Great essays
By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. Every memoirist, at least implicitly, advances a fraught claim: M y life makes a good story. When he struggles with self-doubt, questioning the literary value of his own, lived experience, Mann turns to J. In Lord Fear , his second book, Mann takes on his brother, Josh, who was two decades older, handsome, talented, and helplessly addicted to drugs. Josh died of a heroin overdose when Mann was just 13, leaving behind big, unfulfilled ambitions and scads of self-castigating notebooks.
The Best Essays I Read in 2016
Think essays are just something boring you write for class? These masterpieces will make you totally reconsider. The final piece in one of her two most beloved collections, Slouching Towards Bethlehem , this essay contains everything there is to love about Didion — her sharp eye, her unbelievable concision, her expression of emotions that are real and contradictory.
It follows her arrival in New York and her departure eight years later, and in so doing discusses the city and youth — and the romantic lies that both are. She writes: " I was in love with New York.
I do not mean 'love' in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again. Sullivan has become one of the most talked about magazine writers of the last few years. This piece, which you can read online at the Paris Review , and was collected in his highly recommended book, Pulphead , is one of his best. It discusses, with such grace, being mentored in his twenties by once-famous Southern Renaissance writer Andrew Lytle.
It's a meditation on art and futility, the Old South, and the sheer strangeness that can be relationships between men. Recognized for his children's literature including Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web and popularizing Strunk's The Elements of Style , White was also an accomplished essayist.
It is one of the most moving reflections upon fatherhood, summertime, America, and mortality ever crafted. You can find it in many anthologies and in The Collected Essays of E. Those who knock Wallace for his verbosity — or associate him merely with a liberal use of footnotes — haven't read one of his classic essays through to the end.
Laugh-out-loud hilarious and almost ridiculous in its level of detail, it explores the author's fractured identity, the Midwest versus the East Coast, and the American experience at large. Published in Esquire in , this is the best-known essay by the late, great screenwriter and essayist. While she renders the experience of being flat-chested in the '50s with incredible humor and pathos, it is the essay's ending — the shock of it — that makes this unforgettable.
One of Emerson's most influential essays, you can read it online or in nearly every collection of his works. While his prose's formality may be a shock at first, what he says he says with great clarity and to the great empowerment of his reader. It is a declaration of the fact that true happiness, in oneself and all relationships, must spurn from self-love and honest expression: "I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier.
If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. Though it's collected in his great and final collection of essays, Man Without a Country , you can read an adaptation online at Lapham's Quarterly.
While it's a must-read for aspiring creative writers, it's about more than writing — much, much more — despite its brevity and characteristic Vonnegut wit. It opens with the best slam of the semicolon ever. The titular essay from this collection — which honestly you should just read — is an ambitious and candid discussion of the passing of his father during a time of great racial turmoil.
It opens: "On the twenty-ninth of July, in , my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born. Over a month before this, while all our energies were concentrated in waiting for these events, there had been, in Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots of the century.
A few hours after my father's funeral, while he lay in state in the undertaker's chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem. In the morning of the third of August, we drove my father through the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed glass. David Rakoff died a little over a year ago at the too-early age of Just a few months prior, he read this essay about his cancer, his imminent death, and dancing, aloud as part of This American Life 's live show.
As always with Rakoff's work, it was funny, painful, and revealed the author's intense love of the English language. Warning: When you watch this video , you will laugh audibly, several times, and you might cry.
The briefest — and perhaps densest — essay on this list, "The Death of the Moth," on its face, is about exactly that: Woolf notices a moth caught in her window and witnesses its death. Read it online and then read it again, and again. This much-anthologized meditation follows Dillard and her husband as they drive to a mountaintop in Washington to witness a total eclipse — that rare event when the sun becomes entirely obscured, turning day briefly into night.
Dillard's rendering of this experience showcases her enviable abilities to both observe and describe. It's collected in Teaching a Stone to Talk. Well-known nature writer Barry Lopez shocked many when he published this essay in January, in which he confessed being raped throughout his adolescence by his mother's sometime boyfriend.
It is an affecting and horrifying portrait of what it is to be a victim of sexual abuse. Unfortunately you do have to be a Harper's subscriber to read it for now. Prior to penning and Animal Farm , Orwell was posted as a policeman in Burma, where he once had to shoot a rampaging elephant. The resultant essay, published in , is a condemnation of imperialism — and his own selfish desire to not be implicated by it. Read it online or find it in the collection of the same title.
Yes, Wallace deserves two on this list. Also collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and originally published in Harper's , this is another travelogue turned existential rumination that shows unabashedly and hilariously the horrors of society this time via a cruise ship and really says more about the author himself.
Saunders is more famous for his fiction like many of the folks on this list but that doesn't mean his essays are not fantastic. The first in the eponymous collection , "The Braindead Megaphone" takes on the current political and media climate in America that will make you shake your head in a I've-always-thought-that-but-never-really-put-it-that-way-myself way.
Tisdale was a nurse at an abortion clinic when she published this essay in She writes honestly and movingly about something she knows few want to think let alone read about. Of course Didion also gets two on this list. If you have not read this classic, do so now. It tracks our culture's — and the author's — transition out of the cataclysmic era that was the late '60s into something else much darker.
It also contains an unforgettable image of Jim Morrison wearing black vinyl pants. Find it in the collection of the same name. Lytle, an Essay" — John Jeremiah Sullivan. Share This Article Facebook.
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Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American. But there are great nonfiction essays available for free all over the Internet. From contemporary to classic writers and personal essays to.
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Writing the college application essay is a daunting task. One great way to get started is to read examples of successful essays.
Harry Mount is a journalist, author and editor of the Notting Hill Editions Journal , which commissions a new essay every week. The latest series of essays are published this month.
40 Best Essays of All Time (With Links)
I love reading books of nonfiction essays and memoirs , but sometimes have a hard time committing to a whole book. But reading nonfiction essays online is a quick way to learn which authors you like. Also, reading nonfiction essays can help you learn more about different topics and experiences. But there are great nonfiction essays available for free all over the Internet. From contemporary to classic writers and personal essays to researched ones—here are 25 of my favorite nonfiction essays you can read today. A year-old woman discusses her shifting attitude towards death from her childhood in the s when death was a taboo subject, to World War 2 until the present day.
25 Great Nonfiction Essays You Can Read Online for Free
Now I want to share the whole list with you with the addition of my notes about writing. Each item on the list has a direct link to the essay, so please, click away and indulge yourself. Once you open the package, you have to eat the whole goddamn thing. I tried to find ones that were well-written and awe-inspiring at the same time. I wanted them to have the power to change my thinking and change my life. And they delivered. But a part of it is still with you. It changed you the very moment you read its last line.
Josh Kaufman is the bestselling author of books on business, entrepreneurship, skill acquisition, productivity, creativity, applied psychology, and practical wisdom. As part of my annual review process , I took a few hours to look through my research database for great essays and blog posts I read in
We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in essays.
17 Personal Essays That Will Change Your Life
A good thing too, especially for all those aspiring writers out there looking for a little bit of guidance. Note: there are many, many, many great essays on writing. Bias has been extended here to personal favorites and those available to read online. Read on, and add your own favorite essays on writing to the list in the comments. Read it here. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention. This essay unpacks the formal elements of fairy tales, and does a fair bit more than hint at their essentialness to writers of all kinds. A key for those who see these as binaries, that is… Every writer is like a topsy- turvy doll that on one side is Red Riding Hood and on the other side the Wolf, or on the one side is a Boy and on the other, a Raven and Coffin. The traditional techniques of fairy tales—identifiable, named—are reborn in the different ways we all tell stories. Read a few excerpts here. I had to arrive at the brink and then take a leap in the dark. A gorgeous mini-essay from an American giant that is equally relevant to writers of poetry or prose, and is almost a poem itself. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.
150 Great Articles & Essays to Read Online
Think essays are just something boring you write for class? These masterpieces will make you totally reconsider. The final piece in one of her two most beloved collections, Slouching Towards Bethlehem , this essay contains everything there is to love about Didion — her sharp eye, her unbelievable concision, her expression of emotions that are real and contradictory. It follows her arrival in New York and her departure eight years later, and in so doing discusses the city and youth — and the romantic lies that both are. She writes: "
