Fifty Favorite Essays
(alphabetically by author)
“Notes of a Native Son” by James Baldwin
“The Fourth State of Matter” by Jo Ann Beard
“Why Look at Animals?” by John Berger
“Why I Hate Toni Morrison’s Beloved” by Scott Bradfield
“The Act of Seeing Through” by Andrea Chapela
“The Querent” by Alexander Chee
“Casting Stones” by Charles D’Ambrosio
“About 5,750 Words” by Samuel R. Delany
“Goodbye to All That” by Joan Didion
“Broken Vessels” by Andre Dubus
“Somehow Form a Family” by Tony Earley
“On Dumpster Diving” by Lars Eighner
“The Brown Wasps” by Loren Eiseley
“My Milk” by Anne Enright
“White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” by Manny Farber
“Zapping” by M.F.K. Fisher
“Any Woman’s Blues” by Carol Ann Fitzgerald
“The Crack-Up” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
“BFF” by Sarah Gerard
“The Dreamer Did Not Exist” by David Gessner
“On a Sentence by Raven Leilani” by Garth Greenwell
“I Am Here” by Brian Hall
“The Courage of Turtles” by Edward Hoagland
“Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions” by Valeria Luiselli
“The Sentence Is a Lonely Place” by Garielle Lutz
“If Only This Could Be Said” by Czesław Miłosz
“My Life with Medicine” by Naomi Shihab Nye
“Such, Such Were the Joys…” by George Orwell
“These Precious Days” by Ann Patchett
“Job versus Prometheus” by Lucia Perillo
“Suicidal Realism” by Brad Phillips
“Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World” by Mary Ruefle
“Out of Kansas” by Salman Rushdie
“American Juggalo” by Kent Russell
“The Men We Carry in Our Minds” by Scott Russell Sanders
“My Writing Education: A Timeline” by George Saunders
“A Plague of Tics” by David Sedaris
“Shallow-Water Dictionary: A Grounding in Estuary English” by John R. Stilgoe
“Argyll” by Theodore Sturgeon
“Brief Notes on Bloom-Literature” by Gonçalo M. Tavares
“A Confession” by Leo Tolstoy
“I Touch Myself” by Masha Tupitsyn
“A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” by David Foster Wallace
“Yale Will Not Save You” by Esmé Weijun Wang
“The Cult of the Noble Amateur” by Rebecca Watts
“Spiritual Autobiography” by Simone Weil
“Here Is New York” by E. B. White
“Natural Law, or Don’t Put a Rubber on Your Willy” by Robert Anton Wilson
“On Being Ill” by Virginia Woolf
“In the Matter of the Commas” by Matthew Zipf
— July 13, 2025