Best english essays
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150 English Essay Topics
We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and 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 much 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 memoir , The River of Consciousness a hybrid intellectual history , and Hallucinations a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations. But in , he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, 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 death , Sacks 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 if you must, but read it. 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, 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 Sweetgrass , Dr. 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 what 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. 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 belittles 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 that 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 and , in 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.
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.
Amid all of this, 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. 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, 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, 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!
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, 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. 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 the archetypal disorder of lunacy. 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.
Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us 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. 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 that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, 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. Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature. Article continues after advertisement. You can preorder it here. More Story.
“How to Write with Style,” Kurt Vonnegut, from How to Use the Power of the Written Word. “Why I Write,” George Orwell.
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Virginia has been a university English instructor for over 20 years. She specializes in helping people write essays faster and easier. This list has over questions divided into 15 topic areas to get you started on your English essay.
150 Great Articles & Essays to Read Online
Despite the fact that, as Shakespeare said, "the pen is mightier than the sword," the pen itself is not enough to make an effective writer. In fact, though we may all like to think of ourselves as the next Shakespeare, inspiration alone is not the key to effective essay writing. You see, the conventions of English essays are more formulaic than you might think — and, in many ways, it can be as simple as counting to five. Though more advanced academic papers are a category all their own, the basic high school or college essay has the following standardized, five paragraph structure:. Though it may seem formulaic — and, well, it is - the idea behind this structure is to make it easier for the reader to navigate the ideas put forth in an essay. You see, if your essay has the same structure as every other one, any reader should be able to quickly and easily find the information most relevant to them.
The Top 10 Essays Since 1950
The latest series of essays are published this month. Buy Notting Hill Editions essays. Its parameters are so broad and slack that they encompass practically any shortish passage of non-fiction which makes a general argument. But, still, you could write 50, words about yourself, and it could be an essay in every regard. Here are 10 that are exceptional in both departments. Not an original choice of writer, or of essay. But it would be churlish not to include the man who, more than any other writer over the last century, fine-tuned the form. He applied his essayistic touch to an extreme variety of subjects — the ideal pub, school stories, what makes England England - but this one, on how he became a writer, is my favourite. The word "intellectual" often brings a lot of dull baggage with it.
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.
We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between and
Essay Examples
Robert Atwan, the founder of The Best American Essays series, picks the 10 best essays of the postwar period. Links to the essays are provided when available. So to make my list of the top ten essays since less impossible, I decided to exclude all the great examples of New Journalism--Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Michael Herr, and many others can be reserved for another list. I also decided to include only American writers, so such outstanding English-language essayists as Chris Arthur and Tim Robinson are missing, though they have appeared in The Best American Essays series. And I selected essays , not essayists. A list of the top ten essayists since would feature some different writers. And the best essays show that the name of the genre is also a verb, so they demonstrate a mind in process--reflecting, trying-out, essaying. Against a violent historical background, Baldwin recalls his deeply troubled relationship with his father and explores his growing awareness of himself as a black American. However you view the racial politics, the prose is undeniably hypnotic, beautifully modulated and yet full of urgency. An essay that packed an enormous wallop at the time may make some of us cringe today with its hyperbolic dialectics and hyperventilated metaphysics.
40 Best Essays of All Time (With Links)
To be truly brilliant, an essay needs to utilise the right language. In other words, they live on the land and in the water. To put it another way, they will die without the sun. That is to say, they must breathe air. To that end, a new study has been launched that looks at elephant sounds and their possible meanings. Here are some cleverer ways of doing this. Usage:This is also generally used at the start of a sentence, to add extra information. Likewise, Scholar B argues compellingly in favour of this point of view. Similarly, we have a tendency to react with surprise to the unfamiliar. Another key point to remember is that Blake was writing during the Industrial Revolution, which had a major impact on the world around him.
