This extraordinary series began in 1986 with Elizabeth Hardwick as the guest editor and Robert Atwan as the series editor.  With this, the 38th volume in the series, Atwan is retiring, and his last choice for guest editor, Vivian Gornick is a fitting coda to his spectacular run.

Over the years, the guest editors have included the ‘best and brightest’ of America’s literary community including senior statesmen like Edward Hoagland (represented by an essay on aging in this volume) and vital, new, young writers like Alexander Chee.

I have long been engaged with the personal essay as a vehicle for exploring the world and oneself.  Montaigne is generally credited with inventing the form in the 16th C and giving it its name which in French means ‘to try’. Over the years, I have managed to accumulate all 38 volumes of the Best Essay series, and have read the current year’s addition while also working backwards as far as 1996.  That only leaves 10 more volumes to savor along with the new annual edition.!

This year’s volume was particularly powerful.  The personal essay provides the means to explore in many ways.  Some essays begin as book reviews and then examine the author’s entire ouevre.  Other essays take a topic and explore it in great depth.  The essays chosen by Gornick are of another variety, a deep dive into the personal histories of the writers themelves, and most of those histories were painful and tragic.  Topics included near-fatal anorexia nervosa, drug addiction, extreme poverty, domestic abuse, hard time in prison, homophobia and its consequences, loss of a spouse, death of a brother—you get the idea.  Gornick, in her brief introduction concludes that she chose these essays among hundreds because “they contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience….These are voices, real voices. The book you are holding is full of them.”

Gornick, an 88 year old African-American, feminist literary critic and educator, chose 21 essays from among hundreds that appeared in periodicals in 2023, and among the writers, I was familiar with only 4–Hoagland, Sigrid Nunez, Kathryn Shulz, and Philip Lopate.  Among the new names to me was Merrill Joan Gerber, an 83 year old whose funny and insightful essay about her marriage was terrific. Hoagland’s essay about aging was superb as well.  See a theme here?

If you’ve never read in this series, this volume is a tough way to start, but it will provide an excellent introduction to the personal essay as a literary form.  It will now join the other 38 volumes on the two shelves in my Vermont library that hold this valuable and unique collection.