famous books on essay

The 25 Greatest Essay Collections of All Time

Today marks the release of Aleksandar Hemon’s excellent book of personal essays, The Book of My Lives , which we loved, and which we’re convinced deserves a place in the literary canon. To that end, we were inspired to put together our list of the greatest essay collections of all time, from the classic to the contemporary, from the personal to the critical. In making our choices, we’ve steered away from posthumous omnibuses (Michel de Montaigne’s Complete Essays , the collected Orwell, etc.) and multi-author compilations, and given what might be undue weight to our favorite writers (as one does). After the jump, our picks for the 25 greatest essay collections of all time. Feel free to disagree with us, praise our intellect, or create an entirely new list in the comments.

The Book of My Lives , Aleksandar Hemon

Hemon’s memoir in essays is in turns wryly hilarious, intellectually searching, and deeply troubling. It’s the life story of a fascinating, quietly brilliant man, and it reads as such. For fans of chess and ill-advised theme parties and growing up more than once.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem , Joan Didion

Well, obviously. Didion’s extraordinary book of essays, expertly surveying both her native California in the 1960s and her own internal landscape with clear eyes and one eyebrow raised ever so slightly. This collection, her first, helped establish the idea of journalism as art, and continues to put wind in the sails of many writers after her, hoping to move in that Didion direction.

Pulphead , John Jeremiah Sullivan

This was one of those books that this writer deemed required reading for all immediate family and friends. Sullivan’s sharply observed essays take us from Christian rock festivals to underground caves to his own home, and introduce us to 19-century geniuses, imagined professors and Axl Rose. Smart, curious, and humane, this is everything an essay collection should be.

The Boys of My Youth , Jo Ann Beard

Another memoir-in-essays, or perhaps just a collection of personal narratives, Jo Ann Beard’s award-winning volume is a masterpiece. Not only does it include the luminous, emotionally destructive “The Fourth State of the Matter,” which we’ve already implored you to read , but also the incredible “Bulldozing the Baby,” which takes on a smaller tragedy: a three-year-old Beard’s separation from her doll Hal. “The gorgeous thing about Hal,” she tells us, “was that not only was he my friend, he was also my slave. I made the majority of our decisions, including the bathtub one, which in retrospect was the beginning of the end.”

Consider the Lobster , David Foster Wallace

This one’s another “duh” moment, at least if you’re a fan of the literary essay. One of the most brilliant essayists of all time, Wallace pushes the boundaries (of the form, of our patience, of his own brain) and comes back with a classic collection of writing on everything from John Updike to, well, lobsters. You’ll laugh out loud right before you rethink your whole life. And then repeat.

Notes of a Native Son , James Baldwin

Baldwin’s most influential work is a witty, passionate portrait of black life and social change in America in the 1940s and early 1950s. His essays, like so many of the greats’, are both incisive social critiques and rigorous investigations into the self, told with a perfect tension between humor and righteous fury.

Naked , David Sedaris

His essays often read more like short stories than they do social criticism (though there’s a healthy, if perhaps implied, dose of that slippery subject), but no one makes us laugh harder or longer. A genius of the form.

Against Interpretation , Susan Sontag

This collection, Sontag’s first, is a dazzling feat of intellectualism. Her essays dissect not only art but the way we think about art, imploring us to “reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it.” It also contains the brilliant “Notes on ‘Camp,'” one of our all-time favorites.

The Common Reader , Virginia Woolf

Woolf is a literary giant for a reason — she was as incisive and brilliant a critic as she was a novelist. These witty essays, written for the common reader (“He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole- a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing”), are as illuminating and engrossing as they were when they were written.

Teaching a Stone to Talk , Annie Dillard

This is Dillard’s only book of essays, but boy is it a blazingly good one. The slender volume, filled with examinations of nature both human and not, is deft of thought and tongue, and well worth anyone’s time. As the Chicago Sun-Times ‘s Edward Abbey gushed, “This little book is haloed and informed throughout by Dillard’s distinctive passion and intensity, a sort of intellectual radiance that reminds me both Thoreau and Emily Dickinson.”

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man , Henry Louis Gates Jr.

In this eloquent volume of essays, all but one of which were originally published in the New Yorker , Gates argues against the notion of the singularly representable “black man,” preferring to represent him in a myriad of diverse profiles, from James Baldwin to Colin Powell. Humane, incisive, and satisfyingly journalistic, Gates cobbles together the ultimate portrait of the 20th-century African-American male by refusing to cobble it together, and raises important questions about race and identity even as he entertains.

Otherwise Known As the Human Condition , Geoff Dyer

This book of essays, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year of its publication, covers 25 years of the uncategorizable, inimitable Geoff Dyer’s work — casually erudite and yet liable to fascinate anyone wandering in the door, witty and breathing and full of truth. As Sam Lipsyte said, “You read Dyer for his caustic wit, of course, his exquisite and perceptive crankiness, and his deep and exciting intellectual connections, but from these enthralling rants and cultural investigations there finally emerges another Dyer, a generous seeker of human feeling and experience, a man perhaps closer than he thinks to what he believes his hero Camus achieved: ‘a heart free of bitterness.'”

Art and Ardor , Cynthia Ozick

Look, Cynthia Ozick is a genius. One of David Foster Wallace’s favorite writers, and one of ours, Ozick has no less than seven essay collections to her name, and we could have chosen any one of them, each sharper and more perfectly self-conscious than the last. This one, however, includes her stunner “A Drugstore in Winter,” which was chosen by Joyce Carol Oates for The Best American Essays of the Century , so we’ll go with it.

No More Nice Girls , Ellen Willis

The venerable Ellen Willis was the first pop music critic for The New Yorker , and a rollicking anti-authoritarian, feminist, all-around bad-ass woman who had a hell of a way with words. This collection examines the women’s movement, the plight of the aging radical, race relations, cultural politics, drugs, and Picasso. Among other things.

The War Against Cliché , Martin Amis

As you know if you’ve ever heard him talk , Martin Amis is not only a notorious grouch but a sharp critical mind, particularly when it comes to literature. That quality is on full display in this collection, which spans nearly 30 years and twice as many subjects, from Vladimir Nabokov (his hero) to chess to writing about sex. Love him or hate him, there’s no denying that he’s a brilliant old grump.

Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts , Clive James

James’s collection is a strange beast, not like any other essay collection on this list but its own breed. An encyclopedia of modern culture, the book collects 110 new biographical essays, which provide more than enough room for James to flex his formidable intellect and curiosity, as he wanders off on tangents, anecdotes, and cultural criticism. It’s not the only who’s who you need, but it’s a who’s who you need.

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman , Nora Ephron

Oh Nora, we miss you. Again, we could have picked any of her collections here — candid, hilarious, and willing to give it to you straight, she’s like a best friend and mentor in one, only much more interesting than any of either you’ve ever had.

Arguably , Christopher Hitchens

No matter what you think of his politics (or his rhetorical strategies), there’s no denying that Christopher Hitchens was one of the most brilliant minds — and one of the most brilliant debaters — of the century. In this collection, packed with cultural commentary, literary journalism, and political writing, he is at his liveliest, his funniest, his exactingly wittiest. He’s also just as caustic as ever.

The Solace of Open Spaces , Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich is a poet, and in this collection, you’ll know it. In 1976, she moved to Wyoming and became a cowherd, and nearly a decade later, she published this lovely, funny set of essays about rural life in the American West.”Keenly observed the world is transformed,” she writes. “The landscape is engorged with detail, every movement on it chillingly sharp. The air between people is charged. Days unfold, bathed in their own music. Nights become hallucinatory; dreams, prescient.”

The Braindead Megaphone , George Saunders

Saunders may be the man of the moment, but he’s been at work for a long while, and not only on his celebrated short stories. His single collection of essays applies the same humor and deliciously slant view to the real world — which manages to display nearly as much absurdity as one of his trademark stories.

Against Joie de Vivre , Phillip Lopate

“Over the years,” the title essay begins, “I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre , the knack of knowing how to live.” Lopate goes on to dissect, in pleasantly sardonic terms, the modern dinner party. Smart and thought-provoking throughout (and not as crotchety as all that), this collection is conversational but weighty, something to be discussed at length with friends at your next — oh well, you know.

Sex and the River Styx , Edward Hoagland

Edward Hoagland, who John Updike deemed “the best essayist of my generation,” has a long and storied career and a fat bibliography, so we hesitate to choose such a recent installment in the writer’s canon. Then again, Garrison Keillor thinks it’s his best yet , so perhaps we’re not far off. Hoagland is a great nature writer (name checked by many as the modern Thoreau) but in truth, he’s just as fascinated by humanity, musing that “human nature is interstitial with nature, and not to be shunned by a naturalist.” Elegant and thoughtful, Hoagland may warn us that he’s heading towards the River Styx, but we’ll hang on to him a while longer.

Changing My Mind , Zadie Smith

Smith may be best known for her novels (and she should be), but to our eyes she is also emerging as an excellent essayist in her own right, passionate and thoughtful. Plus, any essay collection that talks about Barack Obama via Pygmalion is a winner in our book.

My Misspent Youth , Meghan Daum

Like so many other writers on this list, Daum dives head first into the culture and comes up with meat in her mouth. Her voice is fresh and her narratives daring, honest and endlessly entertaining.

The White Album , Joan Didion

Yes, Joan Didion is on this list twice, because Joan Didion is the master of the modern essay, tearing at our assumptions and building our world in brisk, clever strokes. Deal.

40 Best Essays of All Time (Including Links & Writing Tips)

I had little money (buying forty collections of essays was out of the question) so I’ve found them online instead. I’ve hacked through piles of them, and finally, I’ve found the great ones. Now I want to share the whole list with you (with the addition of my notes about writing). Each item on the list has a direct link to the essay, so please click away and indulge yourself. Also, next to each essay, there’s an image of the book that contains the original work.

About this essay list:

40 best essays of all time (with links and writing tips), 1. david sedaris – laugh, kookaburra.

A great family drama takes place against the backdrop of the Australian wilderness. And the Kookaburra laughs… This is one of the top essays of the lot. It’s a great mixture of family reminiscences, travel writing, and advice on what’s most important in life. You’ll also learn an awful lot about the curious culture of the Aussies.

Writing tips from the essay:

2. charles d’ambrosio – documents, 3. e. b. white – once more to the lake, 4. zadie smith – fail better, 5. virginia woolf – death of the moth, 6. meghan daum – my misspent youth, 7. roger ebert – go gentle into that good night, 8. george orwell – shooting an elephant, 9. george orwell – a hanging, 10. christopher hitchens – assassins of the mind, 11. christopher hitchens – the new commandments, 12. phillip lopate – against joie de vivre, 13. philip larkin – the pleasure principle, 14. sigmund freud – thoughts for the times on war and death, 15. zadie smith – some notes on attunement.

“You are privy to a great becoming, but you recognize nothing” – Francis Dolarhyde. This one is about the elusiveness of change occurring within you. For Zadie, it was hard to attune to the vibes of Joni Mitchell – especially her Blue album. But eventually, she grew up to appreciate her genius, and all the other things changed as well. This top essay is all about the relationship between humans, and art. We shouldn’t like art because we’re supposed to. We should like it because it has an instantaneous, emotional effect on us. Although, according to Stansfield (Gary Oldman) in Léon, liking Beethoven is rather mandatory.

16. Annie Dillard – Total Eclipse

17. édouard levé – when i look at a strawberry, i think of a tongue, 18. gloria e. anzaldúa – how to tame a wild tongue, 19. kurt vonnegut – dispatch from a man without a country, 20. mary ruefle – on fear.

Most psychologists and gurus agree that fear is the greatest enemy of success or any creative activity. It’s programmed into our minds to keep us away from imaginary harm. Mary Ruefle takes on this basic human emotion with flair. She explores fear from so many angles (especially in the world of poetry-writing) that at the end of this personal essay, you will look at it, dissect it, untangle it, and hopefully be able to say “f**k you” the next time your brain is trying to stop you.

21. Susan Sontag – Against Interpretation

22. nora ephron – a few words about breasts, 23. carl sagan – does truth matter – science, pseudoscience, and civilization, 24. paul graham – how to do what you love, 25. john jeremiah sullivan – mister lytle, 26. joan didion – on self respect, 27. susan sontag – notes on camp, 28. ralph waldo emerson – self-reliance, 29. david foster wallace – consider the lobster, 30. david foster wallace – the nature of the fun.

The famous novelist and author of the most powerful commencement speech ever done is going to tell you about the joys and sorrows of writing a work of fiction. It’s like taking care of a mutant child that constantly oozes smelly liquids. But you love that child and you want others to love it too. It’s a very humorous account of what it means to be an author. If you ever plan to write a novel, you should read that one. And the story about the Chinese farmer is just priceless.

31. Margaret Atwood – Attitude

32. jo ann beard – the fourth state of matter, 33. terence mckenna – tryptamine hallucinogens and consciousness, 34. eudora welty – the little store, 35. john mcphee – the search for marvin gardens.

The Search for Marvin Gardens contains many layers of meaning. It’s a story about a Monopoly championship, but also, it’s the author’s search for the lost streets visible on the board of the famous board game. It also presents a historical perspective on the rise and fall of civilizations, and on Atlantic City, which once was a lively place, and then, slowly declined, the streets filled with dirt and broken windows.

36. Maxine Hong Kingston – No Name Woman

37. joan didion – on keeping a notebook, 38. joan didion – goodbye to all that, 39. george orwell – reflections on gandhi, 40. george orwell – politics and the english language, other essays you may find interesting, oliver sacks – on libraries, noam chomsky – the responsibility of intellectuals, sam harris – the riddle of the gun.

Sam Harris, now a famous philosopher and neuroscientist, takes on the problem of gun control in the United States. His thoughts are clear of prejudice. After reading this, you’ll appreciate the value of logical discourse overheated, irrational debate that more often than not has real implications on policy.

Tim Ferriss – Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide

Edward said – reflections on exile, richard feynman – it’s as simple as one, two, three…, rabindranath tagore – the religion of the forest, richard dawkins – letter to his 10-year-old daughter.

Every father should be able to articulate his philosophy of life to his children. With this letter that’s similar to what you find in the Paris Review essays , the famed atheist and defender of reason, Richard Dawkins, does exactly that. It’s beautifully written and stresses the importance of looking at evidence when we’re trying to make sense of the world.

Albert Camus – The Minotaur (or, The Stop In Oran)

Koty neelis – 21 incredible life lessons from anthony bourdain, lucius annaeus seneca – on the shortness of life, bertrand russell – in praise of idleness, james baldwin – stranger in the village.

It’s an essay on the author’s experiences as an African-American in a Swiss village, exploring race, identity, and alienation while highlighting the complexities of racial dynamics and the quest for belonging.

Bonus – More writing tips from two great books

The sense of style – by steven pinker, on writing well – by william zinsser, now immerse yourself in the world of essays, rafal reyzer.

Hey there, welcome to my blog! I'm a full-time entrepreneur building two companies, a digital marketer, and a content creator with 10+ years of experience. I started RafalReyzer.com to provide you with great tools and strategies you can use to become a proficient digital marketer and achieve freedom through online creativity. My site is a one-stop shop for digital marketers, and content enthusiasts who want to be independent, earn more money, and create beautiful things. Explore my journey here , and don't miss out on my AI Marketing Mastery online course.

The Best George Orwell Essays Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

George Orwell (1903-50) is known around the world for his satirical novella Animal Farm and his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four , but he was arguably at his best in the essay form. Below, we’ve selected and introduced ten of Orwell’s best essays for the interested newcomer to his non-fiction, but there are many more we could have added. What do you think is George Orwell’s greatest essay?

1. ‘ Why I Write ’.

This 1946 essay is notable for at least two reasons: one, it gives us a neat little autobiography detailing Orwell’s development as a writer; and two, it includes four ‘motives for writing’ which break down as egoism (wanting to seem clever), aesthetic enthusiasm (taking delight in the sounds of words etc.), the historical impulse (wanting to record things for posterity), and the political purpose (wanting to ‘push the world in a certain direction’).

2. ‘ Politics and the English Language ’.

The English language is ‘in a bad way’, Orwell argues in this famous essay from 1946. As its title suggests, Orwell identifies a link between the (degraded) English language of his time and the degraded political situation: Orwell sees modern political discourse as being less a matter of words chosen for their clear meanings than a series of stock phrases slung together.

Orwell concludes with six rules or guidelines for political writers and essayists, which include: never use a long word when a short one will do, or a specialist or foreign term when a simpler English one should suffice.

We have analysed this classic essay here .

3. ‘ Shooting an Elephant ’.

This is an early Orwell essay, from 1936. In it, he recalls his (possibly fictionalised) experiences as a police officer in Burma, when he had to shoot an elephant that had got out of hand. Orwell extrapolates from this one event, seeing it as a microcosm of imperialism, wherein the coloniser loses his humanity and freedom through oppressing others.

We have analysed this essay here .

4. ‘ Decline of the English Murder ’.

In this 1946 essay, Orwell writes about the British fascination with murder, focusing in particular on the period of 1850-1925, which Orwell identifies as the golden age or ‘great period in murder’ in the media and literature. But what has happened to murder in the British newspapers?

Orwell claims that the Second World War has desensitised people to brutal acts of killing, but also that there is less style and art in modern murders. Oscar Wilde would no doubt agree with Orwell’s point of view!

5. ‘ Confessions of a Book Reviewer ’.

This 1946 essay makes book-reviewing as a profession or trade – something that seems so appealing and aspirational to many book-lovers – look like a life of drudgery. Why, Orwell asks, does virtually every book that’s published have to be reviewed? It would be best, he argues, to be more discriminating and devote more column inches to the most deserving of books.

6. ‘ A Hanging ’.

This is another Burmese recollection from Orwell, and a very early work, dating from 1931. Orwell describes a condemned criminal being executed by hanging, using this event as a way in to thinking about capital punishment and how, as Orwell put it elsewhere, a premeditated execution can seem more inhumane than a thousand murders.

We discuss this Orwell essay in more detail here .

7. ‘ The Lion and the Unicorn ’.

Subtitled ‘Socialism and the English Genius’, this is another essay Orwell wrote about Britain in the wake of the outbreak of the Second World War. Published in 1941, this essay takes its title from the heraldic symbols for England (the lion) and Scotland (the unicorn). Orwell argues that some sort of socialist revolution is needed to wrest Britain out of its outmoded ways and an overhaul of the British class system will help Britain to defeat the Nazis.

The long essay contains a section, ‘England Your England’, which is often reprinted as a standalone essay, written as the German bomber planes were whizzing overhead during the Blitz of 1941. This part of the essay is a critique of blind English patriotism during wartime and an attempt to pin down ‘English’ values at a time when England itself was under threat from Nazi invasion.

8. ‘ My Country Right or Left ’.

This 1940 essay shows what a complex and nuanced thinker Orwell was when it came to political labels such as ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’. Although Orwell was on the left, he also held patriotic (although not exactly fervently nationalistic) attitudes towards England which many of his comrades on the left found baffling.

As with ‘England Your England’ above, the wartime context is central to Orwell’s argument, and lends his discussion of the relationship between left-wing politics and patriotic values an urgency and immediacy.

9. ‘ Bookshop Memories ’.

As well as writing on politics and being a writer, Orwell also wrote perceptively about readers and book-buyers – as in this 1936 essay, published the same year as his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying , which combined both bookshops and writers (the novel focuses on Gordon Comstock, an aspiring poet).

In ‘Bookshop Memories’, reflecting on his own time working as an assistant in a bookshop, Orwell divides those who haunt bookshops into various types: the snobs after a first edition, the Oriental students, and so on.

10. ‘ A Nice Cup of Tea ’.

Orwell didn’t just write about literature and politics. He also wrote about things like the perfect pub, and how to make the best cup of tea, for the London Evening Standard in the late 1940s. Here, in this essay from 1946, Orwell offers eleven ‘golden rules’ for making a tasty cuppa, arguing that people disagree vehemently how to make a perfect cup of tea because it is one of the ‘mainstays of civilisation’. Hear, hear.

Discover more from Interesting Literature

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Type your email…

3 thoughts on “The Best George Orwell Essays Everyone Should Read”

Thanks, Orwell was a master at combining wisdom and readability. I also like his essay on Edward Lear, although some of his observations are very much of their time: https://edwardleartrail.wordpress.com/2018/10/16/george-orwell-on-edward-lear/

The Everyman edition of Orwell’s essays (1200 pages !) is my desert island book. I like Shooting the Elephant altho Julian Barnes seems to believe this is fictitious. Is this still a live debate ?

• Pingback: The Best George Orwell Essays Everyone Should Read

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

100 Best Essays Books of All Time

We've researched and ranked the best essays books in the world, based on recommendations from world experts, sales data, and millions of reader ratings. Learn more

Men Explain Things to Me

Rebecca Solnit | 5.00

Chelsea Handler Goes deep with statistics, personal stories, and others’ accounts of how brutal this world can be for women, the history of how we've been treated, and what it will take to change the conversation: MEN. We need them to be as outraged as we are and join our fight. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

Me Talk Pretty One Day

David Sedaris | 4.96

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates | 4.94

Barack Obama The president also released a list of his summer favorites back in 2015: All That Is, James Salter The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates Washington: A Life, Ron Chernow All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr (Source)

Jack Dorsey Q: What are the books that had a major influence on you? Or simply the ones you like the most. : Tao te Ching, score takes care of itself, between the world and me, the four agreements, the old man and the sea...I love reading! (Source)

Doug McMillon Here are some of my favorite reads from 2017. Lots of friends and colleagues send me book suggestions and it's impossible to squeeze them all in. I continue to be super curious about how digital and tech are enabling people to transform our lives but I try to read a good mix of books that apply to a variety of areas and stretch my thinking more broadly. (Source)

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Joan Didion | 4.94

Peter Hessler I like Didion for her writing style and her control over her material, but also for the way in which she captures a historical moment. (Source)

Liz Lambert I love [this book] so much. (Source)

We Should All Be Feminists

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | 4.92

Bad Feminist

Roxane Gay | 4.88

Irina Nica It’s hard to pick an all-time favorite because, as time goes by and I grow older, my reading list becomes more “mature” and I find myself interested in new things. I probably have a personal favorite book for each stage of my life. Right now I’m absolutely blown away by everything Roxane Gay wrote, especially Bad Feminist. (Source)

Trick Mirror

Reflections on Self-Delusion

Jia Tolentino | 4.86

Lydia Polgreen This book is amazing and you should read it. https://t.co/pcbmYUR4QP (Source)

Maryanne Hobbs ⁦@jiatolentino⁩ hello Jia :) finding your perspectives in the new book fascinating and so resonant.. thank you 🌹 m/a..x https://t.co/BoNzB1BuDf (Source)

Yashar Ali . @jiatolentino’s fabulous book is one of President Obama’s favorite books of 2019 https://t.co/QHzZsHl2rF (Source)

Consider the Lobster

And Other Essays

David Foster Wallace | 4.85

A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf | 4.75

Dress Your Family in Corduroy & Denim

David Sedaris | 4.73

Adam Kay @penceyprepmemes How about David Sedaris, for starters - "Dress your family in corduroy and denim" is an amazing book. (Source)

Don't have time to read the top Essays books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.

Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:

• Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
• Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
• Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.

The Fire Next Time

James Baldwin | 4.69

Barack Obama Fact or fiction, the president knows that reading keeps the mind sharp. He also delved into these non-fiction reads: Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Evan Osnos Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman Moral Man And Immoral Society, Reinhold Niebuhr A Kind And Just Parent, William Ayers The Post-American World, Fareed Zakaria Lessons in Disaster, Gordon Goldstein Sapiens: A Brief History of... (Source)

When You Are Engulfed in Flames

David Sedaris | 4.67

David Sedaris | 4.63

David Blaine It’s hilarious. (Source)

The White Album

Joan Didion | 4.62

Dan Richards I feel Joan Didion is the patron saint of a maelstrom of culture and environment of a particular time. She is the great American road-trip writer, to my mind. She has that great widescreen filmic quality to her work. (Source)

Steven Amsterdam With her gaze on California of the late 60s and early 70s, Didion gives us the Black Panthers, Janis Joplin, Nancy Reagan, and the Manson follower Linda Kasabian. (Source)

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

Essays and Arguments

David Foster Wallace | 4.61

Tressie McMillan Cottom | 4.60

Melissa Moore The best book I read this year was Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom. I read it twice and both times found it challenging and revelatory. (Source)

David Sedaris and Hachette Audi | 4.60

Sister Outsider

Essays and Speeches

Audre Lorde, Cheryl Clarke | 4.60

Bianca Belair For #BHM  I will be sharing some of my favorite books by Black Authors 26th Book: Sister Outsider By: Audre Lorde My first time reading anything by Audre Lorde. I am now really looking forward to reading more of her poems/writings. What she writes is important & timeless. https://t.co/dUDMcaAAbx (Source)

Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls

David Sedaris | 4.58

Austin Kleon I read this one, then I read his collected diaries, Theft By Finding, and then I read the visual compendium, which might have even been the most interesting of the three books, but I’m listing this one because it’s hilarious, although with the interstitial fiction bits, it’s sort of like one of those classic 90s hip-hop albums where you skip the “skit” tracks. (Source)

Notes from a Loud Woman

Lindy West | 4.56

Matt Mcgorry "Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman" by Lindy West @TheLindyWest # Lovvvvveeedddd, loved, loved, loved this book!!!  West is a truly remarkable writer and her stories are beautifully poignant while dosed with her… https://t.co/nzJtXtOGTn (Source)

Shannon Coulter @JennLHaglund @tomi_adeyemi I love that feeling! Just finished the audiobook version of Shrill by Lindy West after _years_ of meaning to read it and that's the exact feeling it gave me. Give me your book recommendations! (Source)

The Collected Schizophrenias

Esmé Weijun Wang | 4.52

Tiny Beautiful Things

Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Cheryl Strayed | 4.49

Ryan Holiday It was wonderful to read these two provocative books of essays by two incredibly wise and compassionate women. Cheryl Strayed, also the author of Wild, was the anonymous columnist behind the online column, Dear Sugar and boy, are we better off for it. This is not a random smattering of advice. This book contains some of the most cogent insights on life, pain, loss, love, success, youth that I... (Source)

James Altucher Cheryl had an advice column called “Dear Sugar”. I was reading the column long before Oprah recommended “Wild” by Cheryl and then Wild became a movie and “Tiny Beautiful Things” (the collection of her advice column) became a book. She is so wise and compassionate. A modern saint. I used to do Q&A sessions on Twitter. I’d read her book beforehand to get inspiration about what true advice is. (Source)

We Were Eight Years in Power

An American Tragedy

Ta-Nehisi Coates | 4.47

The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

Albert Camu | 4.47

David Heinemeier Hansson Camus’ philosophical exposition of absurdity, suicide in the face of meaninglessness, and other cherry topics that continue on from his fictional work in novels like The Stranger. It’s surprisingly readable, unlike many other mid 20th century philosophers, yet no less deep or pointy. It’s a great follow-up, as an original text, to that book The Age of Absurdity, I recommended last year. Still... (Source)

Kenan Malik The Myth of Sisyphus is a small work, but Camus’s meditation on faith and fate has personally been hugely important in developing my ideas. Writing in the embers of World War II, Camus confronts in The Myth of Sisyphus both the tragedy of recent history and what he sees as the absurdity of the human condition. There is, he observes, a chasm between the human need for meaning and what he calls... (Source)

The Penguin Essays Of George Orwell

George Orwell, Bernard Crick | 4.46

Peter Kellner George Orwell was not only an extraordinary writer but he also hated any form of cant. Some of his most widely read works such as 1984 and Animal Farm are an assault on the nastier, narrow-minded, dictatorial tendencies of the left, although Orwell was himself on the left. (Source)

The Opposite of Loneliness

Essays and Stories

Marina Keegan, Anne Fadiman | 4.46

Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | 4.45

The Tipping Point

How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Malcolm Gladwell | 4.45

Kevin Rose Bunch of really good information in here on how to make ideas go viral. This could be good to apply to any kind of products or ideas you may have. Definitely, check out The Tipping Point, which is one of my favorites. (Source)

Seth Godin Malcolm Gladwell's breakthrough insight was to focus on the micro-relationships between individuals, which helped organizations realize that it's not about the big ads and the huge charity balls... it's about setting the stage for the buzz to start. (Source)

Andy Stern I think that when we talk about making change, it is much more about macro change, like in policy. This book reminds you that at times when you're building big movements, or trying to elect significant decision-makers in politics, sometimes it's the little things that make a difference. Ever since the book was written, we've become very used to the idea of things going viral unexpectedly and then... (Source)

Selected Essays

Mary Oliver | 4.44

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.

Samantha Irby | 4.44

Complete Essays

Michel de Montaigne, Charles Cotton | 4.42

Ryan Holiday There is plenty to study and see simply by looking inwards — maybe even an alarming amount. (Source)

Alain de Botton I’ve given quite a lot of copies of [this book] to people down the years. (Source)

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)

Mindy Kaling | 4.42

Angela Kinsey .@mindykaling I am rereading your book and cracking up. I appreciate your chapter on The Office so much more now. But all of it is fantastic. Thanks for starting my day with laughter. You know I loves ya. ❤️ https://t.co/EB99xnyt0p (Source)

Yashar Ali Reminds me of one of my favorite lines from @mindykaling's book (even though I'm an early riser): “There is no sunrise so beautiful that it is worth waking me up to see it.” https://t.co/pS56bmyYjS (Source)

Not That Bad

Dispatches from Rape Culture

Roxane Gay, Brandon Taylor, et al | 4.40

Henry David Thoreau | 4.40

Laura Dassow Walls The book that we love as Walden began in the journal entries that he wrote starting with his first day at the pond. (Source)

Roman Krznaric In 1845 the American naturalist went out to live in the woods of Western Massachusetts. Thoreau was one of the great masters of the art of simple living. (Source)

John Kaag There’s this idea that philosophy can blend into memoir and that, ideally, philosophy, at its best, is to help us through the business of living with people, within communities. This is a point that Thoreau’s Walden gave to me, as a writer, and why I consider it so valuable for today. (Source)

Confessions of a Common Reader

Anne Fadiman | 4.40

I Feel Bad About My Neck

And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

Nora Ephron | 4.39

Holidays on Ice

David Sedaris | 4.37

An American Lyric

Claudia Rankine | 4.36

Cheryl Strayed A really important book for us to be reading right now. (Source)

Jeremy Noel-Tod Obviously, it’s been admired and acclaimed, but I do feel the general reception of it has underplayed its artfulness. Its technical subtlety and overall arrangement has been neglected, because it has been classified as a kind of documentary work. (Source)

Christopher Hitchens | 4.36

Le Grove @billysubway Hitchens book under your arm. I’m reading Arguably. When he’s at his best, he is a savage. Unbelievable prose. (Source)

Notes of a Native Son

James Baldwin | 4.35

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

Oliver Sacks | 4.34

Suzanne O'Sullivan I didn’t choose neurology because of it but the way Oliver Sacks writes about neurology is very compelling. (Source)

Tanya Byron This is a seminal book that anyone who wants to work in mental health should read. It is a charming and gentle and also an honest exposé of what can happen to us when our mental health is compromised for whatever reason. (Source)

Bradley Voytek I can’t imagine one day waking up and not knowing who my wife is, or seeing my wife and thinking that she was replaced by some sort of clone or robot. But that could happen to any of us. (Source)

The Empathy Exams

Leslie Jamison | 4.33

This is the Story of a Happy Marriage

Ann Patchett | 4.31

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

A Low Culture Manifesto

Chuck Klosterman | 4.30

Karen Pfaff Manganillo Never have I read a book that I said “this is so perfect, amazing, hilarious, he’s thinking what I’m thinking (in a much more thought out and cool way)”. (Source)

Bird By Bird

Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Anne Lamott | 4.29

Susan Cain I love [this book]. Such a good book. (Source)

Timothy Ferriss Bird by Bird is one of my absolute favorite books, and I gift it to everybody, which I should probably also give to startup founders, quite frankly. A lot of the lessons are the same. But you can get to your destination, even though you can only see 20 feet in front of you. (Source)

Ryan Holiday It was wonderful to read these two provocative books of essays by two incredibly wise and compassionate women. [...] Anne Lamott’s book is ostensibly about the art of writing, but really it too is about life and how to tackle the problems, temptations and opportunities life throws at us. Both will make you think and both made me a better person this year. (Source)

Zadie Smith | 4.29

Barack Obama As 2018 draws to a close, I’m continuing a favorite tradition of mine and sharing my year-end lists. It gives me a moment to pause and reflect on the year through the books I found most thought-provoking, inspiring, or just plain loved. It also gives me a chance to highlight talented authors – some who are household names and others who you may not have heard of before. Here’s my best of 2018... (Source)

What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

Malcolm Gladwell | 4.28

Sam Freedman @mrianleslie (Also I agree What the Dog Saw is his best book). (Source)

The Witches Are Coming

Lindy West | 4.27

Against Interpretation and Other Essays

Susan Sontag | 4.25

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

Alexander Chee | 4.25

Eula Biss Alex Chee explores the realm of the real with extraordinarily beautiful essays. Being real here is an ambition, a haunting, an impossibility, and an illusion. What passes for real, his essays suggest, becomes real, just as life becomes art and art, pursued this fully, becomes a life. (Source)

Changing My Mind

Occasional Essays

Zadie Smith | 4.25

Barrel Fever

David Sedaris | 4.24

Chelsea Handler [The author] is fucking hilarious and there's nothing I prefer to do more than laugh. If this book doesn't make you laugh, I'll refund you the money. (Source)

The Fire This Time

A New Generation Speaks About Race

Jesmyn Ward | 4.24

Why Not Me?

Mindy Kaling | 4.24

The View from the Cheap Seats

Selected Nonfiction

Neil Gaiman | 4.24

I Was Told There'd Be Cake

Sloane Crosley | 4.24

The Intelligent Investor

The Classic Text on Value Investing

Benjamin Graham | 4.23

Warren Buffett To invest successfully over a lifetime does not require a stratospheric IQ, unusual business insights, or inside information. What's needed is a sound intellectual framework for making decisions and the ability to keep emotions from corroding that framework. This book precisely and clearly prescribes the proper framework. You must provide the emotional discipline. (Source)

Kevin Rose The foundation for investing. A lot of people have used this as their guide to getting into investment, basic strategies. Actually Warren Buffett cites this as the book that got him into investing and he says that principles he learned here helped him to become a great investor. Highly recommend this book. It’s a great way understand what’s going on and how to evaluate different companies out... (Source)

John Kay The idea is that you look at the underlying value of the company’s activities instead of relying on market gossip. (Source)

Tell Me How It Ends

An Essay in Forty Questions

Valeria Luiselli | 4.23

Tina Fey | 4.22

Sheryl Sandberg I absolutely loved Tina Fey's "Bossypants" and didn't want it to end. It's hilarious as well as important. Not only was I laughing on every page, but I was nodding along, highlighting and dog-earing like crazy. [...] It is so, so good. As a young girl, I was labeled bossy, too, so as a former - O.K., current - bossypants, I am grateful to Tina for being outspoken, unapologetic and hysterically... (Source)

They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

Hanif Abdurraqib, Dr. Eve L. Ewing | 4.22

Saadia Muzaffar Man, this is such an amazing book of essays. Meditations on music and musicians and their moments and meaning-making. @NifMuhammad's mindworks are a gift. Go find it. (thank you @asad_ch!) https://t.co/htSueYYBUT (Source)

This Is Water

Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

David Foster Wallace | 4.21

John Jeremiah Sullivan | 4.21

Greil Marcus This is a new book by a writer in his mid-thirties, about all kinds of things. A lot of it is about the South, some of it is autobiographical, there is a long and quite wonderful piece about going to a Christian music camp. (Source)

The Mother of All Questions

Rebecca Solnit | 4.20

The Partly Cloudy Patriot

Sarah Vowell, Katherine Streeter | 4.20

Essays of E.B. White

E. B. White | 4.19

Adam Gopnik 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... (Source)

A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Rebecca Solnit | 4.19

A Man Without a Country

Kurt Vonnegut | 4.18

No Time to Spare

Thinking About What Matters

Ursula K. Le Guin, Karen Joy Fowler | 4.17

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Annie Dillard | 4.16

Laura Dassow Walls She’s enacting Thoreau, but in a 20th-century context: she takes on quantum physics, the latest research on DNA and the nature of life. (Source)

Sara Maitland This book, which won the Pulitzer literature prize when it was released, is the most beautiful book about the wild. (Source)

Maggie Nelson | 4.14

Furiously Happy

A Funny Book About Horrible Things

Jenny Lawson | 4.13

Women & Power

A Manifesto

Mary Beard | 4.13

Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Timothy Snyder | 4.12

George Saunders Please read this book. So smart, so timely. (Source)

Tom Holland "There isn’t a page of this magnificent book that does not contain some fascinating detail and the narrative is held together with a novelist’s eye for character and theme." #Dominion https://t.co/FESSNxVDLC (Source)

Maya Wiley Prof. Tim Snyder, author of “In Tyranny” reminded us in that important little book that we must protect our institutions. #DOJ is one of our most important in gov’t for the rule of law. This is our collective house & #Barr should be evicted. https://t.co/PPxM9IMQUm (Source)

Small Wonder

Barbara Kingsolver | 4.11

The Source of Self-Regard

Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

Toni Morrison | 4.11

Hyperbole and a Half

Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

Allie Brosh | 4.11

Bill Gates While she self-deprecatingly depicts herself in words and art as an odd outsider, we can all relate to her struggles. Rather than laughing at her, you laugh with her. It is no hyperbole to say I love her approach -- looking, listening, and describing with the observational skills of a scientist, the creativity of an artist, and the wit of a comedian. (Source)

Samantha Irby | 4.10

Both Flesh and Not

David Foster Wallace | 4.10

David Papineau People can learn to do amazing things with their bodies, and people start honing and developing these skills as an end in itself, a very natural thing for humans to do. (Source)

So Sad Today

Personal Essays

Melissa Broder | 4.10

Hope in the Dark

Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

Rebecca Solnit | 4.09

Prem Panicker @sanjayen This is from an essay Solnit wrote to introduce the updated version of her book Hope In The Dark. Anything Solnit is brilliant; at times like these, she is the North Star. (Source)

The Faraway Nearby

How to Be Alone

Jonathan Franzen | 4.08

Regarding the Pain of Others

Susan Sontag | 4.08

The Essays of Warren Buffett

Lessons for Corporate America, Fifth Edition

Lawrence A. Cunningham and Warren E. Buffett | 4.08

One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

Scaachi Koul | 4.07

Amy Poehler | 4.06

The Souls of Black Folk

W.E.B. Du Bois | 4.05

Barack Obama According to the president’s Facebook page and a 2008 interview with the New York Times, these titles are among his most influential forever favorites: Moby Dick, Herman Melville Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson Song Of Solomon, Toni Morrison Parting The Waters, Taylor Branch Gilead, Marylinne Robinson Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton Souls of Black... (Source)

In Praise of Shadows

Jun'ichiro Tanizaki | 4.05

Kyle Chayka Tanizaki is mourning what has been paved over, which is the old Japanese aesthetic of darkness, of softness, of appreciating the imperfect—rather than the cold, glossy surfaces of industrialized modernity that the West had brought to Japan at that moment. For me, that’s really valuable, because it does preserve a different way of looking at the world. (Source)

Ways of Seeing

John Berger | 4.04

Robert Jones He’s a Marxist and says that the role of publicity or branding is to make people marginally dissatisfied with their current way of life. (Source)

David McCammon Ways of Seeing goes beyond photography and will continue to develop your language around images. (Source)

John Harrison (Eton College) You have to understand the Marxist interpretation of art; it is absolutely fundamental to the way that art history departments now study the material. Then you have to critique it, because we’ve moved on from the 1970s and the collapse of Marxism in most of the world shows—amongst other things—that the model was flawed. But it’s still a very good book to read, for a teenager especially. (Source)

Tackling the Texas Essays

Efficient Preparation for the Texas Bar Exam

Catherine Martin Christopher | 4.04

The Book of Delights

Ross Gay | 4.04

Mere Christianity

C. S. Lewis | 4.04

Anoop Anthony "Mere Christianity" is first and foremost a rational book — it is in many ways the opposite of a traditional religious tome. Lewis, who was once an atheist, has been on both sides of the table, and he approaches the notion of God with accessible, clear thinking. The book reveals that experiencing God doesn't have to be a mystical exercise; God can be a concrete and logical conclusion. Lewis was... (Source)

I Remember Nothing

and Other Reflections

Nora Ephron | 4.04

On Photography

Susan Sontag | 4.03

Susan Bordo Sontag was the first to make the claim, which at the time was very controversial, that photography is misleading and seductive because it looks like reality but is in fact highly selective. (Source)

Notes from No Man's Land

American Essays

Eula Biss | 4.03

The Doors of Perception

Heaven and Hell (Thinking Classics)

Aldous Huxley, Robbie McCallum | 4.03

Michelle Rodriguez Aldous Huxley on Technodictators https://t.co/RDyX70lnZz via @YouTube ‘Doors of Perception’ is a great book entry level to hallucinogenics (Source)

Auston Bunsen I also really loved “The doors of perception” by Aldous Huxley. (Source)

Dr. Andrew Weil Came first [in terms of my interests]. (Source)

The Geek Feminist Revolution

Kameron Hurley | 4.02

Wow, No Thank You.

Samantha Irby | 4.01

A Modest Proposal

Jonathan Swift | 4.01

At Large and at Small

Familiar Essays

Anne Fadiman | 4.00

• NONFICTION BOOKS
• BEST NONFICTION 2023
• BEST NONFICTION 2024
• Historical Biographies
• The Best Memoirs and Autobiographies
• Philosophical Biographies
• World War 2
• World History
• American History
• British History
• Chinese History
• Russian History
• Ancient History (up to c. 500 AD)
• Medieval History (500-1400)
• Military History
• Art History
• Travel Books
• Ancient Philosophy
• Contemporary Philosophy
• Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Great Philosophers
• Social & Political Philosophy
• Classical Studies
• New Science Books
• Maths & Statistics
• Popular Science
• Physics Books
• Climate Change Books
• How to Write
• English Grammar & Usage
• Books for Learning Languages
• Linguistics
• Political Ideologies
• Foreign Policy & International Relations
• American Politics
• British Politics
• Religious History Books
• Mental Health
• Neuroscience
• Child Psychology
• Film & Cinema
• Opera & Classical Music
• Behavioural Economics
• Development Economics
• Economic History
• Financial Crisis
• World Economies
• Investing Books
• Artificial Intelligence/AI Books
• Data Science Books
• Sex & Sexuality
• Death & Dying
• Food & Cooking
• Sports, Games & Hobbies
• FICTION BOOKS
• BEST NOVELS 2024
• BEST FICTION 2023
• New Literary Fiction
• World Literature
• Literary Criticism
• Literary Figures
• Classic English Literature
• American Literature
• Comics & Graphic Novels
• Fairy Tales & Mythology
• Historical Fiction
• Crime Novels
• Science Fiction
• Short Stories
• South Africa
• United States
• Arctic & Antarctica
• Afghanistan
• Myanmar (Formerly Burma)
• Netherlands
• Kids Recommend Books for Kids
• High School Teachers Recommendations
• Prizewinning Kids' Books
• Popular Series Books for Kids
• BEST BOOKS FOR KIDS (ALL AGES)
• Ages Baby-2
• Books for Teens and Young Adults
• THE BEST SCIENCE BOOKS FOR KIDS
• BEST KIDS' BOOKS OF 2023
• BEST BOOKS FOR TEENS OF 2023
• Best Audiobooks for Kids
• Environment
• Best Books for Teens of 2023
• Best Kids' Books of 2023
• Political Novels
• New History Books
• New Historical Fiction
• New Biography
• New Memoirs
• New World Literature
• New Economics Books
• New Climate Books
• New Math Books
• New Philosophy Books
• New Psychology Books
• New Physics Books
• THE BEST AUDIOBOOKS
• Actors Read Great Books
• Books Narrated by Their Authors
• Best Audiobook Thrillers
• Best History Audiobooks
• Nobel Literature Prize
• Booker Prize (fiction)
• Baillie Gifford Prize (nonfiction)
• Financial Times (nonfiction)
• Wolfson Prize (history)
• Royal Society (science)
• Pushkin House Prize (Russia)
• Walter Scott Prize (historical fiction)
• Arthur C Clarke Prize (sci fi)
• The Hugos (sci fi & fantasy)
• Audie Awards (audiobooks)

Nonfiction Books » Essays

Browse book recommendations:

Nonfiction Books

• Best Nonfiction Books of 2022
• Best Nonfiction Books of 2023
• Best Nonfiction Books of 2024
• Best Nonfiction Books of the Past 25 Years
• Graphic Nonfiction
• Literary Nonfiction
• Narrative Nonfiction
• Nonfiction Series
• Short Nonfiction

Last updated: May 06, 2024

“Essays root ideas in personal experience”, the philosopher Alain de Botton tells us in his interview  in which he discussed five books of “illuminating essays”.  He chooses The Crowded Dance of Modern Life by Virginia Woolf, as well as a selection of DW Winnicott , The Wisdom of Life by Arthur Schopenhauer, The Secret Power of Beauty by John Armstrong and Yoga for People Who Can’t be Bothered to Do It by Geoff Dyer, which “is in praise of slacker-dom and not doing very much. It’s not about Yoga at all.”

David Russell, Associate Professor at Oxford University, recommends the best Victorian essays , including selections by Charles Lamb , Matthew Arnold , George Eliot , Walter Pater and (one twentieth-century writer) Marion Milner and discusses the connection between the essay and the development of urban culture in the 19 th century.

Dame Hermione Lee, the writer's biographer, chooses her best books on Virginia Woolf .  She discusses how and why her stature has grown so much since the 1960s and selects a range of her books including diaries and novels, as well as essays, including To the Lighthouse , which she considers Woolf’s greatest novel, her Diaries and her essay " Walter Sickert: A Conversation " , which can be seen as a meditation on the disparities between painting and writing as art forms.

Adam Gopnik , of the New Yorker , chooses Woolf’s The Common Reader as well as collections by Max Beerbohm , EB White , Randall Jarrell and Clive James .

The Best Essays: the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award , recommended by Adam Gopnik

Had i known: collected essays by barbara ehrenreich, unfinished business: notes of a chronic re-reader by vivian gornick, nature matrix: new and selected essays by robert michael pyle, terroir: love, out of place by natasha sajé, maybe the people would be the times by luc sante.

Every year, the judges of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay search out the best book of essays written in the past year and draw attention to the author's entire body of work. Here, Adam Gopnik , writer, journalist and PEN essay prize judge, emphasizes the role of the essay in bearing witness and explains why the five collections that reached the 2021 shortlist are, in their different ways, so important.

Every year, the judges of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay search out the best book of essays written in the past year and draw attention to the author’s entire body of work. Here, Adam Gopnik, writer, journalist and PEN essay prize judge, emphasizes the role of the essay in bearing witness and explains why the five collections that reached the 2021 shortlist are, in their different ways, so important.

David Russell on The Victorian Essay

Selected prose by charles lamb, culture and anarchy and other writings by matthew arnold, selected essays, poems, and other writings by george eliot, studies in the history of the renaissance by walter pater, the hands of the living god: an account of a psychoanalytic treatment by marion milner.

With the advent of the Victorian age, polite maxims of eighteenth-century essays in the  Spectator  were replaced by a new generation of writers who thought deeply—and playfully—about social relationships, moral responsibility, education and culture. Here, Oxford literary critic  David Russell explores the distinct qualities that define the Victorian essay and recommends five of its greatest practitioners.

With the advent of the Victorian age, polite maxims of eighteenth-century essays in the  Spectator  were replaced by a new generation of writers who thought deeply—and playfully—about social relationships, moral responsibility, education and culture. Here, Oxford literary critic David Russell explores the distinct qualities that define the Victorian essay and recommends five of its greatest practitioners.

The Best Virginia Woolf Books , recommended by Hermione Lee

To the lighthouse by virginia woolf, the years by virginia woolf, walter sickert: a conversation by virginia woolf, on being ill by virginia woolf, selected diaries by virginia woolf.

Virginia Woolf was long dismissed as a 'minor modernist' but now stands as one of the giants of 20th century literature. Her biographer, Hermione Lee , talks us through the novels, essays, and diaries of Virginia Woolf.

Virginia Woolf was long dismissed as a ‘minor modernist’ but now stands as one of the giants of 20th century literature. Her biographer, Hermione Lee, talks us through the novels, essays, and diaries of Virginia Woolf.

Adam Gopnik on his Favourite Essay Collections

And even now by max beerbohm, the common reader by virginia woolf, essays of e.b. white by e.b. white, a sad heart at the supermarket by randall jarrell, visions before midnight by clive james.

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

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

Illuminating Essays , recommended by Alain de Botton

The crowded dance of modern life by virginia woolf, home is where we start from by d w winnicott, the wisdom of life by arthur schopenhauer, the secret power of beauty by john armstrong, yoga for people who can’t be bothered to do it by geoff dyer.

The essay format allows the author to develop ideas but add a personal touch, says the popular philosopher Alain de Botton . Here, he chooses his favourite essay collections

The essay format allows the author to develop ideas but add a personal touch, says the popular philosopher Alain de Botton. Here, he chooses his favourite essay collections

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. We publish at least two new interviews per week.

Five Books participates in the Amazon Associate program and earns money from qualifying purchases.

© Five Books 2024

The best free cultural &

educational media on the web

• Online Courses
• Certificates
• Degrees & Mini-Degrees
• Audio Books

The Ten Best American Essays Since 1950, According to Robert Atwan

in Books , Literature | November 15th, 2012 3 Comments

“Essays can be lots of things, maybe too many things,” writes Atwan in his fore­ward to the 2012 install­ment in the Best Amer­i­can series, “but at the core of the genre is an unmis­tak­able recep­tiv­i­ty to the ever-shift­ing process­es of our minds and moods. If there is any essen­tial char­ac­ter­is­tic we can attribute to the essay, it may be this: that the truest exam­ples of the form enact that ever-shift­ing process, and in that enact­ment we can find the basis for the essay’s qual­i­fi­ca­tion to be regard­ed seri­ous­ly as imag­i­na­tive lit­er­a­ture and the essay­ist’s claim to be tak­en seri­ous­ly as a cre­ative writer.”

In 2001 Atwan and Joyce Car­ol Oates took on the daunt­ing task of trac­ing that ever-shift­ing process through the pre­vi­ous 100 years for  The Best Amer­i­can Essays of the Cen­tu­ry . Recent­ly Atwan returned with a more focused selec­tion for  Pub­lish­ers Week­ly :  “The Top 10 Essays Since 1950.”  To pare it all down to such a small num­ber, Atwan decid­ed to reserve the “New Jour­nal­ism” cat­e­go­ry, with its many mem­o­rable works by Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Michael Herr and oth­ers, for some future list. He also made a point of select­ing the best essays , as opposed to exam­ples from the best essay­ists. “A list of the top ten essay­ists since 1950 would fea­ture some dif­fer­ent writ­ers.”

We were inter­est­ed to see that six of the ten best essays are avail­able for free read­ing online. Here is Atwan’s list, along with links to those essays that are on the Web:

• James Bald­win, “Notes of a Native Son,” 1955 (Read it here .)
• Nor­man Mail­er, “The White Negro,” 1957 (Read it here .)
• Susan Son­tag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” 1964 (Read it here .)
• John McPhee, “The Search for Mar­vin Gar­dens,” 1972 (Read it here with a sub­scrip­tion.)
• Joan Did­ion, “The White Album,” 1979
• Annie Dil­lard, “Total Eclipse,” 1982
• Phillip Lopate, “Against Joie de Vivre,” 1986 (Read it here .)
• Edward Hoagland, “Heav­en and Nature,” 1988
• Jo Ann Beard, “The Fourth State of Mat­ter,” 1996 (Read it here .)
• David Fos­ter Wal­lace, “Con­sid­er the Lob­ster,” 2004 (Read it here  in a ver­sion dif­fer­ent from the one pub­lished in his 2005 book of the same name.)

“To my mind,” writes Atwan in his arti­cle, “the best essays are deeply per­son­al (that does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal) and deeply engaged with issues and ideas. And the best essays show that the name of the genre is also a verb, so they demon­strate a mind in process–reflecting, try­ing-out, essay­ing.”

To read more of Atwan’s com­men­tary, see his  arti­cle in Pub­lish­ers Week­ly .

The pho­to above of Susan Son­tag was tak­en by Peter Hujar in 1966.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

30 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Fos­ter Wal­lace on the Web

by Mike Springer | Permalink | Comments (3) |

Related posts:

Comments (3), 3 comments so far.

Check out Michael Ven­tu­ra’s HEAR THAT LONG SNAKE MOAN: The VooDoo Ori­gins of Rock n’ Roll

Wow I think there’s oth­er greater ones out there. Just need to find them.

Boise mul­ber­ry bags uk http://www.cool-mulberrybags.info/

Add a comment

Leave a reply.

Name (required)

Email (required)

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

Click here to cancel reply.

• 1,700 Free Online Courses
• 200 Online Certificate Programs
• 100+ Online Degree & Mini-Degree Programs
• 1,150 Free Movies
• 1,000 Free Audio Books
• 150+ Best Podcasts
• 800 Free eBooks
• 200 Free Textbooks
• 300 Free Language Lessons
• 150 Free Business Courses
• Free K-12 Education
• Get Our Daily Email

Free Courses

• Art & Art History
• Classics/Ancient World
• Computer Science
• Data Science
• Engineering
• Environment
• Political Science
• Writing & Journalism
• All 1700 Free Courses

Receive our Daily Email

Free updates, get our daily email.

Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email. We never spam. Unsubscribe at any time.

FOLLOW ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Free Movies

• 1150 Free Movies Online
• Free Film Noir
• Silent Films
• Documentaries
• Martial Arts/Kung Fu
• Free Hitchcock Films
• Free Charlie Chaplin
• Free John Wayne Movies
• Free Tarkovsky Films
• Free Dziga Vertov
• Free Oscar Winners
• Free Language Lessons
• All Languages

Free eBooks

• 700 Free eBooks
• Free Philosophy eBooks
• The Harvard Classics
• Philip K. Dick Stories
• Neil Gaiman Stories
• David Foster Wallace Stories & Essays
• Hemingway Stories
• Great Gatsby & Other Fitzgerald Novels
• HP Lovecraft
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Free Alice Munro Stories
• Jennifer Egan Stories
• George Saunders Stories
• Hunter S. Thompson Essays
• Joan Didion Essays
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez Stories
• David Sedaris Stories
• Stephen King
• Golden Age Comics
• Free Books by UC Press
• Life Changing Books

Free Audio Books

• 700 Free Audio Books
• Free Audio Books: Fiction
• Free Audio Books: Poetry
• Free Audio Books: Non-Fiction

Free Textbooks

• Free Physics Textbooks
• Free Computer Science Textbooks
• Free Math Textbooks

K-12 Resources

• Free Video Lessons
• Web Resources by Subject
• Quality YouTube Channels
• Teacher Resources
• All Free Kids Resources

Free Art & Images

• All Art Images & Books
• The Rijksmuseum
• Smithsonian
• The Guggenheim
• The National Gallery
• The Whitney
• LA County Museum
• Stanford University
• British Library
• Google Art Project
• French Revolution
• Getty Images
• Guggenheim Art Books
• Met Art Books
• Getty Art Books
• New York Public Library Maps
• Museum of New Zealand
• Smarthistory
• Coloring Books
• All Bach Organ Works
• All of Bach
• 80,000 Classical Music Scores
• Free Classical Music
• Live Classical Music
• 9,000 Grateful Dead Concerts
• Alan Lomax Blues & Folk Archive

Writing Tips

• William Zinsser
• Kurt Vonnegut
• Toni Morrison
• Margaret Atwood
• David Ogilvy
• Billy Wilder
• All posts by date

Personal Finance

• Open Personal Finance
• Amazon Kindle
• Architecture
• Artificial Intelligence
• Comics/Cartoons
• Current Affairs
• English Language
• Entrepreneurship
• Food & Drink
• Graduation Speech
• How to Learn for Free
• Internet Archive
• Language Lessons
• Most Popular
• Neuroscience
• Photography
• Pretty Much Pop
• Productivity
• UC Berkeley
• Uncategorized
• Video - Arts & Culture
• Video - Politics/Society
• Video - Science
• Video Games

Great Lectures

• Michel Foucault
• Sun Ra at UC Berkeley
• Richard Feynman
• Joseph Campbell
• Jorge Luis Borges
• Leonard Bernstein
• Richard Dawkins
• Buckminster Fuller
• Walter Kaufmann on Existentialism
• Jacques Lacan
• Roland Barthes
• Nobel Lectures by Writers
• Bertrand Russell
• Oxford Philosophy Lectures

Sign up for Newsletter

Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.

Great Recordings

• T.S. Eliot Reads Waste Land
• Sylvia Plath - Ariel
• Joyce Reads Ulysses
• Joyce - Finnegans Wake
• Patti Smith Reads Virginia Woolf
• Albert Einstein
• Charles Bukowski
• Bill Murray
• Fitzgerald Reads Shakespeare
• William Faulkner
• Flannery O'Connor
• Tolkien - The Hobbit
• Allen Ginsberg - Howl
• Dylan Thomas
• Anne Sexton
• John Cheever
• David Foster Wallace

Book Lists By

• Neil deGrasse Tyson
• Ernest Hemingway
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Allen Ginsberg
• Patti Smith
• Henry Miller
• Christopher Hitchens
• Joseph Brodsky
• Donald Barthelme
• David Bowie
• Samuel Beckett
• Art Garfunkel
• Marilyn Monroe
• Picks by Female Creatives
• Zadie Smith & Gary Shteyngart
• Lynda Barry

Favorite Movies

• Kurosawa's 100
• David Lynch
• Werner Herzog
• Woody Allen
• Wes Anderson
• Luis Buñuel
• Roger Ebert
• Susan Sontag
• Scorsese Foreign Films
• Philosophy Films
• August 2024
• February 2024
• January 2024
• December 2023
• November 2023
• October 2023
• September 2023
• August 2023
• February 2023
• January 2023
• December 2022
• November 2022
• October 2022
• September 2022
• August 2022
• February 2022
• January 2022
• December 2021
• November 2021
• October 2021
• September 2021
• August 2021
• February 2021
• January 2021
• December 2020
• November 2020
• October 2020
• September 2020
• August 2020
• February 2020
• January 2020
• December 2019
• November 2019
• October 2019
• September 2019
• August 2019
• February 2019
• January 2019
• December 2018
• November 2018
• October 2018
• September 2018
• August 2018
• February 2018
• January 2018
• December 2017
• November 2017
• October 2017
• September 2017
• August 2017
• February 2017
• January 2017
• December 2016
• November 2016
• October 2016
• September 2016
• August 2016
• February 2016
• January 2016
• December 2015
• November 2015
• October 2015
• September 2015
• August 2015
• February 2015
• January 2015
• December 2014
• November 2014
• October 2014
• September 2014
• August 2014
• February 2014
• January 2014
• December 2013
• November 2013
• October 2013
• September 2013
• August 2013
• February 2013
• January 2013
• December 2012
• November 2012
• October 2012
• September 2012
• August 2012
• February 2012
• January 2012
• December 2011
• November 2011
• October 2011
• September 2011
• August 2011
• February 2011
• January 2011
• December 2010
• November 2010
• October 2010
• September 2010
• August 2010
• February 2010
• January 2010
• December 2009
• November 2009
• October 2009
• September 2009
• August 2009
• February 2009
• January 2009
• December 2008
• November 2008
• October 2008
• September 2008
• August 2008
• February 2008
• January 2008
• December 2007
• November 2007
• October 2007
• September 2007
• August 2007
• February 2007
• January 2007
• December 2006
• November 2006
• October 2006
• September 2006

©2006-2024 Open Culture, LLC. All rights reserved.

• Advertise with Us
• Copyright Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Use

Things you buy through our links may earn  Vox Media  a commission.

To Read bell hooks Was to Love Her

bell hooks taught the world two things: how to critique and how to love. Perhaps the two lessons were both sides of the same coin. To read bell hooks is to become initiated into the power and inclusiveness of Black feminism whether you are a Black woman or not. With her wide array of essays of cultural criticism from the 1980s and 1990s, hooks dared to love Blackness and criticize the patriarchy out loud; she was generous and attentive in her analysis of pop culture as a self-proclaimed “bad girl.” Sadly, the announcement of her death this week, at 69 , adds to a too-long list of Black thinkers, artists, and public figures gone too soon. While many of us feel heavy with grief at the loss of hooks and her contributions to arts, letters, and ideas, we are also voraciously reading and rereading both in mourning and celebration of her impact as a critical theorist, a professor, a poet, a lover, and a thinker.

As a professor of Black feminisms at Cornell University, where I often teach classes featuring bell hooks’s work, I see a syllabus as having the potential to be a love letter, a mixtape for revolution. hooks’s voice was daring, cutting, and unapologetic, whether she was taking Beyoncé and Spike Lee to task or celebrating the raunchiness of Lil’ Kim. What hooks accomplished for Black feminism over decades, on and off the page, was having built a movement of inclusively cultivated communities and solidarity across social differences. Quotes and ideas of Black feminist thinkers tend to circulate across the internet as inspirational self-help mantras that can end up being surface-level engagements, but as bell hooks shows us, there has always been a vibrant radical tradition of Black women and femmes unafraid to speak their minds. bell hooks was the prerequisite reading that we are lucky to discover now or to return to as a ceremony of remembrance. Here are nine texts I’d suggest to anyone seeking to acquaint or reacquaint themselves with her work.

Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981)

Publishing over 30 books over the course of her career, perhaps the most well-known is her first, Ain’t I a Woman. Referencing Sojourner Truth’s famous words, hooks drew a direct line between herself and the radical tradition of outspoken Black women demanding freedom. Before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined “intersectionality” in 1991, hooks exemplified the importance of the interlocking nature of Black feminism within freedom movements, weaving together the histories of abolitionism in the United States, women’s suffrage, and the Civil Rights era. She refused to let white feminism or abolitionist men alone define this chapter of America’s past. Finding power and freedom in the margins, she lived a feminist life without apology by centering Black women as historical figures.

Keeping a Hold of Life: Reading Toni Morrison’s Fiction (1983)

To read bell hooks is to become enrolled as a student in her extensive coursework. Keeping a Hold of Life shows us her student writing and another side of her political formation as Black feminist literary theorist. hooks earned her Ph.D. from University of California Santa Cruz in 1983 despite having spent years teaching literature beforehand, and in her dissertation she analyzes two novels by Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye and Sula, celebrating both books’ depictions of Black femininity and kinship. For those who are students, it may be encouraging to see hooks’s dedication to learning: Before she got her degree, she had already published a field-defining text. But that wasn’t the end of her scholarly journey by a long shot.

Black Looks : Race and Representation (1992)

I love teaching the timeless essay “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance” from this collection above all because it is the first one of hers I read as a college sophomore. In it, she reflects on what she overhears as a professor at Yale about so-called ethnic food and interracial dating. In some ways, the through-line of hooks’s writing can be summed up here, in the way she examines what it means to consume and be consumed, especially for women of color. In another essay from the collection, “The Oppositional Gaze,” hooks taught her readers the subversive power of looking , especially looking done by colonized peoples; drawing on the writings of Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Stuart Hall, she grappled with the power of visual culture and its stakes for domination in the lives of Black women, in particular. (She mentions that she got her start in film criticism after being grossed out by Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It .) Her criticism shaped feminist film theory and continues to be celebrated as a crucial way to understand the politics of looking back.

Teaching to Transgress: Education As the Practice of Freedom (1994)

bell hooks was a diligent student of Black feminism, and she was more than happy to pass along what she learned, having taught at various points during her career at the University of Southern California, the New School, Oberlin College, Yale University, and CUNY’s City College. In turn, she often reflected on what she learned from teaching in her writings. In this volume, hooks contributes to radicalizing education theory in ways that even now have been understated: She understood schooling as a battleground and space of cultivating knowledge, writing that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility.” In 2004, she returned to her home state, Kentucky, for her final teaching post at Berea College, where the bell hooks Institute was founded in 2014 and to which she dedicated her papers in 2017.

“ Hardcore Honey: bell hooks Goes on the Down Low With Lil’ Kim ,” Paper Magazine (1997)

In this 1997 interview, hooks vibes with Lil’ Kim and probes the rapper’s politics of desire, sex work. It’s an example of how she was invested in remaining part of the contemporary conversations around Black life and feminine sexuality. Though she described Lil’ Kim’s hyperfemme aesthetic as “boring straight-male porn fantasy” and wondered out loud who was responsible for the styling of her image as a celebrity and part of the Notorious B.I.G.’s Junior M.A.F.I.A. (“the boys in charge”), she defends Lil’ Kim against the puritanical attacks that she notes have been made against Black women time and again: In hooks’s opening question, she tells Lil’ Kim, “Nobody talks about John F. Kennedy being a ho ’cause he fucked around. But the moment a woman talks about sex or is known to be having too much sex, people talk about her as a ho. So I wanted you to talk about that a little bit.”

All About Love: New Visions (2000)

hooks was especially prolific during the 1990s, publishing about a book a year. The early aughts marked a shift in her intellectual focus away from cultural theory and toward love as a radical act. In this book, she details her personal life, drawing on romantic experiences and what she learned from experiences with boyfriends. With words from 20 years ago that remain trenchant to this day, hooks writes, “I feel our nation’s turning away from love … moving into a wilderness of spirit so intense we may never find our way home again. I write of love to bear witness both to the danger in this movement, and to call for a return to love.” For her, love was not a mere sentiment but something deeply revolutionary that should inform all of Black feminist thought.

“ Beyoncé’s Lemonade is capitalist money-making at its best ,” The Guardian (2016)

In bell hooks’s scathing review of Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade , she took issue with what she perceived as the singer’s commodification of Black sexualized femininity as liberatory. She calls out Beyoncé’s branding and links the legacy of the auction block to what hooks sees as a repetition of the valuation of Black women’s sexualized bodies, warning of the dangers of circulating such images as faux sexual liberation, dictated by capitalist marketing dollars. “Even though Beyoncé and her creative collaborators daringly offer multidimensional images of black female life,” hooks wrote, “much of the album stays within a conventional stereotypical framework, where the black woman is always a victim.” (As was to be expected, the Beyhive did not take kindly to the critique, and it remains an ideological fault line for many of the singer’s fans.)

Happy to Be Nappy (2017)

While most likely first encountered the writings of bell hooks in a college seminar on feminism or decolonization, some were introduced to bell hooks in their early years, during bedtime stories. Understanding self-esteem and image for Black children as deeply political and encoded in the way they view their hair, she wrote a children’s book for them, Happy to Be Nappy. Remembering the impact of the Doll Test — the 1940s psychological experiment cited by the NAACP lawyers behind Brown v. Board of Education , where Black children were observed to assign positive qualities to white dolls and negative ones to Black dolls — and how important representation is, writing this book was a radical act of love.

Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place (2012)

From interviews to cultural criticism to academic dissertations, bell hooks did not limit herself to a singular form of writing. She was promiscuous in genre, and her approach was to say whatever needed urgent saying about the interlocking structure of patriarchy, capitalism, and racism — however it needed to be said. Reading one of her final books, a poetry collection, helps us to return with her to Kentucky, where she spent her last years. She loved the expanse of the Black diaspora, but she held close the U.S. South, particularly Black Appalachia. Here, she paints in words the rural landscape and its local ecologies, where stolen land and stolen lives converge, touching on how the landscape of the mountains has been home to people like her, whom she describes as “black, Native American, white, all ‘people of one blood.’” It is a literary homecoming that frames her homegoing. To truly read bell hooks necessitates rereading her again and again, and this act forms its own ritual of elegy, of celebrating the life of someone whose foundational impact cannot be overstated.

• reading list
• section lede

Most Viewed Stories

• Cinematrix No. 154: August 27, 2024
• All 28 Pixar Movies, Ranked
• Charli XCX Is Too Brat to Fail
• Love Is Blind: UK Reunion Recap: Don’t Look Back in Anger
• No Movie Captures the Essence of Neil Young’s Best Songs Like Inherent Vice
• A Breakdown of Armie Hammer Allegations, Controversies, and Time-share Drama

Editor’s Picks

Most Popular

What is your email.

This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.

Sign In To Continue Reading

Create your free account.

Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:

• Lower case letters (a-z)
• Upper case letters (A-Z)
• Numbers (0-9)
• Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)

As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.

20 Must-Read Best Essay Collections of 2019

Rebecca Hussey

Rebecca holds a PhD in English and is a professor at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. She teaches courses in composition, literature, and the arts. When she’s not reading or grading papers, she’s hanging out with her husband and son and/or riding her bike and/or buying books. She can't get enough of reading and writing about books, so she writes the bookish newsletter "Reading Indie," focusing on small press books and translations. Newsletter: Reading Indie Twitter: @ofbooksandbikes

View All posts by Rebecca Hussey

Calling all essay fans! For your reading pleasure, I’ve rounded up the best essay collections of 2019. It was a fabulous year for essays (although I say that about most years, to be honest). We’ve had some stellar anthologies of writing about disability, feminism, and the immigrant experience. We’ve had important collections about race, mental health, the environment, and media. And we’ve had collections of personal essays to entertain us and make us feel less alone. There should be something in this list for just about any reading mood or interest.

These books span the entire year, and in cases where the book isn’t published yet, I’ve given you the publication date so you can preorder it or add it to your library list.

I hope this list of the best essay collections of 2019 helps you find new books you love!

About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times , edited by Peter Catapano and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

This book emerged from a  New York Times series of personal essays on living with a disability. Each piece was written by a person in the disabled community, and the volume contains an introduction by Andrew Solomon. The topics cover romance, shame, ambition, childbearing, parenting, aging, and much more. The authors offer a wide range of perspectives on living in a world not built for them.

Black is the Body: Stories from my Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine by Emily Bernard

Emily Bernard’s essays are about her experiences of race. She writes about life as a black woman in Vermont, her family’s history in Alabama and Nashville, her job as a professor who teaches African American literature, and her adoption of twin girls from Ethiopia. It begins with the story of a stabbing in New Haven and uses that as a springboard to write about what it means to live in a black body.

Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger , edited by Lilly Dancyger (Seal Press, October 8)

Women’s anger has been the source of some important and powerful writing lately (see Rebecca Traister’s  Good and Mad and Soraya Chemaly’s  Rage Becomes Her ). This collection brings together a diverse group of writers to further explore the subject. The book’s 22 writers include Leslie Jamison, Melissa Febos, Evette Dionne, and more.

The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang

The Collected Schizophrenias is a collection of essays on mental and chronic illness. Wang combines research with her personal knowledge of illness to explore misconceptions about schizophrenia and disagreements in the medical community about definitions and treatments. She tells moving, honest personal stories about living with mental illness.

The Collector of Leftover Souls: Field Notes on Brazil’s Everyday Insurrections by Eliane Brum, Translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty (Graywolf, October 15)

This volume collects work from two of Brum’s books, and includes investigative pieces and profiles about Brazil and its people. She focuses on underrepresented communities such as indigenous midwives from the Amazon and people in the favelas of São Paulo. Her book captures the lives and voices of people not often written about.

Erosion: Essays of Undoing by Terry Tempest Williams (Sarah Crichton Books, October 8)

This volume collects essays written between 2016 and 2018 covering the topic she has always written so beautifully about: the natural world. The essays focus on the concept of erosion, including the erosion of land and of the self. They are her response to the often-overwhelming challenges we face in the political and the natural world.

The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America ,  edited by Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman

This volume brings together an amazing group of writers including Chigozie Obioma, Jenny Zhang, Fatimah Asghar, Alexander Chee, and many more. The essayists are first and second generation immigrants who describe their personal experiences and struggles with finding their place in the U.S. The pieces connect first-person stories with broader cultural and political issues to paint an important picture of the U.S. today.

Good Things Happen to People You Hate: Essays by Rebecca Fishbein (William Morrow, October 15)

In the tradition of Samantha Irby and Sloane Crosley, this collection is a humorous look at life’s unfairness. Fishbein writes about trouble with jobs, bedbugs, fires, and cyber bullying. She covers struggles with alcohol, depression, anxiety, and failed relationships. She is honest and hilarious both, wittily capturing experiences shared by many.

I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution by Emily Nussbaum

This book contains new and previously published essays by  New Yorker  critic Emily Nussbaum. The pieces include reviews and profiles. They also argue for a new type of criticism that can accommodate the ambition and complexity of contemporary television. She makes a case for opening art criticism up to new forms and voices.

I’m Telling the Truth, But I’m Lying by Bassey Ikpi

Bassey Ikpi’s essay collection is about her personal experiences dealing with Bipolar II and anxiety. She writes about struggling with mental health even while her career as a spoken word artist was flourishing. She looks at the ways our mental health is intertwined with every aspect of our lives. It’s an honest look at identity, health, and illness.

Little Weirds by Jenny Slate (Little, Brown and Company, November 5)

These pieces are humorous, whimsical essays about things that are on Jenny Slate’s mind. As she—an actress and stand-up comedian as well as writer—describes it, “I looked into my brain and found a book. Here it is.” With a light touch, she tells us honestly what it’s like to be her and how she sees the world, one little, weird piece of it at a time.

Make It Scream, Make It Burn: Essays   by Leslie Jamison

Here is Jamison’s follow-up essay collection to the bestselling   Empathy Exams . This one is divided into three sections, “Longing,” “Looking,” and “Dwelling,” each with pieces that combine memoir and journalism. Her subjects include the Sri Lankan civil war, the online world Second Life, the whale 52 Blue, eloping in Las Vegas, giving birth, and many more.

My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education   by Jennine Capó Crucet

Crucet grew up in Miami, the daughter of Cuban refugees. Here she explores her family’s attempts to fit into American culture and her feeling of being a stranger in her own country. She considers her relationship to the so-called “American Dream” and what it means to live in a place that doesn’t always recognize your right to be there.

Notes to Self: Essays by Emilie Pine

Emilie Pine is an Irish writer, and this book is a bestseller in Ireland. These six personal essays touch on addiction, sexual assault, infertility, and more. She captures women’s experiences that often remain hidden. She writes about bodies and emotions from rage to grief to joy with honesty, clarity, and nuance.

Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World by Zahra Hankir (Editor) and Christiane Amanpour (Foreword)

This collection gathers together 19 writers discussing their experiences as journalists working in their home countries. These women risk their lives reporting on war and face sexual harassment and difficulties traveling alone, but they also are able to talk to women and get stories their male counterpoints can’t. Their first person accounts offer new perspectives on women’s lives and current events in the Middle East.

The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations by Toni Morrison

Picking this up is a fitting way to pay tribute to the great Toni Morrison, who just passed away last summer. This book is a collection of essays, speeches, and meditations from the past four decades. Topics include the role of the artist, African Americans in American literature, the power of language, and discussions of her own work and that of other writers and artists.

Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie

Kathleen Jamie is a poet and nature writer. These essays combine travel, memoir, and history to look at a world rapidly changing because of our warming climate. She ranges from thawing tundra in Alaska to the preserved homes of neolithic farmers in Scotland and also examines her own experiences with change as her children grow and her father dies.

Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom

As of this writing,  Thick  was just longlisted for a National Book Award in nonfiction. McMillan Cottom’s essays look at culture and personal experience from a sociological perspective. It’s an indispensable collection for those who want to think about race and society, who like a mix of personal and academic writing, and who want some complex, challenging ideas to chew on.

White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination   by Jess Row

White Flights is an examination of how race gets written about in American fiction, particularly by white writers creating mostly white spaces in their books. Row looks at writers such as Don DeLillo, Annie Dillard, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and more to consider the role that whiteness has played in the American literary imagination.

The Witches Are Coming   by Lindy West (Hachette Books, November 5)

The Witches Are Coming  is Lindy West’s follow-up to her wonderful, best-selling book  Shrill .  She’s back with more of her incisive cultural critiques, writing essays on feminism and the misogyny that is (still) embedded in every part of our culture. She brings humor, wit, and much-needed clarity to the gender dynamics at play in media and culture.

There you have it—the best collections of 2019! This was a great year for essays, but so were the two years before. Check out my round-ups of the best essay collections from 2018 and 2017 .

You Might Also Like

31 Of The Most Beautiful And Profound Passages In Literature You’ll Want To Read Over And Over Again

• https://thoughtcatalog.com/?p=493373

Whenever I’m feeling uninspired I look to a collection of my favorite literary quotes I keep in a document on my computer. Today was one of those days. As I was re-reading some of these and remembering why I love writing, reading, and the power of words and a good story, I thought perhaps someone somewhere out there might be feeling the same as me this morning. Here are 31 of the most beautiful passages in literature .

“Atticus said to Jem one day, “I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. “Your father’s right,” she said. “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” – Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“i took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. i am, i am, i am.” – sylvia plath, the bell jar, “we believe that we can change the things around us in accordance with our desires—we believe it because otherwise we can see no favourable outcome. we do not think of the outcome which generally comes to pass and is also favourable: we do not succeed in changing things in accordance with our desires, but gradually our desires change. the situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant to us. we have failed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us beyond it, and then if we turn round to gaze into the distance of the past, we can barely see it, so imperceptible has it become.” – marcel proust, in search of lost time, “the most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.” – antoine de saint-exupéry, the little prince, “hello babies. welcome to earth. it’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. it’s round and wet and crowded. on the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. there’s only one rule that i know of, babies-“god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” – kurt vonnegut, god bless you, mr. rosewater, “why, sometimes i’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – lewis carroll, alice in wonderland, “we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” – oscar wilde, lady windermere’s fan, “i must not fear. fear is the mind-killer. fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. i will face my fear. i will permit it to pass over me and through me. and when it has gone past i will turn the inner eye to see its path. where the fear has gone there will be nothing. only i will remain.” – frank herbert, dune, “nolite te bastardes carborundorum.” (don’t let the bastards grind you down) – margaret atwood, the handmaid’s tale, “just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. you might want to think about that. you forget some things, dont you yes. you forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.” – cormac mccarthy,  the road, “you can tell yourself that you would be willing to lose everything you have in order to get something you want. but it’s a catch-22: all of those things you’re willing to lose are what make you recognizable. lose them, and you’ve lost yourself.” – jodi picoult, handle with care, “the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” – jack kerouac, on the road, “he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” ― gabriel garcí­a márquez, love in the time of cholera, “there is an idea of a patrick bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though i can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: i simply am not there.” – bret easton ellis, american psycho, “sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. you change direction but the sandstorm chases you. you turn again, but the storm adjusts. over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. why because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. this storm is you. something inside of you. so all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. there’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. that’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine., and you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. no matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. people will bleed there, and you will bleed too. hot, red blood. you’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others., and once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. you won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. but one thing is certain. when you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. that’s what this storm’s all about.” – haruki murakami, kafka on the shore, “a heart is not judged by how much you love; but by how much you are loved by others” – l. frank baum, the wonderful wizard of oz, “sometimes i can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives i’m not living.”- jonathan safran foer, extremely loud and incredibly close, “the most important things are the hardest to say. they are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. but it’s more than that, isn’t it the most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. and you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. that’s the worst, i think. when the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.” stephen king, different seasons, “i don’t have any problem understanding why people flunk out of college or quit their jobs or cheat on each other or break the law or spray-paint walls. a little bit outside of things is where some people feel each other. we do it to replace the frame of family. we do it to erase and remake our origins in their own images. to say, i too was here.” – lidia yuknavitch, the chronology of water, “i never believed in santa claus. none of us kids did. mom and dad refused to let us. they couldn’t afford expensive presents and they didn’t want us to think we weren’t as good as other kids who, on christmas morning, found all sorts of fancy toys under the tree that were supposedly left by santa claus. dad had lost his job at the gypsum, and when christmas came that year, we had no money at all. on christmas eve, dad took each one of us kids out into the desert night one by one., “pick out your favorite star”, dad said., “i like that one” i said., dad grinned, “that’s venus”, he said. he explained to me that planets glowed because reflected light was constant and stars twinkled because their light pulsed., “i like it anyway” i said., “what the hell,” dad said. “it’s christmas. you can have a planet if you want.” and he gave me venus., venus didn’t have any moons or satellites or even a magnetic field, but it did have an atmosphere sort of similar to earth’s, except it was super hot-about 500 degrees or more. “so,” dad said, “when the sun starts to burn out and earth turns cold, everyone might want to move to venus to get warm. and they’ll have to get permission from your descendants first., we laughed about all the kids who believed in the santa myth and got nothing for christmas but a bunch of cheap plastic toys. “years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten,” dad said, “you’ll still have your stars.” – jeannette walls, the glass castle, “lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. my sin, my soul. lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. lo. lee. ta. she was lo, plain lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. she was lola in slacks. she was dolly at school. she was dolores on the dotted line. but in my arms she was always lolita. did she have a precursor she did, indeed she did. in point of fact, there might have been no lolita at all had i not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. in a princedom by the sea. oh when about as many years before lolita was born as my age was that summer. you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. look at this tangle of thorns.” vladimir nabokov, lolita, “you think because he doesn’t love you that you are worthless. you think that because he doesn’t want you anymore that he is right — that his judgement and opinion of you are correct. if he throws you out, then you are garbage. you think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. don’t. it’s a bad word, ‘belong.’ especially when you put it with somebody you love. love shouldn’t be like that. did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain they circle all around it; sometimes you can’t even see the mountain for the clouds. but you know what you go up top and what do you see his head. the clouds never cover the head. his head pokes through, beacuse the clouds let him; they don’t wrap him up. they let him keep his head up high, free, with nothing to hide him or bind him. you can’t own a human being. you can’t lose what you don’t own. suppose you did own him. could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you you really want somebody like that somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door you don’t, do you and neither does he. you’re turning over your whole life to him. your whole life, girl. and if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him he can’t value you more than you value yourself.” – toni morrison, song of solomon, “…i think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. we forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. we forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.” ― joan didion, slouching towards bethlehem, “i don’t let anyone touch me,” i finally said. why not” why not because i was tired of men. hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. men who didn’t come to the emergency room with you, men who left on christmas eve. men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them then changed their minds. forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs. (…) it was a play and i knew how it ended, i didn’t want to audition for any of the roles. it was no game, no casual thrill. it was three-bullet russian roulette.” – janet fitch, white oleander, “i wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. not fuck, like in those movies. not even have sex. just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. but i lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and i was gawky and she was gorgeous and i was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. so i walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, i was drizzle and she was hurricane.” ― john green, looking for alaska, “but i tried, didn’t i goddamnit, at least i did that.” – ken kesey, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest, “if you’re going to try, go all the way. otherwise, don’t even start. this could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. it could mean not eating for three or four days. it could mean freezing on a park bench. it could mean jail. it could mean derision. it could mean mockery–isolation. isolation is the gift. all the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. and, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. and it will be better than anything else you can imagine. if you’re going to try, go all the way. there is no other feeling like that. you will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. you will ride life straight to perfect laughter. it’s the only good fight there is.” ― charles bukowski, factotum, “i will be very careful the next time i fall in love, she told herself. also, she had made a promise to herself that she intended on keeping. she was never going to go out with another writer: no matter how charming, sensitive, inventive or fun they could be. they weren’t worth it in the long run. they were emotionally too expensive and the upkeep was complicated. they were like having a vacuum cleaner around the house that broke all the time and only einstein could fix it. she wanted her next lover to be a broom.” ― richard brautigan, sombrero fallout, “usually we walk around constantly believing ourselves. “i’m okay” we say. “i’m alright”. but sometimes the truth arrives on you and you can’t get it off. that’s when you realize that sometimes it isn’t even an answer–it’s a question. even now, i wonder how much of my life is convinced.” ― markus zusak, the book thief, “i love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. i love you simply, without problems or pride: i love you in this way because i do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no i or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when i fall asleep your eyes close.” ― pablo neruda, 100 love sonnets, “it doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. i want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing., it doesn’t interest me how old you are. i want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive., it doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. i want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further paini want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it., i want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human., it doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. i want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy., i want to know if you can see beauty even when it’s not pretty, every day,and if you can source your own life from its presence., i want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “yes”, it doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. i want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children., it doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. i want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back., it doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. i want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away., i want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.”, ― oriah mountain dreamer, the invitation.

About the author

Koty Neelis

Former senior staff writer and producer at Thought Catalog.

More From Thought Catalog

You Are More Than Your Addiction

5 Signs You Must Take A Break From Dating

Men Who Pretend To Be ‘Nice Guys’ But Are Actually Narcissistic Display These 3 Subtle Behaviors

The Amazing Studio Ghibli Movie You’ve Never Heard Of (And Why That’s Criminal)

4 Signs He Doesn’t Have An Avoidant Attachment Style, He’s Just A Narcissist

If You’ve Streamed ‘1408’ You Might’ve Watched The Wrong Ending

We’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later.

• Our network

The Sydney Morning Herald

• TV & radio
• Australian TV

Andy Lee’s books have sold 3.5 million copies. Now comes the TV series

By karl quinn, save articles for later.

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.

Andy Lee is used to doing things at his own pace – which is to say, pretty fast. But his latest project has moved at a crawl. And he doesn’t mind it one bit.

“It takes so bloody long, but there’s something nice about that,” he says of the process of turning his best-selling children’s book series, which began with Do Not Open This Book in 2016, into an animated TV series for the ABC.

“I compare it with my podcast, which Hamish [Blake] and I knock out in around 45 minutes and it goes out overnight. I love how quick and creative it is. But on this, an individual drawing of how someone’s hair or eyebrows might look, depending on what vowel shape they’re making with their mouth … it’s a different type of intricacy, which is also good.”

Andy Lee at Richmond Primary School with his nephews Freddy (left) and George Miles (right). The other students are (rear from left to right) Nikolas Daglis and Cece Dragovic; (front from left to right) Grace Miller, Manuela Valente and Theodore Ang. Credit: Daniel Mahon

The nine books in Lee’s series have sold more than 3.5 million copies globally, and have been translated into 38 languages. Recently, he was invited to a book fair in Portugal, where he spent hours signing books for hundreds of people. He was stunned to learn he’s a big deal there and in Brazil (“the translators must be really good”, he observes), even if the US has proven a tougher nut to crack. “But there’s about to be a new launch there in the coming months,” he says optimistically.

It all bodes well for the prospects of the animated series, which will be made in Victoria, with funding support from VicScreen and Screen Australia. Leo Baker, who worked on Shaun Tan’s Oscar-winning short animation The Lost Thing , will direct the 12 x 11-minute episodes of Do Not Watch This Show. The series is expected to take about a year to make – at a cost of about $5.3 million – and will have with a crew of about 70.

Andy Lee with his nephew George, for whom he wrote the book in 2016 as a first birthday present. George is now aged nine.

VicScreen chief executive Caroline Pitcher says the success of Lee’s books internationally proves “Victorian creative ideas can resonate with global audiences”, while adapting them for the screen at home was confirmation that “quality Australian children’s content is so important to our culture”.

It might well have not happened here, though.

About 2018, Lee was in talks with DreamWorks Animation about a big-budget Hollywood studio adaptation of the book he wrote as a first birthday present for his nephew George (now aged nine). He went through three development workshops in about six months, but soon realised he was unlikely to retain the degree of creative control he wanted if he pursued that path.

By mutual consent, both parties pulled the pin, but Lee says it was far from a fruitless exercise.

“They were fantastic to work with, and they’ve been helpful since,” he says. “I’ve gone back and shown them what I’ve been doing, and they’ve given me advice and have been tremendous to work with. There seems to be a real warmth about getting great projects up.”

They also offered insights into his work that helped him see it anew. “They were telling me things about my book that I didn’t realise, like it encourages kids to take risks in a world where we’re not really encouraging kids to take risks.

“‘Do not open this book’ or ‘Do not watch this show’ in itself is exciting. It’s a chance for kids to defy, or at least question, things they’re being told. And I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. I didn’t realise the importance of that.’ It just seemed like a fun idea at the time.”

The hero of Lee’s books is a blue monster. And the hero of the ABC’s children’s line-up also happens to be blue. Is there an omen in that?

“Well, my character started out as yellow, but I thought, ‘Hang on, I know the trick to success is the colour blue,’” Lee jokes.

“To be honest, it’s been an incredible help. Bluey paved the way, and got people interested. When I first started talking to DreamWorks six years ago, they were saying, ‘We can’t have Australian accents.’ Now all the streaming platforms and studios I talk to are saying, ‘Keep it in Australian accents.’

“If we have one-tenth of the uptake of Bluey , that would be extraordinary.”

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday .

• Film & TV production
• Early childhood
• For subscribers

Most Viewed in Culture

Totalitarian Gigantomania

Tim brinkhof explores the poetics and politics of the cruise-ship essay., by tim brinkhof august 24, 2024.

Memoir & Essay

IN THE SPRING of 1995, on assignment for Harper’s , David Foster Wallace spent seven days aboard the MV Zenith , a 47,413-ton cruise ship operated by Celebrity Cruises, Inc. The magazine asked him to report on everything he saw, and Wallace saw everything: flared lapels, rubber thongs, conch fritters, projectile vomit, pre-melanomic lesions, potbellies, cellulite, “1,500 professional smiles.” The only thing he didn’t see was his cabin maid Petra, who—to the author’s amazement as well as distress—managed to fully tidy up his room each time he left, even when it was only for a minute or two.

Most of what Wallace saw he did not like. He immediately caught on to the massive class divide aboard the ship, where white Americans are—often to their delight—pampered by underpaid workers from the Global South. When Wallace insisted on carrying his own bag, he realized that he had put his Lebanese porter “in a terrible kind of sedulous-service double bind, a paradox of pampering: The Passenger’s Always Right versus Never Let a Passenger Carry His Own Bag.” The landlubbing Illinoisian also disliked being in the middle of the ocean, a place that—courtesy of teaching Stephen Crane’s 1898 shipwreck story “The Open Boat” at Emerson College—he could not see as anything except a “primordial nada, bottomless depths inhabited by tooth-studded things rising angelically toward you.” The Zenith itself was consumer culture incarnate, providing passengers with food, drink, and entertainment to the point of infantilizing them. “The fact that adult Americans tend to associate the word ‘pamper’ with a certain other consumer product,” he said of the term, which he had encountered over and over in Celebrity’s brochures, “is not an accident.”

The now-iconic essay, originally published under the title “Shipping Out” but better known as “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” not only gave birth to a vibrant genre of nonfiction writing but also laid out that genre’s central conceit—that this supposedly fun thing isn’t actually that fun at all, if you stop and think about it.

Largely dormant during the 2000s and early 2010s, the cruise-ship essay is currently riding a second wave—one generated, perhaps, by shows like HBO’s The White Lotus (2021– ), which casts a critical eye on the leisure industry of the obscenely rich, not to mention by media coverage of the rampant culture of sexual assault aboard many of the world’s most prominent cruise ships. Although some of the more recent essays in this genre—including Lauren Oyler’s “I Really Didn’t Want to Go” (2023) and Gary Shteyngart’s “Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever” (2024)—borrow heavily from Wallace’s pioneering work, they also diverge from it in important ways. To some extent, these divergences can be attributed to the unique style and experiences of each writer, but they are also indicative of changing times. If the cruise ship is, as almost all of these essays note, a microcosmic distillation of American culture, then studying these texts in chronological order should reveal how that culture has developed since 1995.

Nearly 30 years later, Wallace’s shadow still looms large over the genre. “To journalists,” Oyler writes in her own piece, which documents her stay on a megaship chartered by Gwyneth Paltrow’s controversial lifestyle brand Goop, “a ‘cruise piece’—in addition to being a free vacation you’re paid to express all your darkest thoughts about—is a career achievement,” placing the assignee in the same imaginary category as the late author of Infinite Jest . And surely, several themes and thoughts expressed in “A Supposedly Fun Thing” reappear in both her essay and Shteyngart’s. Each of these writers assumes the role of an undercover reporter, passing themselves off as an ordinary vacationer in order to mingle with the other cruisers. All relate their experiences in a deeply ironic tone, using cruise lingo and giving people nicknames like Mr. Dermatitis, GP, and Duck Necklace, imposing a degree of separation between the narrators and the late-capitalist dystopia in which they find themselves. “No,” Shteyngart wants to tell an “old Rastafarian” on the US Virgin Islands who calls him a redneck, “that’s not who I am at all. On my island, Mannahatta, as Whitman would have it, I am an interesting person living within an engaging artistic milieu. I do not wish to use the Caribbean as a dumping ground for the cruise-ship industry.”

The most obvious difference between “Shipping Out” and later cruise-ship essays is in their emphasis on the political orientation of the passengers. Wallace, despite being remembered as a champion of postmodernist writing, channels the spirit of classic literature as he attempts to ascertain fundamental elements of the human experience, such as loneliness and existential dread. Oyler and Shteyngart, by contrast, treat the cruise ship as a mirror for a very particular segment of American society, one that has grown increasingly threatening to the future of democracy. On Paltrow’s Goop cruise, tailored to wealthy alternative-healing afficionados whose limited knowledge of real-world medicine borders on the superstitious and conspiratorial, Oyler runs into a “psychological astrologer” who claims that someone’s teenage son’s tinnitus “might be due to effects from the ‘hot lava, do-not-go-there topic’: the COVID vaccine.” Toward the end of Shteyngart’s cruise, which took place on the planet’s biggest vessel yet, Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas , he describes the way many of the passengers “shed their INAUGURAL CRUISE” attire for “caps pledging to make America great again and T-shirts that celebrate words sometimes attributed to Patrick Henry: ‘The constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.’” Shteyngart notes that,

[w]ith their preponderance of FAMILY FLAG FAITH FRIENDS FIREARMS T-shirts, the tables by the crepe station sometimes resemble the Capitol Rotunda on January 6. The Real Anthony Fauci , by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appears to be a popular form of literature, especially among young men with very complicated versions of the American flag on their T-shirts.

Though Wallace’s cruise also had its share of proto-MAGA followers—participating in a clay-pigeon shooting class, the author squares up against guys with military backgrounds who go hunting with their papas and have their own range in their backyards—those in Oyler’s and Shteyngart’s essays appear much more threatening. “Both of them had a look I have never seen on land,” Shteyngart writes of two such individuals, “their eyes projecting absence and enmity in equal measure. In the ’90s, I drank with Russian soldiers fresh from Chechnya and wandered the streets of wartime Zagreb, but I have never seen such undisguised hostility toward both me and perhaps the universe at large.” A third, in the elevator, announced, seriously rather than jokingly, that someone on board ought to kill one of the Filipino employees, and do so as brutally as possible.

It makes sense that Floridians would be overrepresented on cruises that leave from cities in South Florida, just as it makes sense that passengers with an interest in guns would be attracted to a shooting class. Still, one wonders if there could be a more poetic reason why so many cruise-ship lovers seem to lean starboard on election days.

Research suggests that there is. Drawing upon various surveys, Andrew Van Dam of The Washington Post discovered that in 2020, 26 percent of Trump voters reported going on at least one cruise before the pandemic, compared to only 17 percent of Biden supporters. While 32 percent of Trump voters said they would be “very comfortable” going on a cruise after the pandemic ended, 48 percent of Biden’s said they would be “very uncomfortable” doing so.

Cruise-ship essays can help us understand why this is the case. On a cruise with GOP organizers, pundits, and lobbyists shortly after the 2012 presidential election, New York magazine’s Joe Hagan overheard one disgruntled supporter of Mitt Romney propose that they all burn their passports and “stay on this boat forever,” implying they should live a pirate’s life in the Bermuda Triangle, where they would be free to decide which government policies they obeyed and which they ignored. Shteyngart muses that it’s the cruise ship’s “totalitarian sense of gigantomania” that appeals to folks such as the Rands, a Florida couple nicknamed after their favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand. He goes on to describe an ice-skating show as having the “style and pomp and masterful precision that would please the likes of Kim Jong Un.”

Perhaps it’s got something to do with socioeconomics—both Wallace and Shteyngart point out that cruise vacations are popular among middle-income families: people affluent enough to afford a bit of luxury but not affluent enough to shed their status anxiety, a well-documented force of conservative discontent.

Or maybe it’s about following the leader. As Tim Murphy discusses in a 2020 Mother Jones essay, it’s no coincidence Donald Trump has been longtime friends with Carnival Corporation’s former CEO Micky Arison. Both are billionaires in the hospitality industry, in charge of businesses they inherited from their fathers. Carnival has hosted cruises themed after Trump’s TV show The Apprentice (2004–17) ­ and sponsored one of its season finales. Trump, in turn, used his presidential powers to soften pandemic restrictions, lower tax rates, and loosen workers’ rights, a process he is expected to resume should he win back the White House this fall.

Let’s also not forget the cultural impact of the cruise-ship essay genre itself. With so many prominent, almost exclusively left-wing writers deriding both the cruise vacation and cruise vacationers, it’s not surprising that cruises have become even more attractive to conservatives than they already were, granting them a political significance they did not initially possess. Nowadays, booking a cruise is almost like making a political statement. Cruises are political rallies on water: places where both the silent majority and not-so-silent minority can share their opinions knowing that pretty much everyone around agrees with them. (Tellingly, The Washington Post ’s inquiry began in response to a conservative newsletter that “characterized Democrats as ‘snobs’ who look down on anyone who ‘goes on cruises or to all-inclusive resorts.’”)

If you think about it, the right-wing appeal of cruise ships isn’t all that surprising. If conservatism is defined, as many historians and political theorists argue, by resistance to change and, on a deeper level, by mistrust of the unknown, then a cruise really is the perfect vacation for a conservative person. It’s travel for people who hate travel, who want to enjoy nice weather and exotic locales without needing to come into contact with different cultures. When cruise ships like the Icon of the Seas dock at foreign ports, the passengers enter not a foreign country so much as a resort, a commercial colony operated by the companies that own the ships themselves.

Returning to shore, Shteyngart reaches the harsh but—in light of all he has suffered—understandable conclusion that it is simply “unfair to put a thinking person on a cruise ship.” Writers, he continues,

typically have difficult childhoods, and it is cruel to remind them of the inherent loneliness that drove them to writing in the first place. It is also unseemly to write about the kind of people who go on cruises. Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.

It’s a conclusion that, despite the essay’s overtly political nature, hearkens back to Wallace’s mostly apolitical focus on infantilization in “Shipping Out.” “How long has it been since you did Absolutely Nothing?” he asks the reader.

I know exactly how long it’s been for me. I know how long it’s been since I had every need met choicelessly from someplace outside me, without my having to ask. And that time I was floating, too, and the fluid was warm and salty, and if I was in any way conscious I’m sure I was dreadless, and was having a really good time, and would have sent postcards to everyone wishing they were here.

In the final paragraphs of “Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever,” Shteyngart shares words of sympathy he received from other writers, who congratulated him on making it off Icon of the Seas alive and opined that, after publication of his essay, “it’s time this genre was taken out back and shot.” They have a point. Cruise-ship essays can be as perversely entertaining as the trashiest reality TV, but like trashy reality TV, they also tend to repeat the same point, one originally expressed by Wallace: that this supposedly fun thing isn’t actually fun at all. Now, it’s also politically incorrect.

Featured image: Joseph Mallord William Turner. Whalers , ca. 1845. Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, 1896, The Met Museum (96.29). CC0, metmuseum.org . Accessed August 21, 2024. Image has been cropped.

LARB Contributor

Tim Brinkhof is a Dutch journalist and researcher based in the US. He studied history and literature at New York University and has written for Vox , Vulture , Slate , Esquire , Jacobin , GQ , New Lines Magazine , and more.

LARB Staff Recommendations

The magic — floating — mountain: notes on an alaskan cruise.

Karan Mahajan Mar 21, 2018

On Outgrowing David Foster Wallace

"Why does David Foster Wallace read differently to me now? Why am I ashamed of him? Maybe his work is limited in ways I didn’t see before." A DFW guy...

Julius Taranto Sep 15, 2018

Did you know LARB is a reader-supported nonprofit?

LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. Help us continue this work with your tax-deductible donation today!

• Current Issue
• Arts & Culture
• Social Issues
• Science & Technology
• Environment
• World Affairs
• Data Stories
• Photo Essay
• Newsletter Sign-up
• Print Subscription
• Digital Subscription
• Digital Exclusive Stories

• CONNECT WITH US

How London taught Ambedkar to ‘educate, agitate, organise’

A new book explores b.r. ambedkar’s little-known years in britain, revealing his far-reaching influence on anti-discrimination movements..

Published : Aug 26, 2024 20:12 IST - 7 MINS READ

READ LATER SEE ALL Remove

Dr B. R. Ambedkar (first from right in second row) with his professors and friends from the London School of Economics and Political Science, circa 1916-17. | Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

While Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s studies in, and connections with, Columbia University are well-known and much celebrated, not many know that he also studied for a masters in Economics at the London School of Economics (LSE), and was called to the Bar at Gray’s Inn in London. In fact, his doctoral work in economics and finance at LSE was instrumental in the setting up of the Central banking mechanism now known as the Reserve Bank of India.

Ambedkar in London

Rupa publications, price:rs.995.

Even less studied is Ambedkar’s work in London during the 1930s as part of the two Round Table Conferences held in 1930-early 1931 and late 1931-early 1923 respectively, and his subsequent work in the UK championing the cause of the “Depressed Classes”. The book Ambedkar in London is an attempt to bridge this gap, even as it reveals the extent of his involvement in, and influence upon, the struggles of the underdog all over the world.

Edited by William Gould, professor of Indian History at University of Leeds; Santosh Dass MBE, former civil servant and human rights activist; and Professor Christophe Jaffrelot, Research Director at CERI-Sciences Po and Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s College London, this excellent compilation of essays covers a wide range of geographies and schools of thought.

It is not incidental that the trigger for this volume was the mobilisation by several UK-based Dalits to set up the Ambedkar Museum at 10, King Henry Road, in Camden, a residential borough in the heart of London where Ambedkar spent several years as a tenant. The struggle to set up the Museum after decades of obscurity and years of lobbying and advocacy with civic authorities, the Maharashtra and UK governments, and not least, the residents of King Henry Road, is emblematic of society’s reception to the values that Ambedkar himself struggled for.

Evaluating Ambedkar’s contribution

Ambedkar in London is divided into two parts. Part one covers Ambedkar’s years in London as a student in the 1920s and a lobbyist and policymaker in the 1930s. The foreword by Suraj Milind Yengde, who has worked on the issues of caste and race in Africa, the US, and now the UK, emphasises the international scholarly and policy footprint of Ambedkar whose work continues to impact present-day India and inspires generations. The Introduction by Santosh Dass and William Gould connects Ambedkar’s sojourns in London with the progress of the struggle for the rights of Dalits in the UK, which is explored in greater detail in Chapter 8 in the second part of the book.

The first three chapters, by William Gould, Sue Donnelly and Daniel Payne, and Steven Gasztowicz KC respectively, cover Ambedkar’s stint as an activist research scholar, student of LSE, and student of Law in London, while the fourth by Jesus F. Chairez-Garza discusses Ambedkar’s networking and activism in the First Round Table Conference. “Dr Ambedkar in the 1920s: The Transitional Decade” by Christophe Jaffrelot is a comprehensive treatment of the years between Ambedkar’s life as a student in London and his leadership in the Round Table Conferences in the 1930s.

The second part of the book, while broadly discussing the contemporary movement for the rights of Dalits in the UK, also harks back to Ambedkar’s interaction with the Black intellectual W.E.B Dubois and the subsequent engagement of the Black movement in the US with the Indian freedom struggle and the Dalit movement in India. The African-American community was in sympathy with Indians struggling against white supremacy/colonialism, and also aware of the overlaps between caste and race. Santosh Dass has collaborated with Arun Kumar to trace the growing Ambedkarite movement in the UK in Chapter 6; with Jamie Sullivan to explain how the Ambedkar Museum in London was set up; and writes in detail about the campaign to outlaw caste discrimination in the UK in Chapter 8. The African-American scholar Professor Kevin Brown, renowned for his work on race and caste, writes on Ambedkar in London and the African-American community in Chapter 9.

Also Read | Ambedkar in the here and now

A fuller evaluation of Ambedkar’s contribution and intellectual and political leadership at the national and international sphere is yet to be achieved, but this compilation of essays does cover extensive ground, and connects the contribution of the younger scholar Ambedkar to the mature Constitutionalist, Law Minister, and politician in a substantial manner.

“This compilation of essays connects the contribution of the younger scholar Ambedkar to the mature Constitutionalist, Law Minister, and politician in a substantial manner.”

In his Conclusion, Gould writes: “[t]he early 1920s in London position Ambedkar’s intellectual contributions in the longer term…(his) powerful principles and strategies for Dalit representation and keen principles and strategies for Dalit representation and keen sociological approaches to Indian inequality that characterise his mature phase can only be fully explained in relation to his longer-term intellectual contributions. In his early writings this included the politics and governance of space, the nature of the colonial economy, the idea of the rule of law, and the wider context of political power in interwar India.”

Chairez-Garza and Jaffrelot argue that Ambedkar’s experiences and connections to London around the early mobilisation of the Depressed Classes through education and reform were significant to his later, and more radical, ideas about caste. Gould feels that Ambedkar’s study in London helped him better relate the significance of space and transnationalism to the issues of social segregation and exclusion of the untouchables.

The bungalow on King Henry’s Road in North London where Dr. B R Ambedkar lived as a student in the 1920s. | Photo Credit: PTI

Thus we find that Ambedkar embodied, as an exemplar, that education was the first strategy to ensure the social and economic progress of Dalits, and thereafter became an important means of fostering the wider Dalit movement. Even as his own sponsors saw in his education and progress a means to be more influential in the public life in India, Ambedkar himself saw it as a means to be taken more seriously as an internationally qualified person with the capability to take on both the colonial government as well as Indian politicians who enjoyed a higher social status.

These approaches have stood the Dalit movement in good stead. The principles of institution-building and social mobilisation as modelled by Ambedkar continue to be popular, including in the Buddha Vihara in London as well as at the smallest village or taluk level even now in India.

Spirited challenge to inequality

The other important model that he followed is the spatial contextualisation and representation of the Depressed Classes in the face of caste discrimination. This elicited results in the UK, as the Dalits strove to have caste discrimination officially acknowledged in anti-discrimination legislation: the struggle against social elitism continues as a significant challenge even now both in India and the UK, stemming from an inability—or unwillingness—of the social and political elite to understand the structural advantages conferred on them by historical privilege.

Ambedkar’s spirited and multi-pronged challenge to this inequality includes education, institutionalising legal obligations to the progress of the disadvantaged, political representation and even, towards the end of his life, a spiritual challenge to the entrenched privilege enjoyed by a few on the basis of birth and religious claims.

Also Read | The relevance of Ambedkar

Thus, it was Ambedkar’s critical analysis of the nature and influence of the caste system which set the tone for the pre-Independence struggle against caste discrimination in India and also inspired the leaders of struggle of the African-Americans against racial and colour discrimination. W.E.B. Dubois wrote appreciatively of Ambedkar’s speech in the First Round Table Conference.

Ambedkar’s signal contribution to the framing of the Indian Constitution was the drafting of the Preamble and the foundational values of liberty, equality, and fraternity, based not so much on the slogan of the French Revolution as on the teachings of the Buddha and their values in Indian society.

There is no doubt that Ambedkar would have been proud of the team that successfully campaigned to set up the museum in London dedicated to his memory and legacy. Interestingly, they used the very slogan—“Educate, Agitate, Organise”, which Ambedkar coined to achieve the goal of representation of the underdog—to occupy the space which had hitherto excluded them, and which shall now inspire succeeding generations.

Cynthia Stephen is an independent journalist and social policy researcher who tracks developments related to marginalised sections and women.

CONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS

SHARE THIS STORY

Stories that help you connect the dots

Politics over the purse

Editor’s Note: The Centre is stripping States of their fiscal rights

• Bookmark stories to read later.
• Comment on stories to start conversations.
• Subscribe to our newsletters.
• Get notified about discounts and offers to our products.

Terms & conditions   |   Institutional Subscriber

Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide to our community guidelines for posting your comment

• Movies & TV
• Big on the Internet
• About Us & Contact

How do Emily Henry’s YA books measure up to her mega-popular adult romances?

Colorful Emily Henry novels have become a staple on bookstore shelves everywhere, but that wasn’t always the case for the author. In fact, many people may not realize that Henry used to write young adult novels—she published four of them before switching to adult fiction .

Henry’s first book was a YA novel called The Love That Split the World , and it was published when she was still working as a proofreader back in 2016. She toiled away at the YA genre for four more years before her first adult fiction novel, Beach Read , gave readers a fun romantic escape right when we needed it most: during the height of COVID-19 in 2020. Since then, she’s published four more adult novels, and all five of her novels have been optioned for on-screen adaptations. To date, she’s sold more than 2.4 million books worldwide!

Now that we know how Henry got her start, how do her earlier YA books stack up against her more recent work? We ranked all nine of her books to find out.

9. A Million Junes (2018)

In A Million Junes , Henry’s second published work, the O’Donnell and the Angert families are like a modern-day version of the Capulet and Montagues from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet . The families have been foes for decades, but no one really remembers why until teenagers June O’Donnell and Saul Angert accidentally fall in love. Suddenly, the family feud is rekindled, and June and Saul find themselves utterly star-crossed.

Why does A Million Junes come in last? Well, Henry’s writing is as concise and entertaining as ever, yet this story feels derivative, to say the least. Still, it’s a solid entry into the YA genre that touches on important and weighty feelings that directly affect her teen readers’ lives: love, family, and loss.

8. When the Sky Fell on Splendor (2019)

When The Sky Fell on Splendor is such a fun book, we hate to rank it so low on the list! But this YA novel is so different from Henry’s other work, it just feels like an outlier from the start.

In this book, we meet a teenager named Franny whose small town of Splendor, Ohio suffers a tragedy that results in her brother languishing in a coma for years. Franny finds solace in a group of adventure hunters called The Ordinary, who spend their time searching for supernatural phenomenon that never actually materializes. Until, one day, it does.

7. Funny Story (2024)

Henry’s latest adult fiction novel, Funny Story , was just okay for me. The writing is excellent as always, but I never felt a connection with the characters, and the whole plot felt a bit forced.

The story is about a children’s librarian named Daphne whose fiance Peter leaves her for his childhood best friend, Petra. Somehow, Daphne winds up sharing an apartment with Petra’s own ex, a scruffy grump called Miles. The two hatch a drunken plan to get even with their exes, but naturally, things don’t go exactly as they’d hoped. Frankly, I would have enjoyed this novel more if there was more of a revenge angle; instead, it’s a fairly vanilla love story, but still tasty nonetheless.

6. Hello Girls (2019, with Brittany Cavallaro)

Henry teamed up with Brittany Cavallaro, the bestselling author of the Charlotte Holmes novels, to write this feminist tale of best friends who flee their abusive homes and go on the run. Hello Girls is essentially a teen version of Thelma & Louise , which is why it doesn’t rank higher on this list, but it’s got the wit and snappy dialogue you’d expect from a novel from these two authors.

5. The Love That Split the World (2016)

Henry’s debut novel was not a huge hit, but it was a respectable entry into the YA romance category and it showed the author’s range. The Love That Split The World dabbles in science fiction, exploring the concepts of love and time travel in equal measures. The story follows Natalie, a recent high school graduate who starts having odd “glitch in the Matrix” moments she can’t explain. When a ghostly grandmother figure emerges with a message about “saving him,” she’s confused … until she meets Beau.

The Love That Split The World is not as polished as Henry’s later works, but it’s a unique story with enjoyable characters, and we love a good sci fi angle.

4. People We Meet on Vacation (2021)

Thanks to the success of 2020’s Beach Read , Henry’s second book aimed at adults was an instant bestseller. People We Meet on Vacation has all of the elements we enjoy most about Henry’s work: quirky characters with an “opposites attract” dynamic, snappy dialogue, and a fun location that makes the reader feel like we’re on vacation with the characters. The trouble here is with the plot, which is rather formulaic and unbelievable at times.

Poppy and Alex seemingly have nothing in common, yet they’re best friends trying to reconnect after a falling out. They talk it out while on vacation … and talk … and talk … and talk some more. If you love witty repartee, this is the Henry novel for you.

3. Happy Place (2023)

The 2023 novel Happy Place is a classic beach read. It takes place in Maine, Vacationland itself, and features Henry’s usual cast of chatty and hilarious characters. The story centers on the driven Harriet and the laidback Wyn, a couple that got together in college and stayed together, right up until now. Harriet and Wyn haven’t told their friends that they broke up, so they decide to fake being in love for their annual group vacation to Maine. Naturally, their real feelings start bubbling to the surface quickly, and it doesn’t take long before they don’t have to fake anything anymore.

2. Beach Read (2020)

Beach Read is Henry’s very first adult fiction novel, and it’s the one that put her on the map! Readers were enthralled by the instantly at-odds characters Augustus and January, two authors who write vastly different kinds of books. Both are struggling with writer’s block and are renting side-by-side beach cottages, so they hatch a plot to get both of them writing again. Augustus attempts to write a romance novel, and January tries her hand at crime fiction. They take field trips as research, and somewhere along the line, they fall in love. Obviously!

1. Book Lovers (2022)

My favorite Emily Henry novel is Book Lovers , hands down! This book is truly heartwarming, and the characters feel so real it’s as if we made friends while reading. The story follows Nora Stephens, a feisty literary agent whose sister Libby convinces her to take a vacation in a small town. Nora goes along, envisioning a Hallmark movie-style scenario in which she’s swept off her feet by a burly local. Instead, she meets a cynical book editor named Charlie, who comes from the same city Nora lives in.

Book Lovers manages to deal with some heavy topics (for a Henry novel), yet it does so with a light touch. The dialogue is laugh-out-loud funny at times, and it’s a book we didn’t want to end. Every writer has to start somewhere, and Emily Henry’s talents were evident from her first novel! I enjoyed all of her books, but when it comes to a favorite, it has to be Book Lovers .

National News | Author of grief book to stand trial in her…

Share this:.

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to print (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)

Today's e-Edition

• Latest News
• Environment
• Transportation

National News

National news | author of grief book to stand trial in her husband’s death, kouri richins, who maintains her innocence, wrote children’s book about losing her husband.

PARK CITY, Utah — A Utah mother of three who published a children’s book about grief after her husband’s death and was later accused of fatally poisoning him will stand trial, a judge ruled Tuesday.

Utah state Judge Richard Mrazik ruled on the second day of Kouri Richins’ preliminary hearing that prosecutors had presented enough evidence against her to proceed with a jury trial.

She faces a slew of felony charges for allegedly killing her husband with a lethal dose of fentanyl in March 2022 at their home in a small mountain town near Park City. Prosecutors say Kouri Richins, 34, slipped five times the lethal dose of the synthetic opioid into a Moscow mule cocktail that Eric Richins, 39, drank.

Kouri Richins has been adamant in maintaining she is innocent. She entered pleas of “not guilty” to all 11 counts on Tuesday.

The second morning of her preliminary hearing centered around an additional attempted murder charge filed in March that accused her of slipping fentanyl into her husband’s favorite sandwich on Valentine’s Day, causing a severe but nonfatal reaction.

Summit County Prosecutor Brad Bloodworth defended the charge by describing how he thinks Kouri Richins learned lessons during the first unsuccessful attempt on her husband’s life that helped her carry out the killing 17 days later.

One bite of his favorite sandwich — left with a note in the front seat of his truck on Valentine’s Day — made Eric Richins break out in hives and black out, prosecutors allege. His wife had bought the sandwich from a local diner in the city of Kamas two days after she also purchased fentanyl pills from the family’s housekeeper, according to witness statements and deleted text messages that were recovered by police.

Text messages and location data indicate Kouri Richins may have brought the sandwich home, then left to spend Valentine’s Day with another man with whom she was having an affair, Bloodworth said. A day after Valentine’s Day, she texted her lover, “If he could just go away … life would be so perfect.”

In written testimony, two friends of Eric Richins recounted phone conversations from the day prosecutors say he was first poisoned by his wife of nine years. After injecting himself with his son’s EpiPen and chugging a bottle of Benadryl, he awoke from a deep sleep and told a friend, “I think my wife tried to poison me,” charging documents allege.

Housekeeper Carmen Lauber told police that Kouri Richins then asked her to procure stronger fentanyl, Detective Jeff O’Driscoll said on the first day of the hearing Monday.

“She learned that putting it in a sandwich, where Eric Richins could take a bite, feel the effects and set the sandwich down, was not the proper way to administer it,” Bloodworth told the judge. “She learned that it takes a truckload” of fentanyl to kill him.

Days later, Kouri Richins called 911 in the middle of the night to report that she had found her husband “cold to the touch” at the foot of their bed, according to the police report. He was pronounced dead, and a medical examiner later found five times the lethal dosage of fentanyl in his system.

The book could eventually play a key role for prosecutors in framing Eric Richins’ death as a calculated killing with an elaborate cover-up attempt. The judge scheduled a pretrial conference on Sept. 23 for the prosecution and defense to discuss jury selection. A trial date has not been set.

• Report an error
• Policies and Standards

More in National News

National News | Today in History: August 28, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivers “I Have a Dream” speech

World News | In spat over judicial overhaul, Mexican leader spurns US, Canada

California News | USPS dumps plan to send Reno-area mail processing to Sacramento

National Politics | Smith files reworked indictment against Trump over Jan. 6

• Craft and Criticism
• Fiction and Poetry
• News and Culture
• Lit Hub Radio
• Reading Lists

• Literary Criticism
• Craft and Advice
• In Conversation
• On Translation
• Short Story
• From the Novel
• Bookstores and Libraries
• Film and TV
• Art and Photography
• Freeman’s
• The Virtual Book Channel
• Behind the Mic
• Beyond the Page
• The Cosmic Library
• The Critic and Her Publics
• Emergence Magazine
• Fiction/Non/Fiction
• First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
• The History of Literature
• I’m a Writer But
• Lit Century
• Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre
• Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
• Write-minded
• The Best of the Decade
• Best Reviewed Books
• BookMarks Daily Giveaway
• The Daily Thrill
• CrimeReads Daily Giveaway

102 Indispensible Works of Literary Criticism

A highly subjective and idiosyncratic list created upon moving house.

Having recently moved into a new apartment, I have been presented with one of the great toils, but also great joys, of relocation: moving all my goddamn books. It’s a chore, to be certain, one so notoriously laborious it leads many bibliophiles to shed large portions of their libraries in the interest of avoiding the worst of it. But screw that, I say! I will cart these stupid things with me every place I live, and what’s more, my labor continually increases, as I now receive books in the mail on a daily basis from publishers, editors and even the writers themselves, and I still purchase books (mostly used, which pretty much translates to bulk ). But I don’t care. The weight is worth the lifting.

But even for those who loathe the process of moving a library, once the boxes are firmly stacked in the new digs, you get to create a whole new one, and this is the great joy I referred to. Most literary types acquire so many new books that whatever system they’d installed in their old place inevitably breaks down and becomes overrun with precarious stacks of the dreaded unshelved. In a new home, though, we get to start afresh, create a new system. It can be tedious and tempestuous but it’s ultimately cathartic. At least for me, I mean, shit, I don’t know you.

Anyway, so I spent my Superbowl Sunday organizing the most important section of any critic’s collection: literary criticism and biography. Not only is this my favorite shit to read, but I also refer to them so often that they’re also the most practically necessary. After I finished, I posted a photo of the beautifully and temporarily full shelves (I’ve already pulled like six books off that I’m using for current pieces) on Twitter, and someone asked me if I had any particular favorites. I wasn’t at home when I got the tweet, so to even consider responding at the time was unthinkable. I pondered for a few seconds  before immediately becoming overwhelmed. When I returned later and stared at the shelves, it occurred to me that I’ve been asked this question quite a few times. Perhaps this is because as a self-identifying literary critic there isn’t much else for people to ask me—this field doesn’t exactly make for the most riveting party talk. But whatever the reason, I thought I’d put together a list of the criticism that I most admire and to which I repeatedly refer. This is, of course, an extremely limited list, taken exclusively from books I own. Also for the sake of my sanity, I excluded all single-subject biographies and criticism on film or music; only fiction, poetry, and drama. Memoirs counted only if they directly involve other writers and/or the literary landscape of the era. It is in no way meant to be a list of the world’s indispensible literary criticism, only my own, and only so far.

So to that guy on Twitter, and to those who’ve asked me before, here is my belated reply.

(NB: list is in alphabetical order by author, or subject for biographies, except for two anthologies at the start of the list, which are alphabetical by title.)

(also NB: this shit was hard . I initially wanted to do 50 but my first list stretched to nearly 175 titles. These 102 are, believe it or not, a compromise.)

102 Indispensible Volumes of Literary Criticism

A New Literary History of America , ed. Greil Marcus & Werner Sollors

The Paris Review Interviews, Vols. 1—4 , ed. Philip Gourevitch

White Girls , Hilton Als

Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose, 1983—2005 , Margaret Atwood

Notes of a Native Son , James Baldwin

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung , Lester Bangs, ed. Greil Marcus

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them , Elif Batuman

Illuminations: Essays and Reflections , Walter Benjamin, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn

Selected Non-Fictions , Jorge Luis Borges, ed. Eliot Weinberger

Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998—2003 , Roberto Boláno, ed. Ignacio Echevarría, trans. Natasha Wimmer

Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America , Christopher Bram

Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir , Anatole Broyard

Passions of the Mind: Selected Essays , A.S. Byatt

Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote , Truman Capote

Maps & Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands , Michael Chabon

Inner Workings: Literary Essays, 2000—2005 , J.M. Coetzee

Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979—1989 , Stanley Crouch

The Lifespan of a Fact , John D’Agata & Jim Fingal

The White Album , Joan Didion

Bound to Please: An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education: Essays on Great Writers and Their Books , Michael Dirda

Creationists: Selected Essays, 1993—2006 , E.L. Doctorow

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews , Geoff Dyer

Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, Geoff Dyer

Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Zizek and Others , Terry Eagleton

Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives , Joseph Epstein

How to Be Alone: Essays, Jonathan Franzen

How to Read a Novelist , John Freeman

Finding a Form: Essays , William H. Gass

The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism , Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Bad Feminist: Essays , Roxane Gay

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern , Stephen Greenblatt

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare , Stephen Greenblatt

Scoundrel Time , Lillian Hellman

Arguably: Essays , Christopher Hitchens

Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere , Christopher Hitchens

Ten Years in the Tub: A Decade of Soaking in Great Books , Nick Hornby

Cultural Cohesion: The Essential Essays, 1968—2002 , Clive James

No Other Book: Selected Essays , Randall Jarrell, Brad Leithauser, editor

Selected Essays from the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler , Samuel Johnson, W.J. Bate, editor

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft , Stephen King

Small Wonder: Essays, Barbara Kingsolver

The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination , Ursula K. Le Guin

Reading for My Life: Writings, 1958—2008 , John Leonard

The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, etc. , Jonathan Lethem

Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books , Wendy Lesser

Time Bites: Views and Reviews , Doris Lessing

About Burt Britton, John Cheever, Gordon Lish, William Saroyan, Isaac B. Singer, Kurt Vonnegut, and Other Matters , Morris Lurie

Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays , Norman Mailer

Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers , Janet Malcolm

Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice , Janet Malcolm

The Outermost Dream: Essays and Reviews , William Maxwell

Ideas and the Novel , Mary McCarthy

What We See When We Read , Peter Mendelsund

Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944-2000 , Arthur Miller

Sexual Politics , Kate Millett

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination , Toni Morrison

Lectures on Literature , Vladimir Nabokov

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books , Azar Nafisi

(Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities , Joyce Carol Oates

Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews, and Prose , Joyce Carol Oates

Mystery and Manner: Occasional Prose , Flannery O’Connor

A Collection of Essays , George Orwell

The Portable Dorothy Parker , Dorothy Parker, ed. Marion Meade

Where I’m Reading From: The Changing World of Books , Tim Parks

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21 st Century , Stephen Pinker

Under Review: Further Writings on Writers, 1946-1990 , Anthony Powell

The Tale Bearers , V.S. Pritchett

Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and For Those Who Want to Write Them , Francine Prose

Citizen: An American Lyric , Claudia Rankine

In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays , Katie Roiphe

Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books , Claudia Roth Pierpont

Reading Myself and Others , Philip Roth

Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991 , Salman Rushdie

Joseph Anton: A Memoir , Salman Rushdie

“What Is Literature?” and Other Essays , Jean-Paul Sartre

The Braindead Megaphone: Essays , George Saunders

The Novel: A Biography , Michael Schmidt

Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life , Dani Shapiro

A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx , Elaine Showalter

13 Ways of Looking at the Novel , Jane Smiley

Artful , Ali Smith

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays , Zadie Smith

Men Explain Things to Me , Rebecca Solnit

Against Interpretation: And Other Essays , Susan Sontag

Regarding the Pain of Others , Susan Sontag

Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives , John Sutherland

Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony , Lewis Thomas

What Would Lynne Tillman Do? , Lynne Tillman

New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families , Colm Tóibín

The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews, 1965—75 , Lionel Trilling

Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism , John Updike

More Matter: Essays and Criticism , John Updike

The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry , Helen Vendler

Both Flesh and Not: Essays , David Foster Wallace

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays , David Foster Wallace

The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews , Eudora Welty

The Essential Ellen Willis , Ellen Willis, Nona Willis Aronowitz, editor

Axel’s Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 , Edmund Wilson

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , Tom Wolfe

How Fiction Works , James Wood

A Room of One’s Own , Virginia Woolf

The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All , C.D. Wright

• Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Jonathan Russell Clark

Previous article, next article, support lit hub..

Join our community of readers.

to the Lithub Daily

Popular posts.

Susan Sontag Wants the Manager, Richard Hell Needs the Bathroom Key

• RSS - Posts

Literary Hub

Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature

Sign Up For Our Newsletters

How to Pitch Lit Hub

Advertisers: Contact Us

Privacy Policy

Support Lit Hub - Become A Member

Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter

For the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet.

Become a member for as low as $5/month