The best american essays.., p.1
The Best American Essays 2024, page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Foreword
Introduction
Jenisha from Kentucky by Jenisha Watts
Reframing Vermeer by Teju Cole
Mere Belief by Sallie Tisdale
The Lives of Bryan by Jennifer Sinor
It’s Hard Out Here for a Memoirist by Jerald Walker
Proxemics by Johnathon Gleason
Woodstove by Brock Clarke
The Anatomy of Panic by Michael W. Clune
If/Then by Courtney Miller Santo
The Ones We Sent Away by Jennifer Senior
If Not Now, Later by Yiyun Li
1978 by Amy Margolis
As They Like It: Learning to Follow My Child’s Lead by Nicole Graev Lipson
Trapdoor by Kathleen Alcott
An Upset Place by James Whorton Jr.
Memory’s Cellar by James Mcauley
Because: An Etiology by Richard Prins
As Big as You Make It Out to Be by Austin Woerner
Love Is a Washing Line by Rémy Ngamije
Storm Damage by Anne Marie Todkill
Anita Baker Introduced Us and Patrice Rushen Did the Rest by Ed Pavlić
A Rewilding by Christienne L. Hinz
Contributors’ Notes
Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction of 2023
About the Editors
Guest Editors of The Best American Essays
About Mariner Books
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
For the Sake of Argument
Time spent arguing is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.
—Christopher Hitchens
What is it about argument that is so dangerous? When thoughts blossom into ideas, argument refines them. To argue is to clarify, demonstrate, prove. For an essayist, argument drives thought on the page, urging the writer’s mind to meander associatively until it makes meaning of experience. Argument asks the essay to risk collapse—where do you take thinking when faced with experiences without conclusions, which may seem impossible to mend? Often, there are no answers to the essayist’s questions, though readers may think up their own. Sometimes the argument fails its assignment as a proof, and a new essay—a renewed attempt to decipher how one thinks—argues its way into beginning.
It seems to me that what is today called argument is really dispute (a word derived from disputare, to think contentiously). Nonfiction prose that seeks quarrel is highly polemic, and the essayistic quality of weighing and appraising (arguing) is not present. Contentious thinking knows that losing is almost always guaranteed when each of two sides clings to right and wrong. Dispute, its etymology suggests, describes a state of thinking that cannot be settled. In this binary, someone is destined to be the victor, someone the loser. Losing and loss terrify, particularly in a culture in which winning and gain define success, and losers are dismissed or shunned for their perceived failures. Especially at a time when those who win often deploy intellectual brutality to silence the kind of argument that results in bringing people closer instead of pushing them apart.
Thinking combatively is a hallmark of social polarization, a phenomenon firmly gripping democracies everywhere. In the fevered pitch of polarized dispute, censorship is never too far behind. Such an environment renders books, including anthologies such as the volume you hold in your hands, dangerous. “Books are inseparable from ideas,” writes Viet Thanh Nguyen about censorship, “and this is really what is at stake: the struggle over what a child, a reader and a society are allowed to think, to know and to question.”
Censorship is what happens when argument is no longer supported and tolerated, which allows those with power and privilege to silence the powerless. As I write this foreword, I am dismayed, but not surprised to learn, that book banning surged in 2023 to the highest level ever reported, with over 4,200 individual titles targeted for removal from libraries in America. This upward trend corresponds to the increase of legislation regulating the content of libraries and growing prohibitions against “woke” curricula in classrooms. What should be shocking here is that these specific types of censorship are law in regions of a country whose constitution guarantees the freedom of expression to all its citizens.
Of course, it’s not shocking anymore. Writers of all genres have warned us what’s coming, not only politically, but ecologically, emotionally, and spiritually. The last five years have been catastrophe-inflected: violent in every possible way, environmentally disastrous, and ill in epidemic and pandemic proportion. Compared to the number of people and other species killed, injured, traumatized, and displaced and the ceaseless assault on the Earth itself, the removal of four-thousand-plus books from library shelves might be considered trifling.
In fact, the removal of those books is one cut in the death by a thousand small cuts being meted out to democracy. Given that so many of the recent political cataclysms have unfolded when more countries than at any time call themselves democracies, just imagine the number (and severity) of calamities possible in a world dominated by totalitarian regimes. Picture America being one of those countries, ruled by an autocrat, with no regard to the history that has shaped us, and nothing but disdain for anyone who does not hold the methods of tyranny close to the heart.
We might be fooled into believing that things aren’t so bad because today’s publishing landscape offers a multitude of platforms for new voices. Peruse the American print and online periodical literature and you’ll find a roared-to-life diversity in which everyone is “everywhere whispering essays,” as Alexander Smith put it. Such publications preserve a record of our troubled times, authored by a robust number of writers with everything and nothing in common. I suspect every authoritarian would be afraid to read these publications. These new voices in print represent the marginalized claiming centrality—evidence, to dictators and tyrants at least, that democracy can overtake them.
Authoritarian regimes are characterized by the threat—particularly to their artists and intellectuals—of oblivion. This cruel unremembering drives the type of censorship called deplatforming,* which not only removes someone or their work from the commons but seeks to permanently obscure the removed artists and their work. It has a side effect of arresting the critical thinking required for argument, ultimately silencing and distancing not only the censored, but their allies, whose fear of reprisal prevents them from articulating disagreement. Such censorship is unusually disquieting when the people imposing it decry tyranny while acting, mostly unwittingly, as the agents of tyrants. These censors assert political affinities that are admirable: they are firmly against totalitarianism, massacres, hatred, the flagrant injustice of a culture bequeathed us by too many centuries of colonialism. Scarier still is when the censors are both activists and respected guardians of free speech (academics, editors and publishers, intellectuals), whose work it is to nurture, publish, and protect narratives, not obliviate them. This type of censorship is one sure path toward a democracy in ruin. Lest we forget that the real adversaries—an authoritarian with a mob retinue—are lurking offstage, content they don’t have to dirty their hands in dismembering our First Amendment.
One has only to look out a window for respite from such grim contemplations: In North America, where the essays in this book were published, winter is waning, light returning. Soon spring will swell the continent’s colder reaches with green. By the time these words appear in print, autumn will gild the dimming light. This increase and decrease of light—each reality with its own beauty and enduring nature—occur side by side with the pervasive uncertainty and doom of today’s global turmoil. It is the essay’s nature to contemplate opposites, I think, in this case beauty and ugliness, which will never cease to coexist.
I take a break to peruse previous volumes of The Best American Essays—an essayist’s digression is her prerogative. Imagine all thirty-eight of founding editor Robert Atwan’s forewords together in one book: an anthology comprising essays from anthologies, edited by “one of America’s noted anthologists,” an epithet that recalls the 2011 foreword, “Confessions of an Anthologist.” It is one of my favorites.
“I’m certain no one ever sets out to be an anthologist,” Atwan writes. For me, that’s certainly true: I never intended to be an anthologist or to inherit the responsibility of caring for such a noteworthy anthology. But that is what happened, and I see now how natural a path it was for me. I’ve always liked to collect diverse examples of beauty: pebbles, feathers, the evidence of lives that once were (shells, abandoned nests, skulls picked clean by birds of prey, vacated chrysalises, snakeskins), and of course, all the stories that fill books. Where did it start, this impulse? Likely in childhood, that “jewel beyond all price,” as Rilke calls it, when I organized my seashell collection into clans based on shared morphologies and launched them into epic dramas and odysseys across the ocean of my bedroom floor.
My first idea for a book was to curate an anthology of people’s nuclear nightmares. This was in 1980, nine months after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, eerily preceded twelve days before it occurred by the theatrical release of The China Syndrome, a film about a meltdown at an American nuclear power plant. After several of these meltdown-inspired dreams, you could say that chain-reaction accidents were on my mind. I began to suspect such disasters were on the minds of others. In the unsurprising naivete of a twenty-something, I believed that gathering evidence of a collective psychic re
Forty years passed before I discovered Charlotte Beradt and her remarkable Third Reich of Dreams,* a suite of short essays analyzing seventy-five of the three hundred dreams the author collected in Berlin from 1933 until she fled Germany in 1939. The dreams reflect distinct practices of totalitarianism—including outright censorship (and consequent punishment), limits on the freedom of expression, and denunciations by neighbors, colleagues, and friends—which were undoing, in real time, the collective psyches of Germans who had little belief in or official affiliation with the Nazi Party. As Bruno Bettelheim writes in his afterword: “Typical is the dream of the man who writes a letter of protest about existing conditions, but instead of mailing it he puts an empty piece of paper in the envelope, without a single word on it.” He’s describing silencing, voicelessness, invisible protest that cannot be articulated. I wonder what similarities might be found among today’s collective dreams.
Many, many years after my first failed attempt at anthologizing, I would edit and publish pamphlets from symposia and panel talks on the essay, work at a quarterly of literature and art, edit an anthology of essays devoted to the second person, and publish another featuring essays on the essay. I have many ideas for other anthologies, but I’m happy to focus on exactly where I am, anthologizing the best American essays.
In “Confessions of an Anthologist,” Robert Atwan describes the moment certain readers have when they acquire their first library card, and feel, as he felt in front of the card catalogs and vast shelves filled with books, “the terrifying rush of unknown possibilities.” Libraries being the ultimate anthology. Just after this moment in his essay, we can imagine ourselves in the reference section, where our narrator tells us the meaning of the word anthology. Like any essayist, I love a good etymological romp: “The word anthology derives from the Greek antholegein, which literally means to gather (legein) flowers (anthos). The anthologist in a sense gathers a literary bouquet.”
A bouquet of essays: that’s what we offer you, dear reader, with this volume. Think of them as flowers that sing, arranged with fierce tenderness and a keen ear to emotional rhythms by guest editor Wesley Morris.
Acknowledgments
The practice, circulation, and reputation of the essay have dramatically changed since the first volume of The Best American Essays was published in 1986. No longer “the second-class citizen in the republic of literature,”* the genre has firmly established itself in American letters. In this second decade of the twentieth century, more authors write essays, more periodicals feature or are devoted to them, more editors and agents buy and sell collections of them. No one knows about these transformations more intimately than Robert Atwan, whose enthusiastic love of the essay helped elevate the genre and secure it in its deserved place. A reader of exceptional breadth and depth, Atwan is one of America’s most eloquent champions and erudite scholars of the essay. He diligently nurtured this series for four decades, and I am but one essayist who is thankful to him for his endless devotion. I am fortunate to have worked with him on other deeply meaningful essay-related adventures, profoundly honored when he invited me to take the helm of this series, and grateful for his sage guidance during the last fifteen months.
It has been a pure delight to collaborate with this year’s guest editor, Wesley Morris, whose style as a reader is abundant with authentic insight, sincerity, and wit, qualities that combined like a magic elixir to assemble the contents of this anthology. I feel as if Wesley and I have danced a once-in-a-lifetime dance, at a banquet whose orchestra featured the esteemed contributors to this volume. I am grateful for their music, and for their courage to not only tell their stories, but to make meaning out of them.
Nicole Angeloro at HarperCollins/Mariner has been a source of support, assistance, and humor in perfect measure; she is possessed of that rare ability to make one feel as if she has all the time in the world even when she’s managing a hundred tasks simultaneously. Joshua Levine and Cheyenne Paterson jumped into editorial internships with eager enthusiasm, intelligent questions, and a desire to read excellent work, all of which makes the uncertain world of publishing deeply fulfilling. My husband, Sami, made it possible for me to read in comfort, listened as I extolled the treasures unearthed in reading the many magazines and journals that came to fill a once-empty bookcase, and provided a sounding board for this foreword. I am deeply grateful for my family and friends (both human and nonhuman), who have kept my spirits aloft, and for the many acquaintances and former colleagues who wished me well as I set off on this editorial odyssey. And, finally, I am humbled and awed by the energy and grace of the many tireless editors who celebrate and preserve literature by meeting deadlines, polishing manuscripts, thinking about design matters, and managing the business of the hundreds of periodicals published in North America. This bouquet of the best American essays, culled from your resplendent gardens, is possible only because of you.
Nomination Guidelines
This volume of The Best American Essays features a selection of essays published between January 2023 and January 2024. The qualifications for nomination are: (1) original publication as an unabridged, stand-alone essay in a nationally distributed North American periodical and (2) publication in English (or translated into English by the essay’s author). Writers whose essays have been published in the series and former guest editors are encouraged to nominate up to five of their own eligible essays, or up to five essays by other writers. These nominations must be submitted as tear sheets before or on December 31, 2024. Periodical editors who wish essays in their publications to be considered are invited to send subscriptions or, in the case of online essays, hard copies (up to five per calendar year, with clear citations and contact information) to the following address, to be received before or on December 31, 2024:
Kim Dana Kupperman
Best American Essays
P.O. Box 569
Hartland VT 05048
Please note: Writers whose work has not been published in the series (including those listed in Notables) are invited to email bestamericanessayseditor@gmail.com to determine if a journal or magazine in which their work appears is a periodical to which the series is subscribed. If the series is not subscribed to a particular publication, authors are invited to send the copy in which their work appears to the above address. All nonfiction is reviewed, and all eligible essays are read.
For updated and detailed nomination guidelines and eligibility criteria, please visit http://bestamericanessays.substack.com.
Postscript: Some Farewells
Contemporary literature suffered many losses in 2023, several of which directly impact The Best American Essays anthology.
After thirty-five years, The Gettysburg Review was shuttered by the college that launched and funded it. In this volume of The Best American Essays, you will find James Whorton Jr.’s “An Upset Place,” which will be, sadly, the last essay selected for this series from this magnificent literary journal. You can read Mark Drew’s moving farewell “Editor’s Pages” from the final issue of the Review in the Best American Essays Newsletter at https://bestamericanessays.substack.com.
After thirty-six years, The Briar Cliff Review ended with volume 35. Two of the essays published in its pages are included in this year’s list of Notables.
The journal Freeman’s said goodbye to readers after eight years with the issue called Conclusions. Several of the short essays appearing therein are included in this year’s list of Notables.
Dedication
