100 Must-Read Essay Collections,Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.
WebNote 2: Some of the essays are book-length, such as Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. One book listed as an essay by two listers – Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of WebDec 13, · “I had to grow foul with knowledge, realize the futility of everything; smash everything, grow desperate, then humble, then sponge myself off the slate, as it were, in WebMar 16, · The Best American Essays series — published every year, series edited by Robert Atwan 9. Book of Days — Emily Fox Gordon The Boys of My Youth — Jo Ann WebWriting A College Application Essay. Over the last few years, there have been an immense increase in the number of customers who have used the services of the best paper ... read more
She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick. A finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital. In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable.
Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers.
But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you she has me! that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out or not. There are days when this does not feel good. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant.
The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L. as cities of the dead. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic, This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.
Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to.
When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. Book of Days — Emily Fox Gordon The Boys of My Youth — Jo Ann Beard The Braindead Megaphone — George Saunders Broken Republic: Three Essays — Arundhati Roy Changing My Mind — Zadie Smith A Collection of Essays — George Orwell The Common Reader — Virginia Woolf Consider the Lobster — David Foster Wallace The Crack-up — F.
Scott Fitzgerald Discontent and its Civilizations — Mohsin Hamid Dreaming of Hitler — Daphne Merkin Self-Reliance and Other Essays — Ralph Waldo Emerson The Empathy Exams — Leslie Jameson Essays After Eighty — Donald Hall Essays in Idleness — Yoshida Kenko The Essays of Elia — Charles Lamb Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader — Anne Fadiman A Field Guide to Getting Lost — Rebecca Solnit Findings — Kathleen Jamie The Fire Next Time — James Baldwin The Folded Clock — Heidi Julavits Forty-One False Starts — Janet Malcolm How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America — Kiese Laymon I Feel Bad About My Neck — Nora Ephron I Just Lately Started Buying Wings — Kim Dana Kupperman In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction — anthology, edited by Lee Gutkind In Praise of Shadows — Junichiro Tanizaki Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?
Karaoke Culture — Dubravka Ugresic Labyrinths — Jorge Luis Borges Living, Thinking, Looking — Siri Hustvedt Lunch With a Bigot — Amitava Kumar Madness, Rack, and Honey — Mary Ruefle This suicidally beautiful essay will teach you a lot about the appreciation of life. Gloria E. Anzaldúa — How to Tame a Wild Tongue. Anzaldúa, who was born in south Texas, had to struggle to find her true identity. She was American, but her culture was grounded in Mexico. In this way, she and her people were not fully respected in either of the countries. This essay is an account of her journey of becoming the ambassador of the Chicano Mexican-American culture. Kurt Vonnegut — Dispatch From A Man Without a Country.
In terms of style, this essay is flawless. Mary Ruefle — On Fear. Most psychologists and gurus agree that fear is the greatest enemy of success or any creative activity. Mary Ruefle takes on this basic human emotion with flair. Susan Sontag — Against Interpretation. In this highly intellectual essay, Sontag fights for art and its interpretation. Hell if I know! I will judge it through my subjective experience! Nora Ephron — A Few Words About Breasts. This is a heartwarming, coming-of-age story about a young girl who waits for her breasts to finally grow. The size of breasts is a big deal for women. Carl Sagan — Does Truth Matter — Science, Pseudoscience, and Civilization. Carl Sagan was one of the greatest proponents of skepticism, and an author of numerous books, including one of my all-time favorites — The Demon-Haunted World.
He was also a renowned physicist and the host of the fantastic Cosmos: A Personal Voyage series, which inspired a whole generation to uncover the mysteries of the cosmos. He was also a dedicated weed smoker — clearly ahead of his time. Paul Graham — How To Do What You Love. How To Do What You Love should be read by every college student and young adult. The Internet is flooded with a large number of articles and videos that are supposed to tell you what to do with your lives. Most of them are worthless, but this one is different. Please, read the essay and let it help you gain fulfillment from your work.
John Jeremiah Sullivan — Mister Lytle. A young, aspiring writer is about to become a nurse of a fading writer — Mister Lytle Andrew Nelson Lytle , and there will be trouble. This essay by Sullivan is probably my favorite one from the whole list. The amount of beautiful sentences it contains is just overwhelming. It also takes you to the Old South which has an incredible atmosphere. Joan Didion — On Self Respect. Normally, with that title you would expect some straightforward advice about how to improve your character and get on with your goddamn life — but not from Joan Didion. You can learn more from this essay than from whole books about self-improvement.
Susan Sontag — Notes on Camp. After reading this essay, you will know what camp is. You will vastly increase your appreciation for art. All the listicles we usually see on the web simply cannot compare with it. Ralph Waldo Emerson — Self-Reliance. Written in , it still inspires generations of people. It will let you understand what it means to be self-made. It contains some of the most memorable quotes of all time. Emerson told me and he will tell you to do something amazing with my life. The language it contains is a bit archaic but that just adds to the weight of the argument. You can consider it to be a meeting with a great philosopher who really shaped the ethos of the modern United States. David Foster Wallace — Consider The Lobster.
He sees right through the hypocrisy and cruelty behind killing hundreds of thousands of innocent lobsters — by boiling them alive. This essay uncovers some of the worst traits of modern American peoples. After reading this essay, you may reconsider the whole animal-eating business. 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. But you love that child and you want others to love it too.
If you ever plan to write a novel, you should definitely read that one. And the story about the Chinese farmer is just priceless. Margaret Atwood — Attitude. This is not an essay per se, but I included it on the list for the sake of variety. Soon after leaving university, most graduates have to forget about safety, parties, and travel and start a new life — one filled with a painful routine that will last until they drop. Jo Ann Beard — The Fourth State of Matter. Read that one as soon as possible. To summarize the story would be to spoil it, so I recommend that you just dig in and devour this essay during one sitting. No need for flowery adjectives here.
Terence McKenna — Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness. To me, Terence McKenna was one of the most interesting thinkers of the twentieth century. McKenna consumed psychedelic drugs for most of his life and it shows in a positive way. Many people consider him a looney, and a hippie, but he was so much more than that. He had the courage to go into the abyss of his own psyche, and come back to tell the tale. He also wrote many books most famous being Food Of The Gods , built a huge botanical garden in Hawaii , lived with shamans, and was a connoisseur of all things enigmatic and obscure. Take a look at this essay, and learn more about the explorations of the subconscious mind.
Eudora Welty — The Little Store. By reading this little-known essay, you will be transported into the world of the old American South. There are all these beautiful memories that live inside of us. They lay somewhere deep in our minds, hidden from sight. The work by Eudora Welty is an attempt to uncover some of them and let you get reacquainted with some smells and tastes of the past. John McPhee — The Search for Marvin Gardens. The Search for Marvin Gardens contains many layers of meaning. 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.
Maxine Hong Kingston — No Name Woman.
A reader suggested I create a meta-list of the best essays of all time, so I did. I found over 12 best essays lists and several essay anthologies and combined the essays into one meta-list. The meta-list below includes every essay that was on at least two of the original source lists. They are organized by rank, that is, with the essays on the most lists at the top. To see the same list organized chronologically, go HERE. Note 1: Some of the essays are actually chapters from books. In such cases, I have identified the source book. On 11 lists James Baldwin — Notes of a Native Son On 6 lists George Orwell — Shooting an Elephant E.
White — Once More to the Lake Joan Didion — Goodbye To All That On 5 lists Joan Didion — On Keeping A Notebook Annie Dillard — Total Eclipse Jo Ann Beard — The Fourth State of Matter David Foster Wallace — A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again On 3 lists Jonathan Swift — A Modest Proposal Virginia Woolf — Street Haunting: A London Adventure John McPhee — The Search for Marvin Gardens Joan Didion — The White Album Eudora Welty — The Little Store Phillip Lopate — Against Joie de Vivre On 2 lists Sei Shonagon — Hateful Things from The Pillow Book Yoshida Kenko — Essays in Idleness Michel de Montaigne — On Some Verses of Virgil Robert Burton — Anatomy of Melancholy John Milton — Areopagitica William Hazlitt — On Going a Journey Charles Lamb — The Superannuated Man Henry David Thoreau — Civil Disobedience Henry David Thoreau — Where I Lived, and What I Lived For from Walden Henry David Thoreau — Economy from Walden Henry David Thoreau — Walking Robert Louis Stevenson — The Lantern-Bearers Zora Neale Hurston — How It Feels to Be Colored Me George Orwell — A Hanging Junichiro Tanizaki — In Praise of Shadows Fernando Pessoa — The Book of Disquiet James Agee and Walker Evans — Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Simone Weil — On Human Personality M.
Fisher — The Flaw Vladimir Nabokov — Speak, Memory , revised Mary McCarthy — Artists in Uniform: A Story E. White — Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street Martin Luther King, Jr. On 11 lists James Baldwin — Notes of a Native Son On 6 lists George Orwell — Shooting an Elephant E. Like this: Like Loading
5 Best Essays Ever Written By Great Writers,The Meta-Lists Website
WebMar 16, · The Best American Essays series — published every year, series edited by Robert Atwan 9. Book of Days — Emily Fox Gordon The Boys of My Youth — Jo Ann WebNote 2: Some of the essays are book-length, such as Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. One book listed as an essay by two listers – Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of WebWriting A College Application Essay. Over the last few years, there have been an immense increase in the number of customers who have used the services of the best paper WebDec 13, · “I had to grow foul with knowledge, realize the futility of everything; smash everything, grow desperate, then humble, then sponge myself off the slate, as it were, in ... read more
He was also a renowned physicist and the host of the fantastic Cosmos: A Personal Voyage series, which inspired a whole generation to uncover the mysteries of the cosmos. I wanted to go to my bedroom, confine myself to tears, replay my memories, never come out. Give your essays extra polish Grammarly helps you write with confidence Write with Grammarly. To me, Jon was just cocky. The tips there pick up where this guide leaves off. I was statistically a smart kid with a good head on my shoulders, right?
She writes honestly and movingly about something she knows few want to think let alone read about. I was getting everything right. Once you open the package, eat the whole goddamn thing. Otherwise Known as the Human Best essay ever written — Geoff Dyer The Hsieh family huddled around the casket. Startled, the Captain and his generals abandoned their post.
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