Best literary essays

Best literary essays

The best short articles and essays, long reads and journalism to read online - examples of interesting nonfiction writing by famous authors. tetw. Home Great Articles & Essays Best of Great Books By Subject By Author. Greats Best of By Subject By Author. Essays about Life Literary Essay - Free Essay Writing Tips Best Literary Analysis Essay Topics for Students. Do you know what a literary analysis essay is? Most students are not familiar with the literary essay term, even though it is a common type of essay. It is a type of essay that requires you to analyze a work of literature carefully. It is more than a

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We will do this, of course, best literary essays, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novelsthe best short story collectionsbest literary essays, the best poetry collectionsand the best memoirs of the decadeand we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between and The following books were chosen after best literary essays debate and several rounds of voting by the Literary Hub staff.

Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move a memoirThe River of Consciousness a hybrid intellectual historyand Hallucinations a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations. But inhe gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, best literary essays, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay.

Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his deathSacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart.

The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us.

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Well, we all picked a good one. But what are they about? So read it in awe best literary essays you must, but read it, best literary essays. Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov.

He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, best literary essays, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare.

There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding SweetgrassDr. So many in my generation and younger feel this kind of helplessness—and considerable rage—at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land.

Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark.

There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture. We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising best literary essays little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death.

It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential essay collection, On Immunity. As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life.

As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence. Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent and necessary a defense of basic science as ever, best literary essays. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda.

But Biss never scolds or best literary essays the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat and important trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.

It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in The Mother of All Questions follows up on best literary essays work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women.

Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between andin many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed.

Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a good conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature. Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they both Mexican citizens wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves.

Best literary essays all of this, best literary essays, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment. Tell Me How It Ends is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-thanpages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless best literary essays of federal bureaucracy have best literary essays been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.

Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. 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, best literary essays, 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, best literary essays, 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, best literary essays, 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, best literary essays, 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 best literary essays 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, best literary essays.

Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. We are best literary essays individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over best literary essays 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 best literary essays delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, best literary essays, 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.

These small moments range from the physical—hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings—to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it and because decisions are hard. Terry Castle, best literary essays, The Professor and Other Writings · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably · Roberto Bolaño, tr.

Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours · Kevin Young, The Grey Album · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts · Mary Ruefle, Madness, best literary essays, Rack, and Honey · Herta Müller, tr.

The Fire This Time · Lindy West, Shrill · Mary Oliver, Upstream · Emily Witt, Future Sex · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City · Mark Greif, Against Everything · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch · Best literary essays. Caro, Working · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature.

Features Book Marks CrimeReads Longform Daily Fiction About. By Emily Temple. Emily Temple Emily Temple is the managing editor at Lit Hub. You can buy it here. Previous Article The 10 Best Memoirs of the Decade, best literary essays.

Next Article The 20 Best Works of Nonfiction of the Decade. Aleksandar Hemon Best of the Decade Charlie Fox Edwidge Danticat Best literary essays Passarello Best literary essays Batuman Best literary essays Weijun Wang essay collections essays Eula Biss Hilton Als John Jeremiah Sullivan Oliver Sacks Rebecca Solnit Rivka Galchen Robin Wall Kimmerer Ross Gay Roxane Gay Tressie McMillan Cottom Valeria Luiselli Zadie Smith, best literary essays.

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Write an Introduction for a Literary Analysis Essay - Back-to-School

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Tops 50 Literary Essay Topics Ideas for Students (with Examples, Tips)

Guidelines for a Literary Essay. In writing a literary essay, the following guidelines and for content winning essay should help: Brainstorm all ideas and write them on a piece of paper and choose which will be best as your topic. Develop a sequence to your ideas. Numbering them helps you decide on the order. Make a flow chart in connection to the sequence of ideas starting with the introduction, body, and conclusion. Arrange each idea in an order which you want to take place in the essay The best short articles and essays, long reads and journalism to read online - examples of interesting nonfiction writing by famous authors. tetw. Home Great Articles & Essays Best of Great Books By Subject By Author. Greats Best of By Subject By Author. Essays about Life How to Choose the Best Literature Essay Topic. The choice of the literary essay topic should be strong and relevant to the piece of literature. There are tons of topics that colleges and universities offer for students to choose from. Another scenario is when students come up with their own topics and specific essay