Overview

A collection of the years best essays, selected by critically acclaimed author and essayist, Jia Tolentino.

The Best American series, launched in 1915, is the premier annual showcase for the countrys finest short fiction and nonfiction, and it is the most respectedand most popularof its kind.

Jia Tolentino, critically acclaimed essayist, editor, and New Yorker staff writer, selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

“The essay has taught me how to live,” writes Jia Tolentino, this year’s Best American Essays guest editor. In a time of escalating authoritarianism and disinformation, we turn to artists and writers to make sense of the world around us. The twenty-one authors featured in this collection do not proselytize, nor do they claim to have all the answers. Instead, they teach with vulnerability, raw truths, and open questions. This volume offers testimonies and personal narratives about war and fear; oblivion and memory; disease, grief, and boredom; nonhuman animals and plants; poverty and hyperabundance; consciousness and solipsism; the loss of literature and the work of art; pretense and respect. THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2025 INCLUDES: ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS • SARAH AZIZA • JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN • CAROLYN FORCHÉ • MOSAB ABU TOHA • CHRISTIAN LORENTZEN • WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ • CHRISTINA SHARPE • AND OTHERS