay collections

David Shields

Like D’Agata, Shields is concerned with probing the edges of what makes an essay an essay — or if we should even have terms like “essay” at all. In his 2010 book Reality Hunger , Shields argues that the “lyric essay” is contemporary culture’s premier literary form — but that such terms don’t really matter, as all of culture is in the midst of getting mixed up in a huge intellectual blender. While we had our issues with the book, he makes some fascinating points, all worth reading in this age of mash-ups and DIY and shifting intellectual property rights.

contemporary essay collections

Sloane Crosley

Crosley’s hilarious personal essays are smart and observant and relentlessly sly. Like a lady Sedaris, she wins you over with self-deprecating humor and indignant reactions to the weirdness of the everyday world. Though her essays are no intellectual slog, they will make you smile, commiserate, and perhaps enjoy your day just a little bit more.

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contemporary essay collections

7 Brilliant Essay Collections You Need to Read

contemporary essay collections

When you think of essay collections, the image that comes to mind may be cumbersome compendiums of scholarly compositions. But personal essays banish the academic connotation of the word, and can provide some of the funniest, most sincere, most illuminating, and most genuinely affecting reading you can ever experience. Here are some great collections to start with.

I Was Told There'd Be Cake

The hilarious and iconic first collection by the indomitable Sloane Crosley earned her a rightful place as one of the modern masters of the form. I WAS TOLD THERE’D BE CAKE is a comedy of manners as Crosley tries—and often fails—to navigate the rigid customs of upper-middle-class society in endearing tales of fumbling through everything from social functions to a disastrous volunteer experience at the Museum of Natural History. Crosley is something of a cosmopolitan iconoclast, because through her essays, she exposes the inherent ridiculousness of adhering to the script of etiquette at all costs.

contemporary essay collections

Sloane Crosley is different from Abbi and Ilana in a lot of ways. She can uphold a professional career, for one. She calls Manhattan home, whereas the Broad City stars reside in grungier Gowanus. But even when she’s being a bridesmaid or volunteering at the American Museum of Natural History, Crosley’s experiences always have an amusing twist and usually end in disaster. She’s also really funny.

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So Sad Today

From the creator of the Twitter account of the same name, SO SAD TODAY is a deeply moving series of essays on the loneliness and isolation that lingers beneath social media, texting, online avatars, and just being a person in the modern world. Melissa Broder offers an unflinchingly candid and achingly honest mediation that, despite her trademark style of writing in Internet shorthand and slang, is remarkably profound.

contemporary essay collections

The 5 Best Books I Read Last Month

By Nikki Barnhart | March 14, 2018

Sunshine State

In SUNSHINE STATE, Sarah Gerald blends personal pieces about her childhood and adolescence on Florida’s Gulf Coast, with gonzo journalism–style essays—where she inserts herself and her own experiences in the reporting—on the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary, Florida’s overlooked homeless population, and other issues the titular Sunshine State faces. She brings humanity to a place often separated from the realm of real life, cast off as a mere vacationland or “America’s basement.” The overall effect is a nuanced portrait of Florida, so deeply defined you can almost feel the humid, salty air crackle the pages against your fingers.

contemporary essay collections

When Olivia Laing moved to New York City, she found herself enveloped in a seemingly constant loneliness, despite residing in one of the most populated metropolises in the entire world. But, as she demonstrates in THE LONELY CITY, this is a city built by lonely people. In a series of thought-provoking essays, she examines cities from the point of view of various iconic artists, from Edward Hopper to Andy Warhol. Laing shares how their experiences of isolation and seclusion were pivotal to their work, which in turn, has become part of the fabric of New York itself. By exploring the lives of others, Laing finds connections to her own life in the most intimate of ways, and finally discovers a kinship with the world around her.

contemporary essay collections

Blending personal memoir with cultural criticism, HOW TO FALL IN LOVE WITH ANYONE examines the scripts of finding love we pass down through our society—in romantic comedies, social media posts, stories of other people’s lives—and questions if clinging to these myths prevents us from realizing our own authentic relationships. Inspired by her parent’s divorce and her own breakup, journalist Mandy Len Catron shares her experiences of traveling to the Appalachian coal mining town where her parents met, using literary theory to examine love stories, and using a 36-question quiz to create intimacy with anyone. The result is a vulnerable and insightful collection that digs deep into a subject that affects us all.

Read the full review of HOW TO FALL IN LOVE WITH ANYONE .

contemporary essay collections

How to Fall in Love with a Love Story

By Katy Hershberger | August 28, 2018

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The Book of My Lives

Aleksander Hemon’s first book of nonfiction is as introspective as you might expect from the title. Following Hemon from Sarajevo to Chicago, THE BOOK OF MY LIVES chronicles the experience of feeling like an outsider even when you’ve made it to the place you think you want to be—whether that be a new city, adulthood, or anything in between.

contemporary essay collections

For celebrated essayist Chuck Klosterman, it’s hard to determine the line between his personal life and his writing life. Anyone who’s read Klosterman’s work knows how passionate and curious he is about writing about pop culture. But KILLING YOURSELF TO LIVE—a journal of Klosterman’s cross-country journey to view the sites where rock stars have died—is the collection where he finally inserts himself into his work, and shares with readers how he found himself. From snorting cocaine in a graveyard to ending three relationships in 21 days, KILLING YOURSELF TO LIVE is a behind-the-scenes look at rock journalism like no other.

contemporary essay collections

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The Contemporary American Essay

By phillip lopate, category: essays & literary collections | world history.

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About The Contemporary American Essay

A dazzling anthology of essays by some of the best writers of the past quarter century—from Barry Lopez and Margo Jefferson to David Sedaris and Samantha Irby—selected by acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate. The first decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a blossoming of creative nonfiction. In this extraordinary collection, Phillip Lopate gathers essays by forty-seven of America’s best contemporary writers, mingling long-established eminences with newer voices and making room for a wide variety of perspectives and styles. The Contemporary American Essay is a monument to a remarkably adaptable form and a treat for anyone who loves fantastic writing.   Hilton Als • Nicholson Baker • Thomas Beller • Sven Birkerts • Eula Biss • Mary Cappello • Anne Carson • Terry Castle • Alexander Chee • Teju Cole • Bernard Cooper • Sloane Crosley • Charles D’Ambrosio • Meghan Daum • Brian Doyle • Geoff Dyer • Lina Ferreira • Lynn Freed • Rivka Galchen • Ross Gay • Louise Glück • Emily Fox Gordon • Patricia Hampl • Aleksandar Hemon • Samantha Irby • Leslie Jamison • Margo Jefferson • Laura Kipnis • David Lazar • Yiyun Li • Phillip Lopate • Barry Lopez • Thomas Lynch • John McPhee • Ander Monson • Eileen Myles • Maggie Nelson • Meghan O’Gieblyn • Joyce Carol Oates • Darryl Pinckney • Lia Purpura • Karen Russell • David Sedaris • Shifra Sharlin • David Shields • Floyd Skloot • Rebecca Solnit • Clifford Thompson • Wesley Yang An Anchor Original.

Also by Phillip Lopate

The Glorious American Essay

About Phillip Lopate

PHILLIP LOPATE is the author of the essay collections Against Joie de Vivre, Bachelorhood, and Portrait of My Body. He has also written the novels The Rug Merchant and Confessions of a Summer. Lopate is the editor of The Art of the Personal Essay and the Library of America’s Writing… More about Phillip Lopate

Product Details

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“What’s marvelous is the way Lopate’s anthologies . . . manage to be not only comprehensive monuments of deep expertise, but such continuously fresh and thrilling reading companions.” — Jonathan Lethem, author of The Feral Detective   “Phillip Lopate is one of the most brilliant and original essayists now working.” — Louise Glück, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature  

Table Of Contents

Introduction by Phillip Lopate “I Am the Happiness of This World” by Hilton Als “One Summer” by Nicholson Baker ”Portrait of the Bagel as a Young Man” by Thomas Beller  “Brave Face” by Sven Birkerts        Excerpt from “On Immunity” by Eula Biss      “Tactless” by Mary Cappello           “Decreation” by Anne Carson          “Home Alone” by Terry Castle        “Girl” by Alexander Chee         “Black Body” by Teju Cole “Greedy Sleep” by Bernard Cooper “The Doctor Is a Woman” by Sloane Crosley       “Loitering” by Charles D’Ambrosio             “Matricide” by Meghan Daum         “Joyas Voladoras” by Brian Doyle “Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (with particular reference to Doughnut Plant doughnuts)” by Geoff Dyer           “CID–LAX–BOG” by Lina Ferreira                 “Doing No Harm: Some Thoughts on Reading and Writing in the Age of Umbrage” by Lynn Freed  “The Case of the Angry Daughter” by Rivka Galchen       “Scat” by Ross Gay     “On Revenge” by Louise Glück       “Faculty Wife” by Emily Fox Gordon     “Other People’s Secrets” by Patricia Hampl           “The Aquarium” by Aleksandar Hemon      “The Terror of Love” by Samantha Irby     “The Empathy Exams” by Leslie Jamison     “Negroland” by Margo Jefferson     “Domestic Gulags” by Laura Kipnis           “Ann: Death and the Maiden” by David Lazar            “Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life” by Yiyun Li       “Experience Necessary” by Phillip Lopate             “The Invitation” by Barry Lopez     “Bodies in Motion and at Rest” by Thomas Lynch            “Draft No. 4” by John McPhee         “Failure: A Meditation, Another Iteration (With Interruptions)” by Anders Monson “Live Through That?!” by Eileen Myles       Excerpt from The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson    “Homeschool” by Meghan O’Gieblyn         “A Visit to San Quentin” by Joyce Carol Oates     “Busted in New York” by Darryl Pinckney            “Against ‘Gunmetal’” by Lia Purpura         “Beeper World” by Karen Russell   “This Old House” by David Sedaris            “Differences: Sex, Separateness & Marriage” by Shifra Sharlin “Information Sickness” by David Shields         “Gray Area: Thinking With a Damaged Brain” by Floyd Skloot       “Cassandra Among the Creeps” by Rebecca Solnit           “Eric Garner and Me” by Clifford Thompson         “We Out Here” by Wesley Yang

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10 best essay collections written by women to be inspired by

Covering perspectives on everything from sexual politics to race, these essays are provocative, enlightening and above all, truthful , article bookmarked.

Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile

Being heard as a woman has always been difficult and if the past couple of years post #MeToo has taught us anything, women are still being censored, ignored and erased

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Essay collections are nothing new – writers have always wanted to write non-fiction pieces from their own point of view. But it is fair to say that essay collections among women seem to be enjoying something of a Golden Age.

Being heard as a woman has always been difficult and if the past couple of years post #MeToo has taught us anything, women are still being censored, ignored and erased.

Sexual politics crop up in almost any essay collection by a woman – how could they not? Unique perspectives on universal experiences – sex, work, identity, love – are what essayists do best. However, often it is the more niche topics that really allow an essayist to be at their best and most exposing – which is to say at their most vulnerable, from detailing how they take notes or how they make frittata or what they think of Shakespeare’s sisters, readers get to access a more personal side of what is so often political writing.

Related stories

Many of these essays cover race today – how it intersects with feminism or what it feels like to repeatedly feel shame when viewing yourself through the lens of White America.

Plenty of these collections offer advice on writing itself – and on reading and narrative.

Almost all of these collections are contemporary – with one exception, Slouching Towards Bethlehem , a collection of Joan Didion’s writing from the 1960s, which is a masterclass in essay-writing. We were looking for essays which were provocative, comforting, enlightening and above all, truthful – authours needed to clearly present opinion without straying into self-indulgence. Crucially, all of the essay collections here are by authors with a unique and distinct voice and all feel like little gifts from the writers.

You can trust our independent reviews. We may earn commission from some of the retailers, but we never allow this to influence selections, which are formed from real-world testing and expert advice. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.

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‘Minor Feelings’ by Cathy Park Hong, published by Profile Books

minor-feelings-essay-indybest.jpg

In this volume Korean-American writer and poet Park Hong presents Asian stereotypes as she sees them with a directness that lands like a sucker punch to the gut: “Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don’t even have enough presence to be considered real minorities.”

As a reader you feel totally panicked by the words – how can she write this? – but this is Park Hong’s shame as she sees herself as white America sees her.

Park Hong believes a sense of obedience is at the heart of white manipulation and oppression of Asians. But Park Hong is not obedient. She is candid, opinionated and emotional – all qualities she believes are not part of the Asian stereotype.

Park Hong manages to be very funny when talking about something so personally heart-breaking and systemically appalling. She describes her voice as “a kazoo” and speaks of audiences rushing for the door when her poetry reading is over. She recalls how she begged a Korean therapist to take her on as a patient (“‘Eunice!’ I shouted into the phone.”) because she felt she would be better understood – and doesn’t scrimp on the details of the pain of that rejection.

But although Park Hong’s experiences are naturally at the heart of the essays, she details the racism served up to Chinese workers in America the 1900s – including the example of a 15-year-old girl who was raped until her “body was hollowed out with syphilis” and she was “dumped out on the streets to die alone”. She also explains how Asians were essentially used as pawns by white supremacists during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

Park Hong also discusses how often Asians are lumped into one stereotype when the differences, prejudices and conflicts between the nations are complex and very real: “Most Americans… think Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is for tissues. They don’t understand that we’re this tenuous alliance of many nationalities.”

A standout moment is where Park Hong explains that racism towards Asians is different than racism towards black people, especially as she does so without making any value judgements or suggestions about which is worse.

We learned so much from Minor Things , not least what a dazzling writer Cathy Park Hong is.

‘Coventry’ by Rachel Cusk, published by Faber

coventry-essay-indybest.jpg

The first of Cusk's essays in this collection, Driving As Metaphor , focuses on the road – its users and their vehicles. It covers speeding, morality, road rage and even death. Only Cusk could make a piece about driving – not competitive or even risky driving, just bog standard quotidian driving – remotely interesting.

Later, On Rudeness beautifully examines manners, society and language while Making Home discusses women and nesting – what makes a home and how we live. Towards the end of the collection Cusk concentrates on specific writers and books. Notable is the essay on Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love which Cusk describes rather brilliantly as employing “best friend language”, where secrets, embarrassments and disappointments are relayed in a humourous, knowing tone.

Towards the end of the essay Cusk rejects the idea that this sort of self-discovery memoir is anything but “a competition, at whose heart is a need to win.” Cusk points out that Gilbert is a “relentless cataloguer” of personal successes and questions how that makes her audiences feel given that they are cast as the admirers and not the admired.

But it is in the essay from which the volume takes its name that is the standout. Coventry dissects what it means to be given the silent treatment – with Cusk revealing that her own parents have periodically subjected her to this wordless purgatory. The authour's interest in and visiting of Coventry Cathedral, once grand and proud, decimated to nothing but shattered ruins in 1940 before being rebuilt, serves as the perfect motif here – and is further proof of her cleverness.

‘See What Can Be Done’ by Lorrie Moore, published by Faber

lorrie-moore-essay-indybest.jpg

We loved the introduction, which explains where the volume’s title comes from – Robert Silvers, former editor of The New York Review of Books used to write the phrase at the bottom of his commissions to Moore – but it also allows us to understand more about how Moore goes about her criticism. It is somehow comforting to know that she doesn’t have any training in it and that she subscribes to no formula. She does however have a few self-imposed rules – seemingly minor things – that are likely to make you nod along in recognition or think oops – that’s me , such as avoiding internetese (informal internet speak), or “any form of the word ‘enjoy’”.

And we also love how this doesn’t need to be read in linear fashion. Instead you can dip in and out depending on your wont. That said, the opening essay is a banger if you’re a fan of Nora Ephron’s novel Heartburn . Moore’s 1983 review sums up the enduringly popular novel perfectly by discussing it as both a piece of art and a symbol of revenge.

As well as critical pieces with TV, film and literature as the focal point, the authour tackles huge topics such as memoir and writing itself, giving insight into Moore herself and her trajectory as a writer – “I preferred hearing about parties to actually going to them. I liked to phone the next day and get the news from a friend. I wanted gossip, third-handedness, narrative.”

Moore’s writing is accessible, clever and soothingly unpretentious.

‘Slouching towards Bethlehem’ by Joan Didion, published by 4th Estate

joan-didion-essays-indybest.jpg

This collection of essays include long form reportage, as in the case of Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream where Didion lays bare the case of Lucille Miller – a woman jailed for the murder of her own husband against a backdrop of marital disappointment, intense religion and upward mobility in small town California.

These pieces are gripping stories of specific people in extraordinary circumstances, brilliantly told.

In other essays Didion is more introspective, using herself as subject matter and writing in the first person. In an essay on note taking, her sense of narrative is acute as she points out that “how it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about keeping a notebook”. Being able to see how this literary titan took notes is, without wishing to sound too hammy, a total privilege.

Although all of this writing is from before 1968, Didion’s prose feels relevant, sharp and timeless. There is little to nothing that feels dated about it. In fact, some of her sentences are nothing short of a joy – made to be read and reread repeatedly with an effortlessness that speaks to Didion’s talent.

‘Whose Story is this?’ by Rebecca Solnit published by Granta

whose-story-is-this-essays-indybest.jpg

Solnit’s essays have won plenty of praise in the past for their insight and relatability – and how cleverly she crystallises complex, messy or multifaceted ideas. This latest collection is no different.

It’s essentially a polemic on narrative control – and will likely have you performing the both-hands-raised-in-celebration emoji as finally someone says it, and says it well.

For example, Solnit is brilliant and incising on the difference between wokeness and goodness: “If you’re woke it’s because someone woke you up… It’s easy now to assume that one’s perspectives on race, gender, orientation and the rest are signs of inherent virtue but a lot of ideas currently in circulation are gifts that arrived recently through the labours of others.”

She takes no prisoners in her commentary on Weinstein and #MeToo, setting out a context in which “all the world is not a stage: backstage and beyond are important territories too”. It is horrifying when she describes male witnesses as somebodies, while women are nobodies – but it is horrifying because it is true. Women’s opinions don’t count. Their narratives are meaningless. Or were.

She gets right to the heart of who matters. She takes narrative and picks it up, examining it from all angles to decipher who gets to be heard, and who gets muted, erased.

The entire volume is relentlessly quotable – but it is harsh and brutal and sad too, like how she describes a hotel chain which has panic buttons for the female domestic staff who are assaulted by the rich male guests: “Supply and demand”.

Solnit is hopeful and addresses those who are afraid of a new world where white men won’t be the default controllers: “Some people are being left behind, not because the future is intolerant of them but because they are intolerant of this future”.

The verdict: Essay collections written by women

Our best buy goes to Minor Feelings because there is simply nothing else like it. Funny, horrifying and clever, Park Hong shines a light on the horrors of the small, minor feelings she has about being overlooked and in between and all the other things she has been taught are her fate as an Asian American.

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10 Contemporary American Essayists to Read Right Now

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A look at some of today's most talented writers

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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This week marks the release of celebrated novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson's newest collection of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books . We've been excited about this book for a while now.

Great as it is, Robinson's collection only whet our appetites for more essays by contemporary writers, so in case it does the same for you, we've put together a list of contemporary essayists we think everyone should be reading right now (or, you know, whenever you finish watching Downton Abbey ). We've tried to stick to authors who are still alive—so David Foster Wallace and Christopher Hitchens are off the table, though they both would have made this list with flying colors were they still with us—and limited ourselves to American writers, but even with those caveats, there is enough in these writers' oeuvres to keep you up and thinking for weeks on end.

This post also appears on Flavorpill , an Atlantic partner site.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to [email protected].

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Boston Public Library

BostonPL_15 Must-Read Classic & Contemporary Essay Collections

The Art of the Personal Essay

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10 Memoirs and Essay Collections by Black Women

contemporary essay collections

Reading Lists

These contemporary books illuminate the realities of the world for black women in america.

A Black woman sitting on a bench reading

In her 1993 poem, “won’t you celebrate with me,” author and educator, Lucille Clifton, invites us to wonder at the life she has created:

“… i had no model born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself?  i made it up.” 

As a Black woman existing at the intersections of these marginalized identities (“both nonwhite and woman”), Clifton finds herself rendered invisible in the mainstream and—consequently—creates herself in the process. 30 years onwards, Black women writers continue to take on the mantle of rendering themselves visible across genres and constructing models for future generations to see themselves in. 

This has been especially true in the case of personal narratives, from memoir to essay collections. Starting with Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl published in 1861 as a foundational abolitionist text, through to Angela Davis: An Autobiography released only a few years after the acquittal of the Black Panther leader and prominent feminist, Black women  have narrated their stories and transformed the personal into the political with radical results. 

In our own personal narratives, we shrug off duty and expectations, the needs of others become secondary to our primary, as we catalog our hurts and our hopes. We become the hero, not saving anyone else but ourselves. To borrow a phrase from the late bell hooks, we move from the margin to the center. 

The following contemporary memoirs and personal essay collections released in the past ten years exemplify this growing urgency by Black women to tell our side of the story. Their words illuminate the realities of the world and the impact of racist and sexist systems of powers on the lives of the most disenfranchised. These works are affecting, funny, haunting, inspiring and all urgently salient. They are additions to the records and the archives, insisting and reminding us that our voices always matter. 

Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward

Within a four-year time span, two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward saw the deaths of five Black men in her life, including that of her brother. She chronicles their lives, alongside her own, of growing up in Mississippi and the history of racial violence that surrounds around them. “Hopefully, I’ll understand why my brother died while I live,” Ward writes, ”and why I’ve been saddled with this rotten fucking story.” Her journey of reflection is one of grief, anger, and guilt, all buoyed ultimately by the love that comes through of her family and the home that raised her. 

Negroland: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson

Writing about her upbringing in a wealthy, professional Black community of Chicago in the 1950s, critic Margo Jefferson reflects on the intersections of race, gender, class, and color within her community, poetically delving into the nuances of Black life. The Pulitzer Prize winner manages a tight balancing act, honestly approaching the privileges and prejudices of her childhood family and friends, whilst remaining steadfast in her knowledge and understanding that Blackness—regardless of status or hue—is still ultimately Black. “We’re considered upper-class Negroes and upper-middle-class Americans,” her mother tells her, “But most people would like to consider us Just More Negroes.”

We Are Never Meeting In Real Life: Essays by Samantha Irby

Though comedy writing—much like comedy itself—continues to be a boy’s club, Samantha Irby fuses sarcasm, self-deprecation, and toilet humor into musings and anecdotes about her life in the Midwest. Whether she is writing about The Bachelorette or mental health or falling in love, her singular voice is sure to bring you to tears of laughter or sadness, if not both at the same time. In an especially funny take on her pain she asks, “Do Black girls even get to be depressed?” and hordes of us nod in synchronized recognition. 

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay

Author, cultural critic, and professor Roxane Gay has never shied away from the story of the violent sexual assault that took place as a child, but the story extends from that experience to explore additional themes around the (her) body. Using examples from her own lived experiences, she challenges assumptions and conventional thinking about health and wellness, taking to task all the unacknowledged fatphobia we pervasively encourage in our society. Gay’s memoir is sometimes difficult to read, but necessarily so, particularly the parts where she works through her own demons and leaves us no choice but to confront ours too. “I buried the girl I had been… and perhaps I am writing my way back to her, trying to tell her everything she needs to hear.” 

Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom

In a series of wide-ranging essays, the university professor and MacArthur Genius covers beauty standards, Black maternal mortality, and the election of Barack Obama, told through personal stories, academic scholarship, and cultural criticism. Thick is intentional in centering herself and the experiences of Black women and girls—a revolutionary and counter cultural endeavor given how “[the] personal essay [has] become the way that black women writers claim legitimacy in a public discourse that defines itself, in part, by how well it excludes Black women.” McMillan Cottom refuses to be shut out. 

The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah M. Broom

“Remembering is a chair that is hard to sit still in,” writes Sarah M. Broom in her National Book Award-winning debut work. The title comes from the name of her childhood home in New Orleans where she grew up with her large, loving, and complicated extended family. She moves away for college and continues to move further away from the yellow house, until the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina forces her to reckon with her home and all the historical and political context of where she came from. She looks at race, class, and inequality from a humanistic lens, using her story and the stories of her loved ones to reveal the harder truths about the country and how far left there is for us to go. 

Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Tretheway

For years, former Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner ran away from the defining tragedy of her childhood—the murder of her mother by her ex-husband when Tretheway was a teenager. “All those years I thought that I had been running away from my past I had, in fact, been working my way steadily back to it,” and her memoir is her way of unpacking that journey back, beginning with her mother’s death and studying all around it. As Tretheway looks at her own life, from growing up biracial around the time of Loving v. Virginia to finding her way to becoming a writer, she is tenderly attentive to the memory of her mother and grappling with the situation of her death, taking us along the often dark journey with her. 

Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine

Much like its author, Just Us is a text that defies categorization. The poet, playwright, and essayist utilizes poems, footnotes, essays, photographs, quotes, scripts, tweets and Facebook statuses to explore and indict American racism. Rankine’s writing is grounded in her own experiences, using everything from dinner party conversations with other academics and faculty members to moments between her and her White husband in couples therapy, resulting in a text that is personal, vulnerable, and filled with beauty. Rankine asks, “How does one combat the racism of a culture?” Just Us answers. 

Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop by Danyel Smith

Former editor of the iconic hip-hop and R&B publication VIBE Magazine , Danyel Smith’s memoir doubles as a music history on Black women musicians. Smith chronicles her life growing up in Oakland and her journalistic path, looking to icons like Aretha Franklin, Donna Summer and Stephanie Mills as inspiration as to who she could be, and pays them their due through her own story. “I want Black women who create music to be known and understood, as I want to be known and understood,” Danyel writes, demanding that we pay attention to them and her too. 

Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe

Ordinary Notes can be understood best as meditations—on Blackness, on life, on the human condition—penned deftly and poignantly by the woman described in the New York Times as “shaping a generation of Black thought.” Professor Sharpe intimately walks us through her life, from the museums she walks, to the songs she listens to, to the family histories she unearths, and in the final section, she dedicates pages considering the books she describes as “giving me a place to land in difficult times.” To Sharpe, they show “Black worlds of making and possibility.” Ordinary Notes does the same.

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Nonfiction Books » Essays

Adam gopnik on his favourite essay collections.

In Mid-Air: Points of View from over a Decade by Adam Gopnik

In Mid-Air: Points of View from over a Decade by Adam Gopnik

What makes a great essayist? Who had it, who didn’t? And whose work left the biggest mark on the New Yorker ? Longtime writer for the magazine, Adam Gopnik , picks out five masters of the craft

Adam Gopnik on his Favourite Essay Collections - And Even Now by Max Beerbohm

And Even Now by Max Beerbohm

Adam Gopnik on his Favourite Essay Collections - The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf

The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf

Adam Gopnik on his Favourite Essay Collections - Essays of E.B. White by E.B. White

Essays of E.B. White by E.B. White

Adam Gopnik on his Favourite Essay Collections - A Sad Heart At The Supermarket by Randall Jarrell

A Sad Heart At The Supermarket by Randall Jarrell

Adam Gopnik on his Favourite Essay Collections - Visions Before Midnight by Clive James

Visions Before Midnight by Clive James

contemporary essay collections

1 And Even Now by Max Beerbohm

2 the common reader by virginia woolf, 3 essays of e.b. white by e.b. white, 4 a sad heart at the supermarket by randall jarrell, 5 visions before midnight by clive james.

Before we get into the books, I wanted to ask you about essays generally. In your introduction to The Best American Essays of 2008 you have a rather nice phrase: “The essay is a classical form for short-winded Romantics.” What do you mean by that?

What I mean is that in lots of ways essay writing is classical, in the sense that it works if it’s poised, elegant, compressed, composed – it’s not a rhapsodic outpouring of emotional language. At the same time, what distinguishes it from true criticism is that its purpose is usually to communicate some emotional state or the alteration of an emotional state, rather than an argument.

There are certain kinds of criticism that I think of as essentially essays – Clive James or Randall Jarrell’s criticism, for instance – whereas there are other critics whom I admire just as much – say [William] Empson and [WH] Auden – but whom I don’t think of as essayists. They’re superior literary critics.

Is the distinction to do with the presence of the “I” in their work?

The “I” need not appear in the piece, but it’s always implicit in the essay. Empson and Auden want to win you round to their point of view, Jarrell and James want to make their experience persuasive. Of course, one of the best ways of winning you round to a point of view is to make your experience persuasive, and one of the best ways to make your experience persuasive is to win you round to a point of view!

There are no absolute lines in this. But there does seem to me a real difference between the things Empson – who is an absolutely wonderful writer and an amazing companion – is trying to do in his critical articles and the things Jarrell is trying to do in his. Jarrell conceives of criticism poetically. That is, that it should have some of the surprise and delight of personal revelation: “ I felt this then, and I passed through the prism of a work of writing” rather than “this is a general truth of literature”.

With essayists, we feel we’re reading their first names rather than their honorifics. We’re reading Clive and Virginia and Randall rather than James and Woolf and Jarrell, in a way we never feel we’re reading William and Wystan rather than Empson and Auden.

You have written that the essay has an implicit politics to it, and that the job of the essay is “to drain the melodrama from overwrought debate and replace it with common sense and comedy”.

Did I say that? When you think [of essays] historically, beginning with Montaigne, one of the things Montaigne does – at a time of violent and feverish religious debate – is he makes the case for both and at once, for either and or, for the division within oneself. That there is no pure or certain state which we can be in in our mental lives.

Even someone as seemingly non-political as Max Beerbohm is placed at the intersection of all kinds of political passions – Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw’s socialism, Rudyard Kipling’s imperialism and so on – and he makes fun of them all. That’s one of the things that makes Beerbohm attractive. In a very decorous and mischievous way, he mocks that kind of ideological passion.

EB White did the same kind of thing when writing in the 1930s. His arguments against fascism and totalitarianism are not rhetorical but highly particular, trying to assert the actual fabric of life as it is rather than accepting abstraction. Maybe that’s a good way of putting it. The essay is against abstraction, and by being against abstraction it is against ideological thought.

You mentioned Beerbohm. Let’s begin with his book And Even Now . You said his approach was to parody and make light of things. He was also a caricaturist. Do you see a link between his illustrations and his essays?

Yes, absolutely. He was a caricaturist with remarkable insight and relatively little malice in his parodies and cartoons. He found the pomposities of over-zealous ideology absurd. He also had a lovely vein of affection. One of my favourite of his picture-books is called Rossetti and H is Circle . It’s basically imaginary pictures of Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites in their very complicated domestic life. The implicit theme of the whole book is that behind the Pre-Raphaelite dream of the perfect Botticelli nymph and the medieval romantic life is this very funny, furtive domestic life in Chelsea [London]. Constantly referring dream-life back to reality is another way Beerbohm works.

He’s an essayist who isn’t so widely read these days. Why do you think that is?

For me, Beerbohm has an almost dangerously perfect tone – a mixture of benign serenity and quiet intellectual authority that I think is the tone every essayist searches for. It’s not accidental that Beerbohm was influential on the first generation of The New Yorker writers, people like Wolcott Gibbs.

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One of the dangers of that tone, though, is that it can seem unduly complacent or self-satisfied. I suspect that the note of complacency in Beerbohm’s writing is kind of out of kilter with the times. It’s a note that was so hugely popular for 50 or 60 years that I guess it came to seem old-fashioned. If you ever read old collections of light editorials from The  London Times , they all strive for the Beerbohm sound. Inevitably, when a sound gets imitated for too long it becomes a little empty.

Beerbohm is also not a writer of fanatic passion or political certainty. You can’t consult him directly for the quote you might need about the topic of the day. For those reasons, he’s gone a bit out of fashion. But he remains a wonderful writer, and for me the best witness of that period – the end of the Victorian age and the beginning of the modern age.

What do you think he writes best about?

Literature. My favourite of his essays are ones like “A Clergyman”, which is a very close, loving analysis of an obscure passage of [James] Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson . A clergyman, identified in no other way, squeaks out a little objection to something Dr Johnson has said, and Johnson crushes him with his rejoinder. Beerbohm reflects on the lost and hidden life of this clergyman, who made one brief bid for literary immortality and whose name even Boswell couldn’t recall.

Another favourite is called “William and Mary”, and is a memory of a couple he has known since his Oxford days. It’s a really beautiful story that has an almost Proustian quality.

Let’s go on to another English essayist, Virginia Woolf . She wrote a great deal of non-fiction. Why does her writing in The Common Reader qualify as essays rather than what they strictly appear to be – reviews or criticism?

Exactly because we read Woolf for her tone – her equanimity, her ability to weave together a detached and usually very severe critical judgement with a tone of ruminative engagement. That’s a tone, as much as Beerbohm’s is in another way, which seems to me particularly enviable.

Is it, along with Beerbohm, a particularly English tone? The next three essayists we’re going to talk about are American or Australian.

I think that’s true. There’s a sense in which both Woolf and Beerbohm come after the age of Victorian literary industry. They both take for granted this common pool of Dickens , [George] Eliot and Trollope – writers of huge industry, enormous achievement and vast social observation – and they both make a quiet case for the miniature, for the perfectly wrought. So there’s a kind of running commentary on Victorian fiction in both of their work.

I also think, without having illusions about the nature of the societies in which they worked, that there is a strong lure of a stable and secure literary society in their work. They both feel themselves to be at home with literature, not out of place in any way. Their tone – unlike certain American essayists – does not give a sense of having an uncertain or anxious relationship to literature.

That sense is certainly something you get from the title essay of Jarrell’s collection.

One of the dirty secrets of literature, I’ve always thought, is that there are much stronger “pop” elements to great writing than we would like to admit. The Great Gatsby appeals to us, at least in part, because it’s about rich people and bootleggers in the roaring twenties. Beerbohm and Woolf appeal to us, in part, because of the worlds they live in. Chelsea and Bloomsbury in the early part of the 20th century seem to us, at least, thrillingly stable.

Next, you have gone with a collection of EB White ’s essays. He is one of the most iconic New Yorker writers.

White, for me, is the great maker of the New Yorker style. Though it seems self-serving for me to say it, I think that style was the next step in the creation of the essay tone. One of the things White does is use a lot of the habits of the American newspaper in his essays. He is a genuinely simple, spare, understated writer. In the presence of White, even writers as inspired as Woolf and Beerbohm suddenly look stuffy and literary. White has an amazing ability, which I still marvel at, to come very close to a faux-naïve simplicity that’s excessive and then pull it back.

I’m just picking up one of his collections. I’m going to open it up at random and look for a sentence that captures White. Here’s one from a piece called “The Trailer Park”:

“Before sitting down to draft a preamble to the constitution of a world federations of democracies uniting free people under one banner, I decided I would mosey over to the trailer park at the edge of town and ask some of the campers whether they favoured any such idea of this union.”

The virtue of White’s kind of writing is to start with something that sounds pompous and editorial and then use a verb like “mosey over” to make it work. He cleans up the prose of the essay. Both Beerbohm and Woolf are belle-lettrist sort of writers and they connect to that leisurely tradition. White is a much more urbane and American writer.

What is the key “if you haven’t read any White, read this essay” essay for you?

“Death of a Pig”, in this collection, is a very good one. We have a section in the New Yorker called “Notes & Comments”, which White wrote for over 40 years. If you can find his comment pieces, they’re particularly wonderful. They appear in most of his collections in one form or another, and are the ones that I relish most. They’re kind of perfect miniatures.

Next up is A Sad Heart At The Supermarket . Randall Jarrell is best known as a poet, rather than an essayist. Why are his essays worth reading?

Jarrell, for me, is the absolute master of what I like to think of as “cabaret criticism”. The man has endless wit. I think his novel Pictures From an Institution is the single wittiest book of the last century, even though I’ve read it 10 times and can never recall the story! He’s a very poor storyteller but an amazingly witty writer.

Jarrell is a comedian of a kind. He always finds something not just witty in a literary way but outright funny to say about extremely serious subjects – about Auden, [Robert] Graves, Laura Riding or Wallace Stevens. I admire that ability to turn straight, old-fashioned literary criticism into a constant performance in the best sense – into a form of entertainment in itself. He supplied a new tone of enormous, wonderful excitability. That’s one of the things I love about Jarrell, and one of the things I struggle to infuse my own work with – a sense of excitement and pleasure even in the driest texts. Most of all he’s just a wonderful joker.

Do you have any favourite lines of his?

Again, let me open the book and take a sentence at random. Here’s one. He’s writing about [Walt] Whitman:

“The interesting thing about Whitman’s worst language (for, just as few poets have ever written better, few poets have written worse) is how unusually absurd, how really ingeniously bad, such language is.”

It’s that tone of hyperbolic excitability in the presence of literature, which is a constant antidote to the solemnity and false seriousness of most literary study.

You mention that Jarrell is a model you seek to emulate. But in terms of taste, at least, you’re a very different kind of writer. In the title essay of A Sad Heart at the Supermarket Jarrell is very wary of popular culture, whereas in last week’s New Yorker you compare the Book of Revelations to Transformers. Love of popular culture runs through your work.

That’s very true. I think all the interesting writers of my generation drew the high brow-low brow line in a very different way to Jarrell’s generation. We all came of age – I’m thinking of Louis Menand or Martin Amis or Clive James – when there seemed to be more genuine artistic energy in popular culture, movies and rock music in particular, than there was in high culture. The experience of The Beatles or Fellini or the Godfather films illuminated our understanding of high culture, rather than the other way around. I think that is a true fault line in the history of modern writing – you’re either on one side of it or the other.

Do you think for Jarrell and his contemporaries it was a lack of genuinely great pop culture in their time that put them off? Or was it a generational thing where they couldn’t get on board with the idea that pop culture, even if very good, is something you can consider seriously alongside high culture?

A little of both. Jarrell writes wonderfully about race cars and American football . He was no snob. But as far as I remember he never references jazz – which is a kind of in-between form of pop culture, more culture than pop in lots of ways. You have to remember too that for Jarrell’s generation, the GI generation, they were in the process of recognising and discovering what we now think of as high culture.

My own father was one of that generation. For him, each piece of high culture he achieved, understood, enjoyed – whether it was Bach or Milton – was part of a mountain climbed. We all, in a sense, started too easily – somewhere up on the mountain – because of their work, and therefore had a different view of it.

Do you have a favourite Jarrell essay?

I like the title essay, even though I don’t share his views. But my favourite is the one called “The Taste of the Age”.

Your last choice is Visions Before Midnight by Clive James. How did you come across his work? He’s well known in Britain, especially for his TV career, but not so much in America.

In 1980, Knopf did an anthology of his essays called First Reactions . In a curious way it was an advantage to read him flat-out as a writer. All of my friends in England read him as an entanglement of personal presence and prose style. I read him simply as prose style, without any knowledge of what his personal presence was like.

What was it you liked about his writing?

He has some of Jarrell’s excitability in the presence of creative energy. He has the ability to bring you into his writing, even when he’s writing about things that are in some ways utterly trivial and often completely forgotten, like British TV of the 1970s. He has a way of turning each of those subjects into a wonderful essay – an exercise in cabaret criticism – about values.

Values, I think, are his real subject. The overriding lesson of his work is that categories – high art, low art, television, theatre – are misleading guides to value. That even runs at a deeper, moral level in James’s work about the larger categories – provincial and metropolitan, for instance. He’s a provincial guy who comes to the city, but his provincial experience is in lots of ways richer than his metropolitan experience. It’s the rejection of categories in place of values that is the Montaigne-like takeaway in all his work.

Did he have an influence on your writing, or were you far enough in your writing career to find him as a friend and ally rather than a mentor figure?

Whereas Jarrell, Beerbohm and White were in different ways direct elements in the long-simmering braise that produced my prose style, for whatever it’s worth, Clive came along when I was already, in some sense, a formed writer.

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But I did learn one very specific thing from his writing. He’s a very linear writer. His essays are always organised around sharp, direct and forward-pushing sentences. Whereas with Virginia Woolf your first response to one of her paragraphs, in the best way, is to read it again. Your first response to a Clive James piece is to keep on reading. I learned a great deal about how to make a piece propulsive from reading him.

And can you pick a favourite Clive James essay?

As with Woolf, the joy is cumulative – it’s the pleasure of reading all of his work. But here’s a good one. It’s a television column from December 3rd 1972 which goes from an argument between the philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire, to a documentary on “Bomber” Harris and the morality of area bombing, to a production of Oedipus Rex , to a new David Mercer play. In the midst of it, this comes up:

“Why, then, with all this talent [in the production of Oedipus], including a sumptuous lighting design that covers the décor with spiced gloom, does the production have so little sting? The answer, I think, is that there’s not much point in trying to supply a binding image to a play whose author was so intent on leaving imagery out. It’s difficult to think of Sophocles looking with favour on any attempt to pin his universalised theme to mere political instability.”

That’s a deep and original thought, perfectly expressed, which rises out of the normal eddies of TV journalism. That combination of range, ease and aphoristic subtlety is what I love in Clive’s work.

March 7, 2012

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]

Adam Gopnik

©Brigitte Lacombe

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 Best Reviewed Short Story Collections of 2022

Featuring george saunders, ling ma, colin barrett, jamil jan kochai, and more.

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We’ve come to the end of another bountiful literary year, and for all of us review rabbits here at Book Marks, that can mean only one thing: basic math, and lots of it.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be calculating and revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2022, in the categories of (deep breath): Fiction ; Nonfiction ; Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature ; and Literature in Translation .

Today’s installment: Short Story Collections .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. Bliss Montage by Ling Ma (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

21 Rave • 5 Positive • 2 Mixed Read an interview with Ling Ma here

“The eight wily tales mark the return of an author whose inventive debut, Severance, urgently announced her as a writer worth watching … an assured follow-up, a striking collection that peddles in the uncanny and the surreal, but it often lacks Severance ’s zest. Some stories are confident in their strangeness and ambiguity, a handful feel like promising sketches of sturdier narratives and the rest fall somewhere in between. The connections between them are loose, tethered by similar leads …

Wry, peculiar stories like Los Angeles and Yeti Lovemaking confirm that Ma’s imagination operates on the same chimerical frequency as those of Helen Oyeyemi, Samanta Schweblin, Meng Jin. Each of these stories leans un-self-consciously into the speculative, illuminating Ma’s phantasmagoric interests. They are funny, too … Despite their nagging loose ends, Ma’s stories stay with you—evidence of a gifted writer curious about the limits of theoretical possibility. They twist and turn in unpredictable ways and although the ride wasn’t always smooth, I never regretted getting on.”

–Lovia Gyarkye ( The New York Times Book Review )

2. Liberation Day by George Saunders (Random House)

16 Rave • 6 Positive • 5 Mixed (86) Read George Saunders on reading chaotically and the power of generous teachers, here

“Acutely relevant … Let’s bask in this new collection of short stories, which is how many of us first discovered him and where he excels like no other … Saunders’ imaginative capacity is on full display … Liberation Day carries echoes of Saunders’ previous work, but the ideas in this collection are more complex and nuanced, perhaps reflecting the new complexities of this brave new world of ours. The title story is only one of a handful of the nine stories in this collection that show us our collective and personal dilemmas, but in reading the problems so expressed—with compassion and humanity—our spirits are raised and perhaps healed. Part of the Saunders elixir is that we feel more empathetic after reading his work.”

–Scott Laughlin ( The San Francisco Chronicle )

3. Homesickness by Colin Barrett (Grove Press)

16 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an essay by Colin Barrett here

“Its comedy stands in balance to the collection’s more tragic tenor … expands [Barrett’s] range, and though the first took place in the fictional Irish town of Glanbeigh, the books share a fabric shot through with dark humor, pitch-perfect dialogue and a signature freshness that makes life palpable on the page. The language counterpoints the sometimes inarticulate desperation of the working-class characters, and that dissonance lends an emotional complexity to their stories …

As a writer, Barrett doesn’t legislate from the top down. His unruly characters surge up with their vitality and their mystery intact. Their stories aren’t shaped by familiar resolutions—no realizations, morals or epiphanies. The absence of a conventional resolution does risk leaving an otherwise charming story like The Silver Coast with the rambling feel of a slice of life. But in the majority of the stories in this book, to reinvent an ending is to reinvent how a story is told, and overall, Homesickness is graced with an original, lingering beauty.”

–Stuart Dybek ( The New York Times Book Review )

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

4. Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu (Tin House)

13 Rave • 4 Positive Read a story from Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century here

“..the horrors are more intimate, smaller, and less global in scale. This is not a collection filled with fantastic beasts, although a sea monster does make an appearance, but instead illuminates the monstrous nature of humanity … Technology, rather than magic, catalyzes these changes. That is not to say there are not some traces of unexplained fantasy, such as a girl who sprouts wings from her ankles, but mostly, Fu’s monsters manifest from modernity … The success of Kim Fu’s stories is the element of the unexpected. There are surprises lurking in these narratives, whether it is a quick final plot twist or unexpected peculiarity …

Although Fu seems more concerned with alienation stemming from individual relationships, there is criticism of conventional consumer capitalism … The characters in Fu’s collection are eccentric and unexpected in their choices, and many of their stories feature unforeseen endings that strike the right tone for the dark era we live in … Fu opens a window looking onto the sad possibilities of our own failures.”

–Ian MacAllen ( The Chicago Review of Books )

5. If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery (MCD)

12 Rave • 4 Positive Read an essay by Jonathan Escoffery here

“Ravishing … The book, about an immigrant family struggling to make ends meet, delights in mocking the trope of an immigrant family struggling to make ends meet … There’s peacocking humor, capers, and passages of shuddering eroticism. The book feels thrillingly free … Escoffery’s protagonists, though resourceful, can’t accomplish the impossible; nor do they sacrifice themselves for the reader’s sentimental education … The prose comes alive …

These characters are strange amalgams of limited agency and boundless originality. Their survival, perhaps, comes down to their style … Escoffery deftly renders the disorienting effects of race as they fall, veil-like and hostile, over a world of children … Throughout, the refrain runs like an incantation: What are you? Escoffery, hosing his characters in a stream of fines, bills, and pay stubs, studies the bleak math of self-determination.”

–Katy Waldman ( The New Yorker )

6. The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories by Jamil Jan Kochai (Viking)

12 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an essay by Jamil Jan Kochai  here

“Kochai, an Afghan-American writer, shapes and reshapes his material through a variety of formal techniques, including a fantasy of salvation through video gaming, a darkly surrealist fable of loss, a life story told through a mock résumé, and the story of a man’s transformation into a monkey who becomes a rebel leader…Like Asturias, Kochai is a master conjurer…The collection’s cohesion lies in its thematic exploration of the complexities of contemporary Afghan experience (both in Afghanistan and the United States), and in the recurring family narrative at its core: many of the stories deal with an Afghan family settled in California… Kochai is a thrillingly gifted writer, and this collection is a pleasure to read, filled with stories at once funny and profoundly serious, formally daring, and complex in their apprehension of the contradictory yet overlapping worlds of their characters.”

–Claire Messud ( Harper’s )

7. Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty (Tin House Book)

12 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed Listen to an interview with Morgan Talty here

“Talty depicts the relationship between David and Paige perfectly—the siblings clearly care for each other; it’s evident beneath the bickering and the long periods when they don’t see each other … The story ends with both mother and son experiencing terrifying medical emergencies; it’s almost excruciating to read, but it’s undeniably powerful, and, in its own way, beautiful … Talty’s prose is flawless throughout; he writes with a straightforward leanness that will likely appeal to admirers of Thom Jones or Denis Johnson. But his style is all his own, as is his immense sense of compassion. Night of the Living Rez is a stunning look at a family navigating their lives through crisis—it’s a shockingly strong debut, sure, but it’s also a masterwork by a major talent.”

–Michael Schaub ( The Star Tribune )

8. How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu (William Morrow)

10 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan Read an excerpt from How High We Go in the Dark here

“If you’re a short-story lover—as I am—you’ll be impressed with Nagamatsu’s meticulous craft. If you crave sustained character and plot arcs, well, you’ll have to settle for admiring the well-honed prose, poignant meditations and unique concepts. Hardly small pleasures … The reader might best approach the book like a melancholy Black Mirror season … This is a lovely though bleak book. Humanity has long turned to humor in our darkest moments, but levity feels absent even in a chapter narrated by a stand-up comedian. That said, the somber tone unifies the disparate characters and story lines … a welcome addition to a growing trend of what we might call the ‘speculative epic’: genre-bending novels that use a wide aperture to tackle large issues like climate change while jumping between characters, timelines and even narrative modes … Nagamatsu squarely hits both the ‘literary’ and ‘science fiction’ targets, offering psychological insights in lyrical prose while seriously exploring speculative conceits … a book of sorrow for the destruction we’re bringing on ourselves. Yet the novel reminds us there’s still hope in human connections, despite our sadness.”

–Lincoln Michel ( The New York Times Book Review )

9. Life Without Children by Roddy Doyle (Viking)

9 Rave •  5 Positive • 1 Mixed

“… a quietly devastating collection of short stories that brilliantly portrays the pervasive sense of hopelessness that immobilised us during the dog days of Covid … Lest he be accused of focusing too much on men and their sense of victimhood, the countervailing magnificence of his women is worth noting. Part of Doyle’s genius resides in a kind of bathetic amusement at the follies of his male characters and always it’s the stoical good sense of women that saves the day … Another of his great strengths is the ability to drop in those little epiphanies that resolve the tension and conflict of a story in a single significant moment … Doyle breaks our free fall into despair by emphasizing the redemptive power of humor, love and the kindness of strangers.”

–Bert Wright ( The Sunday Times )

10. Stories From the Tenants Downstairs by Sidik Fofana (Scribner)

12 Rave Read an interview with Sidik Fofana here

“… outstanding … The brilliance of this debut, however, is that Fofana doesn’t let anyone go unseen … masterfully paints a portrait of the people most impacted by gentrification … Fofana brings his characters to life through their idiosyncratic speech patterns. Auxiliary verbs are dropped, words are misspelled, prepositions are jostled, all to create a sense of vernacular authenticity…Grammar is an instrument that Fofana plays by ear, to much success.”

–Joseph Cassara ( The New York Times Book Review )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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The work of horror films

Karen McCally

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How late capitalism is the underrecognized monster lurking in modern American horror.

“Sometimes I wonder what it was exactly, that led me to pull The Dead Zone by Stephen King off of my parents’ bookshelf when I was in fourth grade,” says Jason Middleton. “It was the first ‘grown-up’ novel I ever read. There were certainly parts of it that I found kind of upsetting, but also magnetic. It almost felt as if the world was opening up in a new way.”

Middleton is an associate professor of English and of visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester . He also directs its film and media studies program . His captivation by King’s novel led to a lifelong love of horror films. Although horror is just one of the film genres Middleton has immersed himself in—both as a fan and a scholar—it’s a genre whose appeal he thinks is especially durable.

In horror, “normality is threatened by a monster,” he says. “What’s so wonderfully expansive about the horror genre is that the monster keeps forming and reforming in relation to the fears and anxieties of its time. And on the flip side, normality, and the depiction of normality, keeps evolving and changing based on the historical period as well.”

Work as the American nightmare

There have been some clear trends. In the post-World War II era, the monster was often a stand-in for anxieties about the atomic bomb. During the feminist movement of the 1970s, the monster often suggested anxieties about female power and female bodies.

That critique has extended into a new era—late capitalism, a phrase coined to describe a world of globalized commodification that’s both unsettling and absurd . The essays focus overwhelmingly on 21st-century horror films. Those depict a world of economic precarity and a hollowed-out middle class that make up “a new ‘normality’” of survival, or of just getting by. And even that bleak environment is vulnerable to new monsters that threaten what stability protagonists have been able to muster—or that they are striving to attain in the first place.

In Labors of Fear: The Modern Horror Film Goes to Work (University of Texas Press, 2023), Middleton has joined with Aviva Briefel, who teaches literature and film at Bowdoin College, to make the case that there’s been another kind of monster lurking in American horror films all along: the post-industrial world of work.

In the essay collection, which they coedit, Middleton and Briefel suggest that ambivalence about work is a theme that has roots stretching back to classic horror , when it usually came in the form of the mad scientist. In modern horror films, starting roughly in the 1970s, ambivalence evolved into a fuller critique. Middleton and Briefel describe the critique as reflecting “social fears and anxieties that took root in the 1970s and 1980s in response to deindustrialization, automation, globalized labor, union busting, and rising income inequality.”

An easy example is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , a pathbreaking film that’s 50 years old this year. Rural, unemployed slaughterhouse workers are never shown performing slaughterhouse labor, but are shown “repeating the trained motions of this labor upon their human victims,” they write.

New categories of uncompensated work

Middleton is especially interested in forms of uncompensated work, which he argues fall disproportionately on groups that are already marginalized. He isn’t just talking about such uncompensated labor as housework or family caregiving. In his own contribution, “No Drama: Emotion Work in Midsommar, ” Middleton explores “emotion work” in the 2019 film directed by Ari Aster.

He describes emotion work as “suppressing and modifying, and maybe not expressing one’s own feelings in order that a spouse or partner has the kind of optimal experience that they themselves expect to have in the relationship.” It has a long history in the quest of women to get by but has proven resilient even as women have achieved greater economic independence.

Midsommar (2019) depicts the arduous efforts of a 20-something female protagonist, Dani, to hold onto her relationship with her distant and disengaged boyfriend, Christian. The couple attends a summer festival in Sweden that turns out to be an annual ritual of a murderous cult.

Its horrors mirror Dani’s labors in preserving her attachment to Christian. But she also attains a level of power within the cult, and the film’s cathartic ending shows Dani ending the relationship by sacrificing Christian.

It’s actually a breakup story, Middleton explains. But in showing the slow, laboriousness process in which Dani comes to recognize Christian’s neglectfulness, it’s the inverse of many lighter breakup films. “It’s kind of the horror movie version of a breakup film like Eat Pray Love or Under the Tuscan Sun ,” he says. “The semantic elements are mostly the same—travel, exotic location, meeting different people, food, all of these things. But whereas in those films, the work of a breakup is frictionless and fulfilling and idealized, Midsommar uses the horror genre to instead express the work of a breakup as just agonizing, laborious, and painful—and ultimately, in the end, cathartic.”

The horror of stagnation—and of leisure

The essays in the collection also demonstrate how the experience of economic precarity can differ along racial lines. Briefel’s essay, for example, is subtitled “The Hard Work of Leisure in Jordan Peele’s Us .”

“In a 2019 interview for Vanity Fair, Jordan Peele explained that one of his objectives in the film Us was to represent Black leisure,” Briefel begins. “Yet relaxation is a major source of horror in the film.” Us shows a Black family living with a constant threat of merely letting their guard down.

In another essay, Mikal Gaines, an assistant professor of English at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, coins a subgenre of “Buppie horror,” which reworks the conventional home-invasion thriller. Lakeview Terrace (2008) is an archetype, Gaines explains, of a subgenre that “seems to say that entry into a rarified class status historically reserved for whites must be paid in blood.”

For many white Americans, however, the threat is losing what they have—or living with the dread of having already lost. Middleton’s colleague at Rochester, Joel Burges, finds in David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 film It Follows a depiction of “the precarity of white working-class identity.” The film shows a group of young adult friends in a desolate and stagnant postindustrial Detroit. It’s a reworking of the stalker films of the 1970s and ’80s, explains Burges, like Middleton, an associate professor of English and of visual and cultural studies. It Follows adheres to the slasher convention of punishing people for sexual acts. Sexual encounters between the characters—men as well as women, in this film—infect characters with “It,” a stalker who lurks after them, and takes changing forms, but always of mangled middle- and working-class white bodies.

In these bodies, however, Burges found something beyond the slasher convention in which sex equals death. In It Follows , the work of getting by literally takes place mostly in low-level, dead-end service occupations that fill the young adults with dread to have. There’s emotion work, in other words, in surviving the bleak landscape through which “It” stalks victims. “Dread is slow,” Burges writes. “Its menace bears down on you with steadily intensifying pressure that never relents.”

Horror films in the post-COVID era

When Middleton and Briefel got started on their project, COVID-19 was sweeping across the globe. No one knew at the time just how much the pandemic would transform the world of work. Have these changes started to play out in horror films? And if so, how?

Says Middleton: “Something that I noticed during the last few years is that some really interesting horror movies take place not only entirely in a house, or entirely within an enclosed space, but entirely just a person and their laptop. For example, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021). The whole film is just from the perspective of an isolated teenage girl on her laptop, as she’s on it every night to do these internet challenges that grow increasingly dangerous and threatening as she does them.

“It’s just the horrific experience of being on the internet on your laptop all the time.”

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Jason Middleton in a mask teaches his film class.

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  1. 50 Must-Read Contemporary Essay Collections

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    March 7, 2012. Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]. Essays Literary Nonfiction. ©Brigitte Lacombe.

  19. The Contemporary American Essay

    The first decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a blossoming of creative nonfiction. In this extraordinary collection, Phillip Lopate gathers essays by forty-seven of America's best contemporary writers, mingling long-established eminences with newer voices and making room for a wide variety of perspectives and styles.

  20. The Contemporary American Essay

    The first decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a blossoming of creative nonfiction. In this extraordinary collection, Phillip Lopate gathers essays by forty-seven of America's best contemporary writers, mingling long-established eminences with newer voices and making room for a wide variety of perspectives and styles.

  21. The Best Reviewed Short Story Collections of 2022 ‹ Literary Hub

    Kochai is a thrillingly gifted writer, and this collection is a pleasure to read, filled with stories at once funny and profoundly serious, formally daring, and complex in their apprehension of the contradictory yet overlapping worlds of their characters.". 7. Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty.

  22. Modern essay collections : r/suggestmeabook

    By: Samantha Irby | 250 pages | Published: 2013 | Popular Shelves: essays, non-fiction, nonfiction, humor, memoir | Search "Meaty". Samantha Irby explodes onto the printed page with her debut collection of brand-new essays about trying to laugh her way through failed relationships, being black, taco feasts, bouts with Crohn's disease, and more.

  23. The work of horror films

    In the essay collection, which they coedit, Middleton and Briefel suggest that ambivalence about work is a theme that has roots stretching back to classic horror, when it usually came in the form of the mad scientist. In modern horror films, starting roughly in the 1970s, ambivalence evolved into a fuller critique.