In this provocative essay collection, an award-winning writer shares her personal and reportorial investigation into America's search for meaning.A Los Angeles Times BestsellerA Lit Hub | Chicago Review | Ms. Magazine March PickA Lambda Literary Most Anticipated BookWhen Jordan Kisner was a child, she was saved by Jesus Christ at summer camp, much to the confusion of her nonreligious family. She...

From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction PrizeA Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How shou...

Through the lens of horror—from Halloween to Hereditary—queer and trans writers consider the films that deepened, amplified, and illuminated their own experiences.Horror movies hold a complicated space in the hearts of the queer community: historically misogynist, and often homo- and transphobic, the genre has also been inadvertently feminist and open to subversive readings. Common tropes—such as the circumspect and resilient “final girl,” body po...

Named One of the Best Books of the year by:Esquire, Refinery29, BookRiot, Medium, Electric Literature, The Brooklyn Rail, Largehearted Boy, The Coil and The Cut.Winner of the Lambda Literary Jeanne Cordova Prize for Lesbian/Queer NonfictionFinalist, Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/BiographyFinalist, Publishing Trian...

"[A] deliciously dry, moody essay collection" about America's obsession with violence against women is "a lyrical meditation" (Carina Chocano, New York Times Book Review).In this poignant collection, Alice Bolin examines iconic American works from the essays of Joan Didion and James Baldwin to Twin Peaks, Britney Spears, and Serial, illuminating the widespread obsession with women who are abused, killed, and disenfranchised, and whose bodies (dead and alive...

In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic ob...

The National Book Award–winning author compiles a "thought-provoking volume" of essays by Joyce Carol Oates, Oliver Sacks, Jaquira Diaz and others ( Publishers Weekly).As Jonathan Franzen writes in his introduction, his main criterion for selecting The Best American Essays 2016 "was whether an author had taken a risk." The resulting volume showcases authorial risk in a variety of forms, from championing an unpopular opinion to the possibility of r...

Nonfiction from Malcolm Gladwell, Francine Prose, Jonathan Franzen, and more: "There is not a dud in the bunch. [An] exhilarating collection." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)Whether a personal reflection on a wife's decline from Alzheimer's, a critique of the overdiagnosis of mood disorders, a lighthearted look at menopause, a friend's commentary on David Foster Wallace's heartbreaking suicide, or a memoir of teaching underprivileged children, this co...

This anthology edited by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Empathy Exams offers "essays that are challenging, passionate, sobering, and clever" ( Publishers Weekly)."The essay is political—and politically useful, by which I mean humanizing and provocative—because of its commitment to nuance, its explorations of contingency, its spirit of unrest, its glee at overturned assumptions; because of the double helix of awe and distrust...

Curated by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wild, this volume shares intimate perspectives from some of today's most acclaimed writers.As Cheryl Strayed explains in her introduction, "the invisible, unwritten last line of every essay should be and nothing was ever the same again." The reader, in other words, should feel the ground shift, if even only a bit. In this edition of the acclaimed anthology series, Strayed has gathered ...

Amber Tamblyn, Jessica Valenti, Lidia Yuknavitch, Jia Tolentino, Samantha Irby, Meredith Talusan, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, Amy Poehler, America Ferrera, Ada Limón, and Huma Abedin are among the impressive list of authors contributing to this powerful collection of essays that takes a fresh and powerful look at our relationship to intuition and how we can harness it to change our everyday lives and the world.For generations, women have been taught to ignore th...

A collection of the year's best essays, selected by award-winning journalist and New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz"The world is abundant even in bad times," guest editor Kathryn Schulz writes in her introduction, "it is lush with interestingness, and always, somewhere, offering up consolation or beauty or humor or happiness, or at least the hope of future happiness." The essays Schulz selected are a powerful time capsule of 2020, showcasing that even ...