BAE 2001 read by Matthew Gavin Frank
After reading Rebecca McClanahan’s “Book Marks,” in The Best American Essays 2001—which, in part, engages the ways in which a reader’s written marginalia (not to mention sloughed-off bodily detritus...
View ArticleBAE 1990 as read by Joni Tevis: The Traveler: An Essay and Playlist
The Traveler: An Essay and PlaylistJoni Tevis*The legend of the Traveler appears in every civilization, perpetually assuming new forms, afflictions, powers, and symbols. Through every age he walks in...
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BAE 2004 with John Proctor
I’m 42 years old, and have considered myself a writer since—well, since I could write. As an essayist, though, I’m really still a baby. When I decided five or so years ago to start calling myself one,...
View ArticleRenée E. D’Aoust: Regarding The Best American Essays 2003
I am a first-generation American, and I live in Switzerland, a country where people of color are routinely interrogated by border guards when riding the train across the Swiss-Italian border. The...
View ArticleBAE 1998 with Brian Doyle: I AM A GOLDEN ESSAY GOD!
What do I remember best from being in Best American Essays for the first time, in 1998?This:Back then the back cover of the annual volume listed the contributors in alphabetical order, in lovely crisp...
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Robert Atwan: The Best American Essays: Some Notes on the Series, Its...
The Best American Essays was published in both hardcover and paperback until 2008. Starting with 2009, the books appear only in paperback. For the first two editions in 1986 and 1987, Houghton Mifflin...
View ArticleBAE 1993 as read by Jill Talbot: Context and Observations
I. ContextIt wasn’t until The Best American Essays 1993 arrived in the mail a few weeks ago that I stopped to think about what I was doing in the fall of 1993. I was in my first semester of graduate...
View ArticleBAE 2015: Sarah Minor on Death and Mourning the Essay in 2015
Last week I was having dinner with a poet and two fiction writers. Dinner was late and simmering and at this point the conversation was on its third and fourth drinks. We weren't in literary society,...
View ArticleBAE 2010: Composing Smart by César Díaz
Two girls sat beside each other on a bench. They engaged in a conversation that went back and forth. One girl looked intently at the other, who spoke while she scanned the parking lot. Moments later,...
View ArticleBAE 1987 as read by Ned Stuckey-French
In 1987, Ronald Reagan was President, Raymond Carver was still alive, “Walk Like an Egyptian” was the number one song, and Elizabeth and I had been married for a year. Like our marriage, the Best...
View ArticleBAE 1988 as read by Amy Leach
Recently I learned that Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are no longer cool. Excoriated for being solitary, for not thinking in tandem, for not riding on the bicycle built for a thousand,...
View ArticleBAE 2008: Los Mejores Ensayos Americanos by Michele Morano
You’ll find number 51 Calle de Fernán Gonzalez between a shoe repair shop and a fishmonger who opens only in the morning. By noon he’ll have sold out of bass and trout and bacalao and will have rolled...
View ArticleBest American Essays 2005 read by Michael Martone: A Bread Crumb Memoir
1979“What’s an ‘MLA?’” I asked. The person I was asking was William Baer, a graduate student poet in The Writing Seminars of Johns Hopkins University. He stood in my office doorway. I was nearing the...
View ArticleBAE 1992 as read by T Clutch Fleischmann
Can something still be a uchronia if I lived through it personally? Merry old 1992. I’m guilty of making a unchronia of the early 1990s in part because I was at that weird age where I knew things were...
View ArticleThomas Larson on BAE 1995: Man Versus Boy
The surprise? That I single out the male authors. That I count twenty authors total, thirteen men. That my distaste is palpable. Find them sexist, show-off-y, self-infatuated. Was unprepared for such a...
View ArticleStephanie G’Schwind on the BAE 2009, edited by Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver introduces the 2009 volume, not surprisingly, by talking about what an essay is. She turns to Emerson, her favorite essayist, noting that his writings “do not thoroughly answer the...
View ArticleBAE 2012 Read by Thomas Mira y Lopez
My first familiarity with David Brooks, the guest editor of Best American Essays’ 2012 Edition, came not through The New York Times, where he is an op-ed columnist, or NPR’s All Things Considered,...
View ArticleBAE 2002, read by Nicole Walker
It wasn’t until the NonfictioNOW conference, when Marcia Aldrich presented the statistics on the Best American Series, that I knew that the edition I had assigned myself, 2002, was the edition that...
View ArticleBAE 1991 read by Michael Steinberg
In the early 1990’s, I was taking a series of theory classes and writing workshops in a Creative Writing MFA program. I was halfway through the program when the woman who’d taught the graduate workshop...
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Revisiting the Last Millennium: The Best American Essays 2000 by Kyoko Mori
*The cover is a purple so dark it’s almost brown, the color of the oval vase in which my mother once arranged her dahlias. The spine is cracked and pages are falling out because I taught from this...
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