Edited and with an Introduction by Rebecca Solnit
Robert Atwan, Series Editor
"ESSAYS ARE RESTLESS LITERATURE, trying to find out how things fit together, how we can think about two things at once, how the personal and the public can inform each other, how two overtly dissimilar things share a secret kinship," contends Rebecca Solnit in her introduction. From lost languages and extinct species to life-affirming cosmologies and literary myths that offer cold comfort, the personal and the public collide in The Best American Essays 2019. This searching, necessary collection grapples with what has preoccupied us in the past year - sexual politics, race, violence, invasive technologies - and yet, in reading for the book, Solnit also found "how discovery can be a deep pleasure."
Copyright © 2019 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
Introduction copyright © 2019 by Rebecca Solnit
ISBN 978-1-328-46580-1
Contents
Foreword ix
Introduction xvii
RABIH ALAMEDDINE Comforting Myths 1
FROM Harper's Magazine
MICHELLE ALEXANDER We Are Not the Resistance 11
FROM The New York Times
HEATHER ALTFELD Obituary for Dead Languages 16
FROM Conjunctions
MARIO ALEJANDRO ARIZA Come Heat and High Water 23
FROM The Believer
JABARI ASIM Getting It Twisted 40
FROM The Yale Review
ALEXANDER CHEE The Autobiography of My Novel 52
FROM The Sewanee Review
CAMILLE T. DUNGY Is All Writing Environmental Writing? 70
FROM The Georgia Review
MASHA GESSEN Stories of a Life 77
FROM The New York Review of Books
JEAN GUERRERO My Father Says He's a "Targeted Individual." Maybe We All Are. 88
FROM Wired
LACY M. JOHNSON On Likability 105
FROM Tin House
WALTER JOHNSON Guns in the Family 113
FROM The Boston Review
ELIZABETH KOLBERT How to Write About a Vanishing World 124
FROM The New Yorker
J. DREW LANHAM Forever Gone 131
FROM Orion
LILI LOOFBOUROW Men Are More Afraid Than Ever 145
FROM Slate
TERESE MARIE MAILHOT Silence Breaking Woman 151
FROM Pacific Standard
DAWN LUNDY MARTIN When a Person Goes Missing 162
FROM n+1
KAI MINOSH PYLE Autobiography of an Iceheart 176
FROM Prism
GARY TAYLOR Death of an English Major 189
FROM Tampa Bay Times
JIA TOLENTINO The Rage of the Incels 192
FROM The New Yorker
DAYNA TORTORICI In the Maze 197
FROM n+1
Contributors’ Notes 209
Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction of 2018 213
Notable Special Issues of 2018 225
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