I look forward to reading each year’s edition of the ‘Best American Essays’ with great anticipation.  The essay is my favorite writing style, enabling the author to ‘try’ to figure out how he/she feels about a topic without being exhaustive in background or authoritative in opinion.  From Montaigne to Emerson, the essay has provided a means for brilliant minds to explore the world and their place in it.

This year’s volume is the 36th in the series.  Some years back, I managed to collect all of the back issues, mostly at one Cape Cod used book store, so as I sit here typing in my Vermont library, I can look to my right and see the prior 35 volumes each in a different color and sporting the name of that year’s guest editor. Each edition is quite different in tone, subject, style, etc., the result of the series editor, Robert Atwan, choosing a new guest editor each year as well as the influence of contemporary events.

The editor for the 2021 edition is Kathryn Schulz a staff writer at The New Yorker, and she has chosen 20 essays that are heavily weighted towards COVID, the Black experience in America,  and the dystemper of the Trump years.  In her Introduction (always one of the best essays in the book!), Schulz points out that she took on the assignment in 2019 before COVID was a household word and a frightening and dominant event in our lives. She writes, “But even by the standards of a difficult age, last year was notable.  Mostly, it was notably bad.” She then goes on to provide a brilliant, concise, hard-hitting and spot on summary of COVID, Trumpian bizarre behavior (she refers to him as the ‘mad president), George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Black Lives Matter marches, and the Giuliani press conference at the Four Seasons Total Landscaping site.  Her summary of 2020, what she refers to as ‘a whole year in six paragraphs‘ is brilliant and worth reading to remind each of us what we lived through.  The book evidently went to press before she could add the events of January 6th to the litany of woes.

The essays themselves were chosen  because they ‘reflect the specific calamities that so unmistakably dominated 2020 and all those aspects of life that were touched by them, only lightly, if at all: the vast rich realms of thought and experience both within and mercifully beyond the anguish of this past year.”  The latter half of that sentence refers to how the world ‘simply carries on with its usual business’ in the face of terrible suffering.  The essays are powerful and uniformly excellent, written by well known writers (Elizabeth Alexander, Hilton Als, Claire Messud, Wesley Morris, and Jesmyn Ward), some writers whose names I didn’t know, and even two brilliant authors who had passed away in 2020—Tony Hoagland and Barry Lopez.

Reading this volume does bring back the events of 2020, many unfortunate and unsettling.  All worth reading about.