The Best American Essays 2023

Highly recommend for fans of the essay format. There are precious essays in the volume for everyone to enjoy. I have a number I enjoy, but I will mention two you may like Bitters of Din by Eric Borsuk and Eat, Prey, Love by Kathryn Schultz an overview of the story by Felix Salten’s 1922 novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods.

I'd really given up on this series. The last few years, this collection has been basically unreadable and made me question if this really were the best of the crop of essays for the year...then maybe the essay should die. Last year's collection, edited by Chee, was an affront to taste and a blatant attempt to be 'woke' in the term the political right uses (for the record I'm a centrist libertarian)...in all the wrong ways and for all the wrong reasons. So I was somewhat hopeful when Gornick was the editor, because her Situation and the Story is a classic in any creative nonfiction course. I expected essays that had attention to craft, not just shock value (like Chee's selections). There are a number of very good essays in this collection. "Fat Man and LIttle Boy" is an interesting version of the essay of place, "The Americas They Left Me" is a lovely study of identity, and "Fist of Muscle" was a powerful, raw and vulnerable memoir that left me wanting more, but that's not a critcism. There are others that are also really quite good--"Bidders of the Din" and "Mrs Daylily" take marginalized situations and bring them to the fore. "Care Credit" is at once an expose of the American vision of success, and the shame that so often tangles itself in it. But there are at least two absolute clunkers in here and I don't mean 'clunkers' because I disagree wtih Gornick's choice at putting them in here. They're clunkers because they're just...not good and reveal blindspots in Gornick's vision. "Rough Ride" is just awful. If your doctor likes this essay, find another doctor. But Gornick, a white affluent woman, and Eliason, another white affluent woman, somehow have survived to 2023 with this, well it's not even Sowell's 'Soft bigotry of low expectations', it is actually a harmful bigotry. If you take (mild spoiler) 'never call the police on a Black person' (spoken by your bipolar unmedicated patient) as the new law of the heart, well, you're going to see a lot more dead Black people. I was so pissed by this essay I wrote my own response in my dumb substack, but I'll just give you the lowdown here: If you think it's never okay to call 911 to help a Black person...you want dead Black people. Black people, just like white people and Latinx people...overdose, get abused by spouses, get kidnapped, assaulted, sexually assaulted, Black children just like white children, get abused....you name it. Grow up. Also, if Eliason wanted to help Serena, her patient, she, as a doctor, could have instigated an investigation. In the US in 2023, it's hard to find a police precinct where they don't have bodycams and all of them have cameras in transport vehicles. If Serena had been beaten up by the cops, there would be hours and hours of footage, and Eliason could have started the process of getting justice. But she doesn't. Why get Serena justice and maybe put a stop to an abusive police department so they can't harm any other Black people? Why didn't you do that ,Eliason? Oh, because it's just so much easier to sit there and feel virtuous that you have been taught by a Black person. The other essay that just stunk was "Gender: a Melee." And it wasn't so much that this essay was bad (it was, because the writer was ranting, and while ranting is cathartic, to polish a rant into an essay requires stepping back and whipping it into coherent shape and something that humanizes it, brings it to the heart, not just the brain, which this author never did), it is that while it full throatedly bashes feminism as the domain of white college educated soccer moms, literally two essays after it is "A Thousand Gentle Smotherings"--a classic feminist essay in the very vein of feminism that Kipnis clearly despises. (Kipnis ends her essay with a paragraph guaranteed to set off a lot of people: "To those who fear trans women in the ladies' room: make sure to pee before you leave the house".) What gives, Gornick? Did you feel pressure to put some sort of token trans-friendly essay into your piece and then snuck in one you actually vibed with? Are white affluent feminists evil or nah? A lot of the essays share a theme that perhaps befits Atwan's last volume as chief editor--the theme of aging, changes, and mortality. These are all beautifully written and strike at the heart and are exactly what the genre is capable of--humanizing the realities of the world. Even the essay about the author of Bambi, the book upon which the Disney movie is based, challenges, provokes and prods the reader. I love an essay where I learn something new, or feel and see experiences I've never had before, or even have someone, like the author of "When We Were Boys" take experiences I remember, and cast them up into art. And there's plenty of that in this collection. Just, maybe, skip those two essays.

I used this product to entertain myself, and to expand my understanding. Suddenly I'm bingeing on essay collections. Such a variety of well written, deeply reflective, often personal and funny writings.

This is the best essay collection I have read in a long time..The essays are autobiographical in nature dealing with peoples lives in different circumstances..it makes you also meditate on yours also.

Most if not all of the stories are depressing or boring. Pass this one if you’re looking for entertaining, pleasurable writing.

Got this for English class. It was pretty good.

Book group discussion.

I was disappointed in this collection because the essay sub genre and “voice” across the essays, albeit as applied to a range of subjects, is basically memoir and personal essay, largely without the more outward facing perspective, and ballast, of context, light research, reportage, or incisive social Commentary and critique. Instead, the last appears, if at all, nestled into densely observed pieces about the self, with a few exceptions, including the reliably brilliant Kipnis’ selection…. In addition to the monotone of the memoir essay generically, I’m struck that these collections rarely draw much on other inflections and modalities of the essay as a genre, including humor. This volume would have us believe that “essay” is all but synonymous with “memoir,” the dense, sometimes suffocating, self-rumination. The genre contains multitudes. You just won’t find them in this edition if BAE. I hope that next year the editors draw on a broader range of modes—humor, in particular— as well as a broader range of essay sun-genres.