American Essays

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

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

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice · A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2025 · A People Best Book of November 2025 · An NPR Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2025 A revealing exploration of a quarter century of cultural stagnation, examining the commercial and technological...

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

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

Essays discuss the status of the contemporary African American family, examining current concerns and problems, and offering possible solutions to the troubles they face

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

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

Emerson's enduring reputation, however, is as a philosopher, an aphoristic writer (like Friedrich Nietzsche) and a quintessentially American thinker whose championing of the American Transcendental movement and influence on Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, William James, and others would alone secure him a prominent place in American cultural history. Emerson is often characterized as an idealist philosopher and indeed used the term himself of his philosophy, explaining it simply as a recognition that plan always precedes action. Contents:. History. Self-Reliance. Compensation.

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

In a book that begins with a series of lynchings and ends with a series of apologies, Eula Biss explores race in America. Her response to the topic is informed by the experiences chronicled in these essays - teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting for an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and settling in Chicago’s most diverse neighborhood.

A collection of the year’s best short stories, selected by celebrated bestselling author Lauren Groff, author of Matrix and The Vaster Wilds, and series editor Heidi Pitlor. “There have never been as many exquisitely built stories in existence than there are now,” proclaims guest editor...

African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives.

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Soul of America unites centuries of essential American voices to understand our national debates and divisions from 1619 to the present, with his signature commentary on the consequential speeches, letters, and essays that led us to this moment...

In 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson took the stage at Harvard and delivered what would become one of the most influential speeches in American intellectual history. The American Scholar was not just a lecture—it was a manifesto, a call to arms for a young nation searching for its own cultural identity. Emerson challenged his audience to break free from European intellectual traditions, urging them to think for themselves, to create, and to embrace the vast potential of the American mind.

Ranging from the shattered gentility of Edith Wharton's heroines to racial confrontation in the songs of Nina Simone, American Rhapsody presents a kaleidoscopic story of the creation of a culture. Here is a series of deeply involving portraits of American artists and innovators who have helped to shape the country in the modern age. Claudia Roth Pierpont expertly mixes biography and criticism, history and reportage, to bring these portraits to life and to link them in surprising ways.

Compiled, edited, and newly revised by Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, this Modern Library Paperback Classic includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews, as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964), hailed by Robert Penn Warren as “a...

A collection of the year’s best short stories, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sean Greer and series editor Heidi Pitlor. Andrew Sean Greer, “an exceptionally lovely writer, capable of mingling humor with sharp poignancy” (Washington Post), selects twenty stories out of thousands...

A collection of the year’s top food and travel writing, selected by the trailblazing New York Times bestselling author and Emmy-nominated host of Taste the Nation and Top Chef Padma Lakshmi. “Food and travel are natural companions,” writes guest editor Padma Lakshmi. From this pairing...

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