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Spring 2023 Announcements: Essays & Literary Criticism

This season’s titles include career retrospectives from cultural critics, musings from media figures, reflections on the purpose of literature, and examinations of William Shakespeare’s legacy and treatment of race.

The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening

Ari Shapiro. HarperOne, Mar. 21 ($28.99, ISBN 978-0-06-322134-5)

Shapiro, cohost of NPR’s All Things Considered , debuts with a collection of autobiographical essays on connecting across difference. 150,000-copy announced first printing.

How to Write About Africa: Essays

Binyavanga Wainaina. OneWorld, June 6 ($27, ISBN 978-0-8129-8965-6)

These pieces by the late Kenyan writer discuss coming out and Western media’s racist depictions of Africa.

The Nerves and Their Endings: Essays on Crisis and Response

Jessica Gaitán Johannesson. Scribe US, Feb. 7 ($15 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-950354-59-7)

Bookseller and climate activist Johannesson explores how people come to terms with crises, in essays that touch on climate change, eating disorders, and privilege.

Once upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature

Sarah Hart. Flatiron, Apr. 11 ($29.99, ISBN 978-1-250-85088-1)

Mathematician Hart unpacks the numerical patterns and references in writings by James Joyce, George Eliot, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis

Sara Marcus. Belknap, May 30 ($39.95, ISBN 978-0-674-24865-6)

Examining works by W.E.B. Du Bois, Lead Belly, and Audre Lorde, English professor Marcus suggests that disappointment undergirds the major works of 20th-century American art and thought.

Quietly Hostile: Essays

Samantha Irby. Vintage, May 16 ($17 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-593-31569-9)

The Wow, No Thank You author delivers autobiographical pieces on therapy, reiki, and QVC addiction.

Shakespeare Was a Woman & Other Heresies

Elizabeth Winkler. Simon & Schuster, May 2 ($29.99, ISBN 978-1-98217-126-1)

Journalist Winkler takes on the Bard’s legacy by investigating how he came to hold his place in the Western canon and why the debate over the authorship of his plays is so heated.

Tabula Rasa, Vol. 1

John McPhee. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, July 11 ($27, ISBN 978-0-374-60360-1)

McPhee serves up vignettes from his career he had intended to write about, but didn’t get around to, including episodes about meeting Thornton Wilder and visiting the river-bound islands of central California.

Wanting: Women Writing About Desire

Edited by Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters. Catapult, Feb. 14 ($17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64622-011-3)

Women writers examine the intersection of gender and desire, be it for cowboy boots, a former lover, or time.

Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination

Adam Shatz. Verso, May 9 ($29.95, ISBN 978-1-80429-059-0)

The U.S. editor of the London Review of Books probes the relationship between writers’ work and their political commitments by looking at the lives of such intellectuals as Jean-Paul Sartre, Edward Said, and Richard Wright.

Essays & Literary Criticism Listings

Abrams Image

Comedy Bang! Bang! the Podcast: The Book by Scott Aukerman (Apr. 25, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-4197-5481-4) adapts the antics of Aukerman’s podcast to the page, featuring dispatches from the show’s fictional characters. 50,000-copy announced first printing.

The Kevin Powell Reader: Essential Writings and Conversations by Kevin Powell (Apr. 4, $32.95, ISBN 978-1-63614-101-5) collects pieces that span the cultural critic’s career on topics including the AIDS epidemic, the murder of George Floyd, and such celebrities as Dave Chappelle and bell hooks.

How We Do It: Black Writers on Writing in Color , edited by Jericho Brown and Darlene Taylor (July 4, $27.99, ISBN 978-0-06-327819-6), brings together previously published and original essays by writers of color on their craft. Natasha Trethewey, Jamaica Kincaid, and Tiphanie Yanique are among the contributors.

Astra House

Pleasure of Thinking by Wang Xiaobo, trans. by Yan Yan (July 25, $26, ISBN 978-1-66260-125-5), provides new translations of major essays by the Chinese intellectual weighing in on Italo Calvino, living in the U.S., and getting mugged.

Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter by Gary Saul Morson (May 9, $37.95, ISBN 978-0-674-97180-6) argues that Russian literature has long been animated by the friction between radical dogmatism and a more inwardly focused humanism.

Cambridge Univ.

Dublin: A Writer’s City by Chris Morash (Mar. 16, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-108-83164-2) offers a literary tour of the city by unpacking the writings of W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett.

The Male Gazed by Manuel Betancourt (May 30, $26, ISBN 978-1-64622-146-2) reflects on the author’s coming out as gay and his conflicted relationship with masculinity in these meditations on telenovelas, drag queens, and Antonio Banderas.

Coffee House

This Wide Terraqueous World by Laird Hunt (Mar. 21, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-56689-667-2). Hunt follows up his novel Zorrie with contemplations on Jane Bowles, childhood games, taxidermy, and denim.

Columbia Univ.

Freedom Reread by L. Gibson (Feb. 7, $20 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-231-18893-7) considers Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel, Freedom , in light of the novelist’s polarizing public persona, juxtaposing the book with the works of George Eliot and Susan Sontag.

On Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: The First of a New Genus by Susan J. Wolfson (Apr. 25, $14.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-231-20625-9) studies how Wollstonecraft’s rhetorical and aesthetic strategies contribute to the impact of reading her feminist manifesto.

Uncle of the Year: And Other Debatable Triumphs by Andrew Rannells (May 16, $28, ISBN 978-0-593-44343-9). The Book of Mormon star shares his thoughts on the hollowness of traditional metrics of success in essays on the awards circuit, children, and perfectionism.

Incarnation and Metamorphosis: Can Literature Change Us? by David Mason (Mar. 7, $19.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-58988-172-3) offers takes on Claudia Rankine, Tom Stoppard, and Sylvia Plath to probe literature’s capacity to influence readers.

The Loved Ones by Madison Davis (June 13, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-950539-77-2). Autobiographical pieces contemplate the deaths of four members of Davis’s family—by murder, car accident, illness, and combat.

Voyager: Constellations of Memory by Nona Fernández, trans. by Natasha Wimmer (Feb. 21, $15 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64445-217-2) takes the author’s mother’s illness as the impetus for meditations on Chilean democracy, memory, and astronomy.

Tough Titties: On Living Your Best Life When You’re the F-ing Worst by Laura Belgray (June 13, $28, ISBN 978-0-306-82604-7) serves up dispatches about dating, falling for internet scams, and refusing responsibilities, from the TV writer.

Hanover Square

Adult Drama: And Other Essays by Natalie Beach (June 20, $27.99, ISBN 978-1-335-91402-6) expands the author’s viral New York magazine article about her contentious relationship with Instagrammer Caroline Calloway, and includes additional pieces on heartache, jeans, and existential crises.

You’re That Bitch: A Gay Cinderella Story by Bretman Rock (Feb. 14, $26.99, ISBN 978-0-358-69410-6) recounts episodes from the social media personality’s life, from growing up in the Philippines through living as a first-generation immigrant in Hawaii to his ascent to online fame. 100,000-copy announced first printing.

I Finally Bought Some Jordans by Michael Arceneaux (May 9, $17.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-06-314041-7) follows up I Don’t Want to Die Poor with a collection of essays touching on dating in the age of social media and the obstacles to achieving success as a Black creative. 35,000-copy announced first printing.

Wannabe: Reckonings with the Pop Culture that Raised Me by Aisha Harris (May 2, $26.99, ISBN 978-0-06-324994-3). The cohost of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour muses on the art that has influenced her. 50,000-copy announced first printing.

Holding the Note: Writing on Music by David Remnick (May 23, $29, ISBN 978-1-4000-4361-3). The editor of the New Yorker brings together pieces on such musicians as Aretha Franklin, Charlie Parker, and Paul McCartney. 60,000-copy announced first printing.

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer (Apr. 25, $28, ISBN 978-0-525-65511-4) grapples with the relationship between the audience and the works of such problematic artists as Ernest Hemingway, V.S. Naipaul, and Woody Allen. 35,000-copy announced first printing.

New Directions

War Diary by Yevgenia Belorusets, trans. by Greg Nissan (Mar. 7, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-8112-3480-1), collects the Ukrainian author’s writings on living in Kyiv during the Russian invasion.

New York Review Books

Affinities: On Art and Fascination by Brian Dillon (Mar. 28, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-68137-726-1) examines what attracts individuals to the art they hold dear, drawing on insights from Goethe, Baudelaire, and Walter Benjamin.

Alexandra Petri’s U.S. History: Important American Documents (I Made Up) by Alexandra Petri (Apr. 11, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-324-00643-5). The Washington Post humor columnist takes on U.S. history via a survey of imaginary documents.

In Search of a Beautiful Freedom: New and Selected Essays by Farah Jasmine Griffin (Mar. 28, $20 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-393-35577-2) anthologizes the comparative literature professor’s writings on Malcolm X, Hurricane Katrina, and bans of Toni Morrison’s Beloved .

Not Funny: Essays on Life, Comedy, Culture, Et Cetera by Jena Friedman (Apr. 18, $27.99, ISBN 978-1-982178-28-4). Comedian Friedman opines on the post-#MeToo era, giving celebrities second chances, and joking about controversial topics.

Dispatches from the Diaspora: From Nelson Mandela to Black Lives Matter by Gary Younge (Apr. 18, $22.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-68219-385-3) brings together the journalist’s reports on Nelson Mandela, Angela Davis, Hurricane Katrina, and the night Obama first won the presidency.

The Manifesto of Herman Melville by Barry Sanders (June 6, $22.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-68219-399-0) suggests Moby Dick should be read as a warning about the destruction of nature.

Penguin Books

Watch Your Language: Visual Essays, Sketches, and Meditations on a Century of Poetry by Terrance Hayes (July 25, $20 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-14-313773-3). The National Book Award winner offers an illustrated critical meditation on the last 100 years of poetry.

In Our Shoes: On Being a Young Black Woman in Not So Post-Racial America by Brianna Holt (Apr. 11, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-593-18639-8) brings together autobiographical essays about surviving the bigotry aimed at American Black women.

Princeton Univ.

Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America by Korey Garibaldi (Feb. 14, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-691-21190-9) details Black-white partnerships in commercial publishing in the first half of the 20th century.

Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques by Grace Elisabeth Lavery (May 30, $29.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-691-24393-1) examines written depictions of gender transition, with a focus on the works of George Eliot and Sigmund Freud.

Random House

Letters to a Writer of Color , edited by Deepa Anappara and Taymour Soomro (Mar. 7, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-593-44941-7). Mohammed Hanif, Madeleine Thien, Amitava Kumar, and other writers of color from across the globe reflect on the politics and craft of composing literature.

Without Model: Parva Aesthetica by Theodor W. Adorno, trans. by Wieland Hoban (Apr. 5, $24.50, ISBN 978-1-80309-218-8), compiles essays previously unavailable in English by the German philosopher on how art should change with the times.

Simon & Schuster

The Ugly History of Beautiful Things by Katy Kelleher (Apr. 25, $27.99, ISBN 978-1-98217-935-9). Paris Review contributor Kelleher highlights the seedy processes and ingredients that produce such beautiful objects as lipstick, perfume, and silk.

Univ. of New Mexico

A Description of Acquaintance: The Letters of Laura Riding and Gertrude Stein, 1927–1930 , edited by Logan Esdale and Jane Malcolm (June 1, $65, ISBN 978-0-8263-6489-0), compiles and contextualizes correspondence from the poets’ brief friendship.

Univ. of Pennsylvania

Bad Blood: Staging Race Between Early Modern England and Spain by Emily Weissbourd (June 20, $55, ISBN 978-1-5128-2290-8) studies early modern depictions of race in the plays and fictions of Spanish and English writers.

Capitalism and the Senses , edited by Regina Lee Blaszczyk and David Suisman (June 13, $65, ISBN 978-1-5128-2420-9), serves up essays on how capitalism has changed and exploited everyday sensory experience.

The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race by Farah Karim-Cooper (June 6, $28, ISBN 978-0-593-48937-6) examines how Shakespeare approached race throughout his plays and poetry.

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Longreads : The best longform stories on the web

Best of 2023: Personal Essays

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Personal essays are as much about the readers as the writers. While all the essays in this list demonstrate exceptional writing—each piece struck a distinct chord with the editor who chose it. For Seyward, it was an essay on grief. For Krista, a piece on community experience. Peter was drawn to video game writing ( Red Dead Redemption 2 !), Cheri to the immigrant experience and caring for loved ones, and Carolyn to the fear of missed opportunities as we age (and a vicious jungle tick).

We hope you find a piece to resonate with you as you read these beautiful personal stories.

Ahead of Time

Kamran Javadizadeh | The Yale Review | June 12, 2023 | 3,285 words    

Grief is unpredictable. Sometimes it stabs you, sometimes it suffocates you; when it isn’t making you weep or scream, it’s leaving you numb. Grief is also unfathomable: we cannot see, much less reach, the edges of the permanent absence of someone we love. “Grief may be the knowledge … that the future won’t be like the past,” Kamran Javadizadeh writes in this exquisite essay about the death of his sister, Bita. “Like water to the page, it spreads in all directions, it thins the surface, it touches what you cannot touch.” Javadizadeh reflects on his grief through the lens of poetry he encountered during the experience of losing Bita: a volume of Langston Hughes he located in their shared childhood bedroom; a copy of  The Dead and the Living  by Sharon Olds, filled with Bita’s notes from college; a Hafez verse that Bita texted to him one day. The best poetry is not unlike grief: it is vast, complex, elusive. And in reading verse, Javadizadeh shows, we can find lessons for mourning. I’ve thought about this essay countless times since I read it last summer, and I suspect I will reread it many times in the years to come. — SD

The Butchering

Jake Skeets | Emergence Magazine | June 22, 2023 | 3,901 words

Consider what it means to truly feel full—with a full stomach and a full heart—when your physical and spiritual hungers are satiated for a time. Diné poet Jake Skeets mulls these layers of resonance in his beautiful essay “The Butchering,” in which he prepares to kill a sheep for “the Kinaałda. . . .loosely translated as the Diné puberty ceremony.” For Skeets and members of his Indigenous community, story is wonderfully entangled with preparing the food that will nourish his family both physically and spiritually. Community members teach and learn interchangeably, switching roles naturally in a space of safety, free from shame. Skeets meditates on the open mindset needed to fully participate; sometimes he is a child, earning knowledge passed on from family and sometimes he is an uncle, offering an example for others. There’s a slowness to savor in Skeets’ writing, a gentle quickening you observe in the essay as he educates you on what it takes to sustain his community and their Indigenous way of life. “The next time I butcher I’ll have my own story to tell, my own memory to share, knowledge to offer. One more voice to add to the chorus on those nights when you’re out in the desert under the night sky, no sound for miles, just the moon and the ground beneath you, reminding you it’s all real. That and your full stomach. Generations heard through wind, the air, the stirring gleaming stars. All that knowledge, all that story, all that beauty,” he writes. Be sure to make time for this piece; it will ignite your sense of wonder and spark your curiosity, feeding you in a way that’s truly satisfying. — KS

We’re More Ghosts Than People

Hanif Abdurraqib  |  The Paris Review  |  October 16, 2023  |  3,922 words

Not long after I started at  Longreads , I put together a reading list  detailing some of my favorite pieces of video game writing  over the previous decade. If people could enjoy reviews of movies they haven’t seen, I reasoned, then they could do the same with gaming criticism and journalism—even if they’d never held a controller. That conviction hasn’t wavered in the years since; however, this year brought a piece powerful enough to vault back through time and land on that list. Hanif Abdurraqib’s  Paris Review  essay (which also appears in the newly published collection  Critical Hits ) is nominally about the experience of playing  Red Dead Redemption 2 , Rockstar Games’ critically acclaimed title set in the American West in 1899. The word “nominally” carries more weight than usual, though. In Abdurraqib’s able hands, the game instead becomes a portal to grief and salvation, futility and loss. Some characters can’t be redeemed by virtue of their programming. Others can. The trajectory of the character of  you  is another story altogether. “If there is a place of judgment where I must stand and plead my case for a glorious and abundant afterlife, I hope that whoever hears me out is interested in nuances, but who’s to say,” Abdurraqib writes. “I don’t think about it, until I do.” As with the very best of arts writing, this meditation teases apart its medium’s limitations to find the universal truths and questions embedded within. No virtual revolver necessary. — PR

A Mother’s Exchange for Her Daughter’s Future

Jiayang Fan | The New Yorker | June 5, 2023 | 6,197 words

Jiayang Fan was 25 when her mother was diagnosed with ALS. She writes: “The child became the mother’s future, and the mother became the child’s present, taking up residence in her brain, blood, and bones.” This was the first personal piece Fan wrote after her mother’s death; it’s a devastating tale of the immigrant experience in America, of illness, of the intimate and complicated relationship between a mother and daughter. Fan’s descriptions of her bedridden mother range from exquisite to grim to satisfyingly peculiar. She is “shipwrecked in her own body,” with skin like “rice paper” that will inevitably tear. Even a line detailing how literal shit excretes out of her mother’s body—a “rivulet” down the “limp marble of her thigh”—manages to read beautifully. Fan writes with vulnerability about caring for an elderly loved one, love and sacrifice, the intertwining of two lives, and the story about them that’s ultimately written. I had to pause and collect myself a number of times as I thought about my own aging mother, and the decisions made over the course of our lives that have made us who we are. “One creature, disassembled into two bodies,” Fan writes of their shared life. This is extraordinary writing that hit me in a spot deep within. — CLR

How I Survived a Wedding in a Jungle That Tried to Eat Me Alive

Melissa Johnson | Outside | July 18, 2023 | 4,273 words

A key sentence in this essay goes as follows, “Behold my nightmare: a tick has bitten my vagina.” The incident—relayed with “the gravitas of Obi-Wan Kenobi describing the destruction of planet Alderaan”—occurs in 2017, while Melissa Johnson is enduring a five-day trek in northern Guatemala to attend the wedding of two ex-military women. (She reflects on how during the days of Trump America, the middle of the jungle felt a safer spot for such nuptials.) Johnson embarks on this quest fresh from harvesting her eggs. Single at the age of 39, she is not only wrestling ticks from her “holy garden” but with her fear of missing out on love and motherhood. Trudging along the soggy trails, Johnson dwells on her cloudy future with trepidation. But, by the time she is released from the jungle’s insect-infested innards, she has come to terms with the fact that she is an adventurer—someone comfortable with the unknown. This piece has many layers: an adventure story, a character study of people with names such as “Tent Dawg,” and a thoughtful take on aging and motherhood. It’s also just plain funny. I loved going through the jungle with Johnson, and I also loved the last sentence of her bio:  She had a baby girl in March.  — CW

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The Best Reviewed Essay Collections of 2022

Featuring bob dylan, elena ferrante, zora neale hurston, jhumpa lahiri, melissa febos, and more.

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: Essay Collections .

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

1. In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing  by Elena Ferrante (Europa)

12 Rave • 12 Positive • 4 Mixed

“The lucid, well-formed essays that make up In the Margins  are written in an equally captivating voice … Although a slim collection, there is more than enough meat here to nourish both the common reader and the Ferrante aficionado … Every essay here is a blend of deep thought, rigorous analysis and graceful prose. We occasionally get the odd glimpse of the author…but mainly the focus is on the nuts and bolts of writing and Ferrante’s practice of her craft. The essays are at their most rewarding when Ferrante discusses the origins of her books, in particular the celebrated Neapolitan Novels, and the multifaceted heroines that power them … These essays might not bring us any closer to finding out who Ferrante really is. Instead, though, they provide valuable insight into how she developed as a writer and how she works her magic.”

–Malcolm Forbes ( The Star Tribune )

2. Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri (Princeton University Press)

8 Rave • 14 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Lahiri mixes detailed explorations of craft with broader reflections on her own artistic life, as well as the ‘essential aesthetic and political mission’ of translation. She is excellent in all three modes—so excellent, in fact, that I, a translator myself, could barely read this book. I kept putting it aside, compelled by Lahiri’s writing to go sit at my desk and translate … One of Lahiri’s great gifts as an essayist is her ability to braid multiple ways of thinking together, often in startling ways … a reminder, no matter your relationship to translation, of how alive language itself can be. In her essays as in her fiction, Lahiri is a writer of great, quiet elegance; her sentences seem simple even when they’re complex. Their beauty and clarity alone would be enough to wake readers up. ‘Look,’ her essays seem to say: Look how much there is for us to wake up to.”

–Lily Meyer ( NPR )

3. The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan (Simon & Schuster)

10 Rave • 15 Positive • 7 Mixed • 4 Pan

“It is filled with songs and hyperbole and views on love and lust even darker than Blood on the Tracks … There are 66 songs discussed here … Only four are by women, which is ridiculous, but he never asked us … Nothing is proved, but everything is experienced—one really weird and brilliant person’s experience, someone who changed the world many times … Part of the pleasure of the book, even exceeding the delectable Chronicles: Volume One , is that you feel liberated from Being Bob Dylan. He’s not telling you what you got wrong about him. The prose is so vivid and fecund, it was useless to underline, because I just would have underlined the whole book. Dylan’s pulpy, noir imagination is not always for the squeamish. If your idea of art is affirmation of acceptable values, Bob Dylan doesn’t need you … The writing here is at turns vivid, hilarious, and will awaken you to songs you thought you knew … The prose brims everywhere you turn. It is almost disturbing. Bob Dylan got his Nobel and all the other accolades, and now he’s doing my job, and he’s so damn good at it.”

–David Yaffe ( AirMail )

4.  Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos (Catapult)

13 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed Read an excerpt from Body Work here

“In her new book, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative , memoirist Melissa Febos handily recuperates the art of writing the self from some of the most common biases against it: that the memoir is a lesser form than the novel. That trauma narratives should somehow be over—we’ve had our fill … Febos rejects these belittlements with eloquence … In its hybridity, this book formalizes one of Febos’s central tenets within it: that there is no disentangling craft from the personal, just as there is no disentangling the personal from the political. It’s a memoir of a life indelibly changed by literary practice and the rigorous integrity demanded of it …

Febos is an essayist of grace and terrific precision, her sentences meticulously sculpted, her paragraphs shapely and compressed … what’s fresh, of course, is Febos herself, remapping this terrain through her context, her life and writing, her unusual combinations of sources (William H. Gass meets Elissa Washuta, for example), her painstaking exactitude and unflappable sureness—and the new readers she will reach with all of this.”

–Megan Milks ( 4Columns )

5. You Don’t Know Us Negroes by Zora Neale Hurston (Amistad)

12 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed

“… a dazzling collection of her work … You Don’t Know Us Negroes reveals Hurston at the top of her game as an essayist, cultural critic, anthropologist and beat reporter … Hurston is, by turn, provocative, funny, bawdy, informative and outrageous … Hurston will make you laugh but also make you remember the bitter divide in Black America around performance, language, education and class … But the surprising page turner is at the back of the book, a compilation of Hurston’s coverage of the Ruby McCollom murder trial …

Some of Hurston’s writing is sensationalistic, to be sure, but it’s also a riveting take of gender and race relations at the time … Gates and West have put together a comprehensive collection that lets Hurston shine as a writer, a storyteller and an American iconoclast.”

–Lisa Page ( The Washington Post )

6. Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

11 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed Listen to an interview with Rachel Aviv here

“… written with an astonishing amount of attention and care … Aviv’s triumphs in relating these journeys are many: her unerring narrative instinct, the breadth of context brought to each story, her meticulous reporting. Chief among these is her empathy, which never gives way to pity or sentimentality. She respects her subjects, and so centers their dignity without indulging in the geeky, condescending tone of fascination that can characterize psychologists’ accounts of their patients’ troubles. Though deeply curious about each subject, Aviv doesn’t treat them as anomalous or strange … Aviv’s daunted respect for uncertainty is what makes Strangers to Ourselves distinctive. She is hyperaware of just how sensitive the scale of the self can be.”

–Charlotte Shane ( Bookforum )

7. A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast by Dorthe Nors (Graywolf)

11 Rave • 1 Positive Read an excerpt from A Line in the World here

“Nors, known primarily as a fiction writer, here embarks on a languorous and evocative tour of her native Denmark … The dramas of the past are evoked not so much through individual characters as through their traces—buildings, ruins, shipwrecks—and this westerly Denmark is less the land of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales and sleek Georg Jensen designs than a place of ancient landscapes steeped in myth … People aren’t wholly incidental to the narrative. Nors introduces us to a variety of colorful characters, and shares vivid memories of her family’s time in a cabin on the coast south of Thyborøn. But in a way that recalls the work of Barry Lopez, nature is at the heart of this beautiful book, framed in essay-like chapters, superbly translated by Caroline Waight.”

–Claire Messud ( Harper’s )

8. Raising Raffi: The First Five Years by Keith Gessen (Viking)

4 Rave • 10 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Raising Raffi here

“A wise, mild and enviably lucid book about a chaotic scene … Is it OK to out your kid like this? … Still, this memoir will seem like a better idea if, a few decades from now, Raffi is happy and healthy and can read it aloud to his own kids while chuckling at what a little miscreant he was … Gessen is a wily parser of children’s literature … He is just as good on parenting manuals … Raising Raffi offers glimpses of what it’s like to eke out literary lives at the intersection of the Trump and Biden administrations … Needing money for one’s children, throughout history, has made parents do desperate things — even write revealing parenthood memoirs … Gessen’s short book is absorbing not because it delivers answers … It’s absorbing because Gessen is a calm and observant writer…who raises, and struggles with, the right questions about himself and the world.”

–Dwight Garner ( The New York Times )

9. The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser (Doubleday)

8 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed • 1 Pan Watch an interview with CJ Hauser here

“17 brilliant pieces … This tumbling, in and out of love, structures the collection … Calling Hauser ‘honest’ and ‘vulnerable’ feels inadequate. She embraces and even celebrates her flaws, and she revels in being a provocateur … It is an irony that Hauser, a strong, smart, capable woman, relates to the crane wife’s contortions. She felt helpless in her own romantic relationship. I don’t have one female friend who has not felt some version of this, but putting it into words is risky … this collection is not about neat, happy endings. It’s a constant search for self-discovery … Much has been written on the themes Hauser excavates here, yet her perspective is singular, startlingly so. Many narratives still position finding the perfect match as a measure of whether we’ve led successful lives. The Crane Wife dispenses with that. For that reason, Hauser’s worldview feels fresh and even radical.”

–Hope Reese ( Oprah Daily )

10. How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo (Viking)

8 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from How to Read Now here

“Elaine Castillo’s How to Read Now begins with a section called ‘Author’s Note, or a Virgo Clarifies Things.’ The title is a neat encapsulation of the book’s style: rigorous but still chatty, intellectual but not precious or academic about it … How to Read Now proceeds at a breakneck pace. Each of the book’s eight essays burns bright and hot from start to finish … How to Read Now is not for everybody, but if it is for you, it is clarifying and bracing. Castillo offers a full-throated critique of some of the literary world’s most insipid and self-serving ideas …

So how should we read now? Castillo offers suggestions but no resolution. She is less interested in capital-A Answers…and more excited by the opportunity to restore a multitude of voices and perspectives to the conversation … A book is nothing without a reader; this one is co-created by its recipients, re-created every time the page is turned anew. How to Read Now offers its audience the opportunity to look past the simplicity we’re all too often spoon-fed into order to restore ourselves to chaos and complexity—a way of seeing and reading that demands so much more of us but offers even more in return.”

–Zan Romanoff ( The Los Angeles Times )

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The Best American Essays 2023

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For any essay lover , a highlight of the literary calendar is the publication of the year’s Best American Essays volume. The 2023 edition is the thirty-eighth in the series, and it matches the standard of excellence set by its predecessors. While every year’s selection is different, the organizing principle behind each one remains the same. Series editor Robert Atwan scans the periodical literature for what he describes as “a selection of the year’s outstanding essays.” He’s looking for “works of literary achievement that show an awareness of craft and a forcefulness of thought.” A list of around one hundred possibilities is then passed on to a guest editor, who decides what should be included in the volume. 

Vivian Gornick, 2023’s guest editor, is the most recent in a long line of distinguished literary figures who have taken on this role. As well as making their selections, guest editors contribute an introduction that says something about how they handled their assignment, and their take on the mercurial genre with which the series is concerned. In fact, it would be hard to find a better introduction to the art of the essay than what is provided in the guest editors’ introductions (and the series editor’s forewords) over the course of the years. Cumulatively, they cast a great deal of light on the nature of the essay form.

To say what an essay is “about” always undersells it. Yes, in one sense, The Best American Essays 2023 contains essays that are about addiction, adoption, aging, anorexia, Bambi, bereavement, concision, gender, Los Alamos, marriage, mental illness, prison life, racism, sex, and writing. Although giving such a raw listing of subject matter may indicate the volume’s pleasingly diverse spread of material, it also risks creating a kind of Procrustean bed—where the idea of an essay is stretched or trimmed to fit a topic, with the expectation that it will address it in the manner of an article. That essays, whatever they are (and they are notoriously hard to define), are not articles becomes quickly evident when you read good ones, like the selection offered here.

In the preface to what remains a key reference book for the genre—the Encyclopedia of the Essay , edited by Tracy Chevalier—Graham Good suggests that “at heart, the essay is the voice of the individual.” That catches something important about the nature of this kind of writing. It is the individuality—and authenticity—of the voices speaking to us, the particular personal perspectives they offer on whatever it is their speakers are concerned with, that gives the twenty-one essays in The Best American Essays 2023 their power, rather than their topics per se. Echoing Good’s point, Vivian Gornick ends her introduction by assuring readers that the selection she has chosen is full of voices, “ real voices.” Listening to them is like being invited to share in a whole range of conversations. The turns they take are enlightening, amusing, unexpected, and sometimes shocking. The talk is easy and informal, always clear, often lyrical—a world away from the specialized jargon of a scholarly article. The authors are from all sorts of backgrounds. They represent a very varied range of interests and insights. But they share one vital characteristic: they know what they’re talking about and have the ability to share it in an engaging and accessible manner. Without exception, these are voices worth listening to.

Robert Atwan notes in his foreword that “literary magazines form the foundation of our creative writing.” In addition to showcasing twenty-one fine pieces of prose, The Best American Essays 2023 , like its sister volumes, provides readers with a stimulating sampler from the many literary magazines that flourish in North America. The twenty-one essays selected for reprinting in the volume are drawn from eighteen different magazines (with two essays apiece coming from the Chicago Quarterly Review , New England Review , and Sewanee Review ). The selection of the year’s “Notable Essays and Literary Fiction,” compiled by Robert Atwan and occupying the final pages of the book, identifies many more of the magazines that play such an important role in fostering good essay writing. World Literature Today is, unsurprisingly, among the publications listed.

After initiating the series in 1986 and overseeing its publication every year since then, Robert Atwan is finally stepping down. The 2024 volume will see Kim Dana Kupperman taking over as the new series editor. To have guided the series so successfully over so many years is an impressive literary achievement. One hopes that retirement from his editorial role may allow Mr. Atwan time to write more on a form that’s obviously close to his heart and about which he has unrivaled knowledge.

Looking back to the first volume in the series, The Best American Essays 1986 , Elizabeth Hardwick—the inaugural guest editor—made the point that the word “best” in the book’s title should be thought of as “some of the best.” The same point is echoed by the present guest editor, who is pleasingly open about the fact that the essays chosen “are simply the ones that gave me great pleasure, or moved me for reasons I can’t readily articulate, or were so indisputably well written I had no choice but to include them.” Vivian Gornick surely speaks for any of the series’ thirty-eight guest editors when she stresses that “another editor might, with equal justification, have chosen an entirely different set of selections that would have been as satisfying as this one.” This, she says, is because we’re fortunate to be living at a time when “there is an abundance of superior essay writing being done.” 

Robert Atwan can, I think, take some of the credit for fostering this abundance and, through the pages of this splendid series, bringing it to the attention of a wider audience.

Chris Arthur St. Andrews, Scotland

More Reviews

Dragon Palace Hiromi Kawakami. Trans. Ted Goossen

Hà Nội at Midnight Bảo Ninh. Trans. Quan Manh Ha & Cab Tran

You Dreamed of Empires Álvaro Enrigue. Trans. Natasha Wimmer

À la recherche de Glitter Faraday Kebir M. Ammi

I Will Greet the Sun Again Khashayar J. Khabushani

The Road to the City Natalia Ginzburg. Trans. Gini Alhadeff

Your Presence Is Mandatory Sasha Vasilyuk

Free Radicals Rosa Beltrán. Trans. Robin Myers

XENIA, etc. Anthony Caleshu

The Extinction of Irena Rey Jennifer Croft

The Witching Tide Margaret Meyer

Sur la dalle Fred Vargas

Deep Are These Distances Between Us Susan Atefat-Peckham. Ed. Darius Atefat-Peckham

Family Style: Memories of an American from Vietnam Thien Pham

Black Ghosts: A Journey into the Lives of Africans in China Noo Saro-Wiwa

Monica Daniel Clowes

River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation Ed. Nuzhat Abbas

About People Juli Zeh. Trans. Alta L. Price

An Unruled Body Ani Gjika

Take Me to Stavanger Anzhelina Polonskaya. Trans. Andrew Wachtel

Lady Tan’s Circle of Women Lisa See

African Battle Traditions of Insult: Verbal Arts, Song-Poetry, and Performance Ed. Tanure Ojaide

My Heavenly Favorite Lucas Rijneveld. Trans. Michele Hutchison

Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries against Despair Christian Wiman

The Best American Essays 2023 Ed. Vivian Gornick & Robert Atwan

Motherland: A Memoir Paula Ramón. Trans. Julia Sanches & Jennifer Shuye

The Naked Tree Keum Suk Gendry-Kim. Trans. Janet Hong

Le fruit le plus rare ou la vie d’Edmond Albius Gaëlle Bélem

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With a cover illustration by Edel Rodriguez,  “Writing the Polycrisis”  headlines the March/April 2024 issue of  World Literature Today , showcasing contributions by nine writers, mainly from the Global South. Additional highlights include interviews, creative nonfiction, booklists, essays, and more! Plus a book review section brimming with the latest must-reads also enliven the issue, making it your latest passport to the best new reading from around the world.

Purchase this Issue »

Table of Contents

Writing the polycrisis: dispatches from a calamitous planet, in every issue, creative nonfiction, book reviews.

Our Most-Read Prose of 2023

Only essays comprise our most-read prose this year, but it’s a list that proves how capacious the essay is as a form, with criticism that changes the way we encounter a text, personal reflections, and reconsiderations of literary figures we thought we knew. The list includes Garth Greenwell ’s rousing defense of the indefensible in art, classics scholar Emily Greenwood ’s review of Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Iliad , and Alec Pollak ’s compassionate unearthing of Lorraine Hansberry’s fraught relationship with queerness. Collectively, they bring depth and humanity to questions as varied as where the dead go, whom we write for, and whether failure is a blessing in disguise. These essays represent some of our favorite work of the year, and we invite you to enjoy them—or enjoy them again.

—The Editors

Garth Greenwell, “ A Moral Education ” Greenwell offers a lesson in art, morality, and God in an unexpected reading of Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth.

Kamran Javadizadeh, “ Ahead of Time ” Javadizadeh picks up the threads of his sister’s diagnosis and death by returning to the poems they shared.

Becca Rothfeld, “ In the Shallows ” As intellectuals and academics write for a public readership, Rothfeld makes a case against condescension.

Percival Everett, “ Abstraction and Nonsense ” Everett reconsiders his lifelong quest to write an abstract novel.

Emily Greenwood, “ How Emily Wilson Reimagined Homer ” Greenwood, a classics scholar in her own right, considers the choices that make Emily Wilson’s translation of the Iliad a new classic.

Elleza Kelley, “ Ordinary Allurements ” Kelley traces the tenderness and rigor that structure Christina Sharpe’s reading and writing of black life in Ordinary Notes .

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, “ The Consolations of Failure ” Reviewing In Praise of Failure by Costica Bradatan and Political Disappointment by Sara Marcus, Ratner-Rosenhagen asks what it might mean for a book about failure to succeed.

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, “ James Baldwin in Turkey ” Van der Vliet Oloomi considers James Baldwin through the lens of the decade he spent on and off in Turkey, where he—and his writing—blossomed.

Kathryn Lofton, “ Cancel Culture and Other Myths ” Lofton asks us to examine the mythology of cancel culture as we reckon with its effects on society and art.

Alec Pollak, “ Lorraine Hansberry’s Queer Archive ” Pollak delves into Lorraine Hansberry’s unknown lesbian writings, giving new breadth to our understanding of the playwright’s life offstage.

Louise Glück’s Late Style

The critic as friend, rachel cusk, you might also like, our most-read archival pieces of 2023, our most-read poems of 2023, our favorite cultural artifacts of 2023, new perspectives, enduring writing.

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Top Reads 2023 | Essays

With 2023 coming to a close, we have collected together our most-read essays of the year.

On Beyoncé | Okechukwu Nzelu

‘Renaissance gives back, by reminding Black queer people what it’s like to be in our most sacred spaces.’

Okechukwu Nzelu on Beyoncé.

My Time Machine | Arthur Asseraf

‘How do we imagine the past of those we love?’

Arthur Asseraf on family and fractured memories.

For the Love of Losing | Marina Benjamin

‘Winning, it turns out, was the cracking whip that meant gamblers had to stay where they were until they lost their money all over again.’

Marina Benjamin on losing.

Jealous Laughter | Joanna Biggs

‘She could not make me see my best qualities, but she could sit with me.’

Joanna Biggs on literary friendships between women.

Reproducing Paul | Des Fitzgerald

‘Having a child, I came to see, was more a kind of haunting.’

An essay by Des Fitzgerald.

Beyond Deep Throat | Part I | Saskia Vogel

‘The eye wants to see its fill, the I wants to see how it feels.’

Saskia Vogel on the foundational stories of pornography.

Last Week at Marienbad | Lauren Oyler

‘The only thing on the schedule was spa.’

Lauren Oyler on her trip to Marienbad.

Cairo Song | Wiam El-Tamami

‘I see this everywhere. The creativity, resourcefulness and incredible talent for improvisation in Egypt.’

Wiam El-Tamami on returning to Cairo.

The Killing of a Berlin Power Broker | Peter Richter

‘Why does the centre of Berlin look like an abandoned shopping mall on the edge of Omaha?’

An essay from Peter Richter, translated by Shaun Whiteside.

Particular Matter | Amitava Kumar

‘India, as we know it, is changing. What will it become?’

Memoir by Amitava Kumar.

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Granta 167: Extraction Online

You Are the Product

‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’ Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.

‘What is the read receipt for?’ Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.

‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’ Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.

‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’ Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.

‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’ Two poems by Sylvia Legris.

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More on granta.com, podcasts | issue 165, podcast | lauren oyler, lauren oyler.

‘You are what you do, and you are what you write, to some extent, I believe that at least.’ Lauren Oyler on personality, intention and the collapse between private and authorial selves.

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

Personal growth, marina benjamin.

‘Refusal is the last recourse of the powerless.’ Marina Benjamin on her years of not eating, and not growing.

In Conversation | The Online Edition

In conversation, saskia vogel & jen calleja.

‘Narrative is control, dominance, purposeful withholding, flirting’

Jeanette Winterson | Podcast

Jeanette winterson & saskia vogel.

Jeanette Winterson reads from her new memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, and her story ‘All I Know About Gertrude Stein’ from Granta 115: The F Word.

Helen Garner & Izabella Scott

‘I think what draws me in is the spectacle of the law trying to deal with something that nothing can deal with – just the wildness of people.’ Izabella Scott in conversation with Helen Garner.

Brad Watson | Interview

Brad watson & patrick ryan.

‘This story did emerge from the single image of the mother, angry, vacuuming while her three boys watched television, a little dumbfounded and afraid. That’s a memory from my childhood that’s always stuck with me.’

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New Times, New Thinking.

The best New Statesman Ideas essays of 2023

Our pick of the finest writing from the past year.

By New Statesman

The rise of the new tech right Quinn Slobodian A cult – one that worships a genetically determined meritocracy has Silicon Valley in a chokehold. Slobodian unpacks the racial science of IQ, and the growing far-right threat of a future shaped by high-tech-hierarchy.

The new politics of time Hettie O’Brien Jenny Odell’s  Saving Time  is concerned with bewildering disjunctions. A recursive, impressionistic discussion of clocks, capitalism and the climate crisis, her book is composed of anecdotes, cut-and-pasted histories and cultural criticism. How should we spend our hours in the age of burnout? Arguably not by reading Odell’s frustrating new book, Saving Time .

What it means to be Jewish now Various Writers With anti-Semitism rising and divisions on the left over the Hamas-Israel war, 17 writers reflect on being Jewish now.

Settling scores with God: Leszek Kolakowski at the end of history Madoc Cairns An orphan. A Marxist. A Catholic-conservative. Leszek Kolakowski holds a 50-year-career as one of Europe’s leading, and most controversial public intellectuals. In conversation, he unpacks a troubled history: of paradox, of collapse, and of transcendence; of finding belonging in belief, and being haunted by the absolute.

The realists were right about the war in Ukraine Lily Lynch Far from the flashy, hope filled “David vs Goliath” narratives of resistance and reclamation of its first months, the Ukraine-Russia war has slowed to a drivel – and alongside it domestic morale, foreign support and US funding. Initially ignored warnings of Ukrainian “false hope” were not so incorrect, Lynch suggests, as she questions what version (if any) of Ukraine’s future is actually attainable.

The Saturday Read

Morning call.

Going Native Oliver Eagleton People who study cults sometimes end up joining them. Has this fate befallen Matthew Goodwin, one of Britain’s most visible scholars of the hard right? Eagleton looks at how Goodwin became part of the right-populist movement he once sought to explain.

Who is afraid of Martin Heidegger? Lyndsey Stonebridge In the rootless world of the 1920s, Heidegger’s ideas about Being (with a capital B, signifying the full meaning of human existence) ripped up the ground of philosophy. The truth exists only in our Being. “Being-there” – “ Dasein ”, in Heidegger’s distinctive terminology – is what matters; there in history, gliding on nothingness, with no other certain knowledge than that of our own death. There is no plot to follow, save the “hidden primordiality” of Being itself. This essay looks at why the most radioactive philosopher of the 20th century still speaks to us.

The New Age of Tragedy Robert D Kaplan, John Gray and Helen Thompson For this wide-ranging exchange, we asked Kaplan, the  Cambridge  political economist Helen Thompson and the philosopher John Gray to explore what we are calling this new age of tragedy, and how societies might navigate and endure the gathering storms.

Gramsci in Florida Alberto Toscano While talk of a “Gramscian vanguard” is largely a conspiratorial fabrication of the right, it could also serve as a spur for a somewhat rudderless left to reflect on what hegemony might look like today, on what it would take to become the threat to capitalism, patriarchy and white nationalism that the right already takes it to be.

Arno J Mayer’s 20th Century Enzo Traverso The American historian Arno J Mayer belongs to an extraordinary generation of German-speaking Jewish scholars – George L Mosse, Raul Hilberg, Peter Gay and Fritz Stern among others – who were born in Europe between the end of the First World War and Hitler’s rise to power, reaching their maturity during the Second World War. The cataclysms of the 20th century forged their mental  habitus  and gave them a sharp sense of  history . Mayer helped transform the writing of history – and with it our understanding of the modern world.

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