The Best American Essays 2019

by Rebecca Solnit (Editor), Robert Atwan (Editor)

Overview

A collection of the year’s best essays selected by Robert Atwan and guest editor Rebecca Solnit.

“Essays are restless literature, trying to find out how things fit together, how we can think about two things at once, how the personal and the public can inform each other, how two overtly dissimilar things share a secret kinship,” contends Rebecca Solnit in her introduction. From lost languages and extinct species to life-affirming cosmologies and literary myths that offer cold comfort, the personal and the public collide in The Best American Essays 2019. This searching, necessary collection grapples with what has preoccupied us in the past year—sexual politics, race, violence, invasive technologies—and yet, in reading for the book, Solnit also found “how discovery can be a deep pleasure.”
 The Best American Essays 2019 includes Michelle Alexander, Jabari Asim, Alexander Chee, Masha Gessen, Jean Guerrero, Elizabeth Kolbert, Terese Marie Mailhot, Jia Tolentino, and others.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781328465801
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/01/2019
Series:	Best American Essays Series
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	500,133
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

ROBERT ATWAN has been the series editor of The Best American Essays since its inception in 1986. He has edited numerous literary anthologies and written essays and reviews for periodicals nationwide.

Table of Contents

REBECCA SOLNIT: Introduction
RABIH ALAMEDDINE: Comforting Myths
MICHELLE ALEXANDER: We Are Not the Resistance
HEATHER ALTFELD: Obituary for Dead Languages
MARIO ALEJANDRO ARIZA: Come Heat and High Water
JABARI ASIM: Getting It Twisted
ALEXANDER CHEE: The Autobiography of My Novel
CAMILLE T. DUNGY: Is All Writing Environmental Writing?
MASHA GESSEN: Stories of a Life
JEAN GUERRERO: My Father Says He’s a “Targeted Individual.” Maybe We All Are.
LACY M. JOHNSON: On Likability
WALTER JOHNSON: Guns in the Family
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: How to Write About a Vanishing World
J. DREW LANHAM: Forever Gone
LILI LOOFBOUROW: Men Are More Afraid Than Ever
TERESE MARIE MAILHOT: Silence Breaking Woman
DAWN LUNDY MARTIN: When a Person Goes Missing
KAI MINOSH PYLE: Autobiography of an Iceheart
GARY TAYLOR: Death of an English Major
JIA TOLENTINO: The Rage of the Incels
DAYNA TORTORICI: In the Maze
 

Editorial Reviews

"A worthwhile series installment that should not only interest contemporary readers but also hold a place in the historical record."—Library Journal —

From the Publisher