The Best American Essays 2016

by Jonathan Franzen

  JAQUIRA DíAZ is the recipient of a Kenyon Review Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the Carl Djerassi Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and an NEA Fellowship to the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences. She has received awards from the MacDowell Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Sun, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Ninth Letter, Brevity, and elsewhere.

  IRINA DUMITRESCU is a professor of medieval English literature at the University of Bonn. She recently edited a collection of essays on arts and humanities in crisis titled Rumba Under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi (2016). Her essays can be found in The Yale Review, The Southwest Review, Petits Propos Culinaires, the Washington Post, and The Manifest-Station. She was nominated for an MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award and has been supported by the Whiting Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

  ELA HARRISON’s poetry, essays, and book reviews have appeared in New England Review, The Georgia Review, Cirque Journal, and F Magazine. She also contributes articles on environmental and nutri­tional issues to online publications, including BeMore! Magazine. She holds advanced degrees in classical literature and linguistics (from Oxford, Stanford, and UC Berkeley) and has always studied and worked with herbs. Originally from England and Israel, she has traveled widely and lived in places as diverse as Alaska and Hawaii. Harrison received her MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop in 2014. Now based in Tucson, Arizona, she translates (including a German encyclopedia project), writes, edits, provides health coaching, and makes herbal remedies and food for people on healing programs.

  SEBASTIAN JUNGER is the New York Times best-selling author of War, The Perfect Storm, Fire, and A Death in Belmont. “The Bonds of Battle” grew into his most recent book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. Together with Tim Hetherington, he directed the documentary Restrepo, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and was nominated for an Oscar in 2011. He went on to direct Which Way Is the Front Line from Here?, Korengal, and The Last Patrol. He is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and has been awarded a National Magazine Award and an SAIS-Novartis Prize for Excellence in International Journalism. Junger’s essay “The Lion in Winter” was selected by Stephen Jay Gould for The Best American Essays 2002. He lives in New York City.

  LAURA KIPNIS is a cultural critic and former video artist who writes frequently on sexual politics, aesthetics, emotion, acting out, bad behavior, and various other crevices of the American psyche. She is the author of six books. The latest is Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation; previous titles include How to Become a Scandal and Against Love: A Polemic. The next (just finished!) is Stupid Sex/Higher Ed. She teaches filmmaking at Northwestern University and lives in New York and Chicago.

  JORDAN KISNER has published essays in n+1, New York Magazine, The American Scholar, and elsewhere, and she is at work on a book inspired by “Thin Places.” She holds an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University, where she teaches undergraduate writing.

  AMITAVA KUMAR is the author of several works of nonfiction, including Lunch with a Bigot, A Matter of Rats, and A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb. He teaches English at Vassar College and is currently writing a book about academic style with the support of a Guggenheim fellowship.

  RICHARD M. LANGE’s short fiction has appeared in North American Review, Cimarron Review, Mississippi Review, Ping Pong, Chicago Quarterly Review, Eclipse, Georgetown Review, and elsewhere, and two of his stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. A former copywriter for a major insurance company, he is working on a novel about the financial crisis. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.

  LEE MARTIN has published three memoirs: From Our House, Turning Bones, and Such a Life. He is also the author of four novels, including The Bright Forever, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, and, most recently, Late One Night. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such places as Harper’s Magazine, Ms., Creative Nonfiction, The Sun, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Glimmer Train, and The Best American Mystery Stories. He is the winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. He teaches in the MFA Program at The Ohio State University.

  LISA NIKOLIDAKIS’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Brevity, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Passages North, Hunger Mountain, The Rumpus, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. She has won an Orlando Prize from the A Room of Her Own Foundation for flash fiction and The Briar Cliff Review’s annual contest for nonfiction. She currently teaches creative writing in the Midwest, has just completed a collection of short stories, and is working on an essay collection.

  JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author of fiction, poetry, plays, and criticism. Her more than forty novels include them, which won the National Book Award in 1970, Wonderland, You Must Remember This, We Were the Mulvaneys, The Gravedigger’s Daughter, and, in 2016, The Man Without a Shadow. She has received the President’s Medal in the Humanities, a PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, and, most recently, the A. J. Liebling Award for Outstanding Boxing Writing. She teaches at Princeton University, New York University, and the University of California, Berkeley, and is a founding editor of Ontario Review.

  MARSHA POMERANTZ is the author of The Illustrated Edge, a book of poems (2011). A second manuscript has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series and for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize but is still looking for a home. Her poems and essays have been published by Beloit Poetry Journal, berfrois.com, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Parnassus, PN Review, Raritan, Salamander, and others, and she has translated a novel, short stories, and poems from the Hebrew. She retired in 2013 as managing editor at the Harvard Art Museums.

  JILL SISSON QUINN’s essays have appeared in Orion, Ecotone, OnEarth, and many other magazines. She has received the Annie Dillard Award in Creative Nonfiction, a John Burroughs Essay Award, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her essay “Sign Here if You Exist” was reprinted in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011. Her first book, Deranged, was published in 2010. A regular commentator for Wisconsin Public Radio’s Wisconsin Life series, she lives and writes in Scandinavia, Wisconsin.

  JUSTIN PHILLIP REED is a South Carolina native and the author of A History of Flamboyance (2016). His first full-length book of poetry, Indecency, is forthcoming in 2018. His work has appeared—or soon will—in Boston Review, Callaloo, Catapult, Columbia Poetry Review, Eleven Eleven, The Kenyon Review, Obsidian, PEN American, The Rumpus, Vinyl, and elsewhere. He received his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and is the online editor for Tusculum Review.

  Born in London in 1933, OLIVER SACKS was educated at The Queen’s College, Oxford. After receiving his medical degree, Sacks continued his studies in the United States, specializing in neurology and moving to New York City. His first book, Migraine (1970), combined an authoritative medical and historical coverage of the condition with the experiences of his suffering patients. Sacks would return again and again to case studies, turning them into a provocative literary form. They provide the basis for two of his best-known books, Awakenings (1973) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985). He wrote two memoirs, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001) and On the Move: A Life, which was published shortly before he died in August 2015. “A General Feeling of Disorder” was one of his last essays.

  KATHERINE E. STANDEFER won the 2015 Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction. She writes about the body, consent, and medical technology from Tucson, where she teaches intimate creative writing classes that help people engage their experiences of sexuality and illness on the page. She earned her MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of Arizona. A certified sexologist, she also teaches in
a pilot narrative medicine program at UA’s College of Medicine. Her work has appeared most recently in Fourth Genre, The Iowa Review, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Cutbank, Essay Daily, and High Country News.

  GEORGE STEINER, the winner of numerous international awards and for many years a book critic at The New Yorker, is the author of many books, including After Babel, Antigones, Language and Silence, Real Presences, and Extraterritorial. His fiction includes Proofs and Three Parables and The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.; he has also published two memoirs, Errata: An Examined Life and My Unwritten Books. A fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, since 1961, Steiner has taught at a number of universities and was a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Geneva between 1974 and 1994.

  MASON STOKES is a professor of English at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, where he teaches courses on African-American literature and queer fiction. He has published widely on race and sexuality in American culture and is also the author of Saving Julian: A Novel.

  THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS is the author of a memoir, Losing My Cool, and has written for The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Smithsonian Journeys, London Review of Books, The New Yorker, and many other publications. His next book, a reckoning with how we define race in America, will expand his essay “Black and Blue and Blond,” published last year in The Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives in Paris, where he is an associate editor at Holiday and Purple Fashion Magazine and a regular book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.

  Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction of 2015

  Selected by Robert Atwan

  Raymond Abbott

  Seymour Krim, Oyez Review, Spring

  Sufiya Abdur-Rahman

  Surrender at the Cinema, Ummah Wide, February 15

  Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams

  Dog and Wolf: The Time Between, Southern Humanities Review, vol. 48, no. 3

  Steve Adams

  Border Crossing, Grist, no. 8

  Tamara Adelman

  Rustic Canyon, Rubbertop Review, no. 7

  Marcia Aldrich

  The Blue Dress, Hotel Amerika, Winter

  Tariq al Haydar

  Machine Language, Crab Orchard Review, Summer/Fall

  Cynthia Allen

  When the Walls Came Down, So to Speak, Fall

  Lauren Alwan

  Eldorado, ZYZZYVA, Winter

  Zay Amsbury

  Immersive Theater, New York: A Report from the Field, The Labletter, no. 17

  Kate Angus

  My Catalog of Failures, The Southeast Review, vol. 33, no. 1

  Kwame Anthony Appiah

  Race in the Modern World, Foreign Affairs, March/April

  Aaron Apps

  The Formation of This Grotesque Fatty Figure, Passages North, no. 36

  Amye Archer

  Slow Motion, PMS, no. 14

  Chris Arthur

  Memory Sticks, The Literary Review, Spring

  Glass, Tahoma Literary Review, vol. 2, no. 2

  Rilla Askew

  Trail, This Land, Spring

  Howard Axelrod

  Into the Blind Spot, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter

  Matthew James Babcock

  Boogaloo Too, Small Print Magazine, Spring/Summer

  C. Morgan Babst

  Death Is a Way to Be, Guernica, June 15

  Julianna Baggott

  A Portrait of My Father Mapping a Plane Crash, The Cincinnati Review, Summer

  Ronald Bailey

  Eternal Youth for All, Reason, March

  Sarah E. Baker

  Every Western Is a Ghost Story, Ninth Letter, Spring/Summer

  Poe Ballantine

  No Talking to Imaginary People, The Sun, October

  Russell Banks

  Last Days Feeding Frenzy, Conjunctions, no. 64

  Barret Baumgart

  The Mountain, The Gettysburg Review, Autumn

  Elizabeth Benedict

  What We Talk About When We Talk About Money, Salmagundi, Winter/Spring

  Geoffrey Bent

  John Singer Sargent: The Great Good Painter, Boulevard, Fall

  Stephen Benz

  A Grave on the High Plain, River Teeth, Fall

  Laurel Berger

  The Magic of Untidiness, The Point, September 23

  Emily Bernard

  Black Is the Body, Creative Nonfiction, Spring

  Sven Birkerts

  Double Take, Agni, no. 82

  Eula Biss

  White Debt, The New York Times Magazine, December 6

  Mary Clearman Blew

  What My Hands Know, The Gettysburg Review, Summer

  Paul Bloom

  The Lure of Luxury, Boston Review, November/December

  Will Blythe

  Five Encounters with Vegetation, Oxford American, Summer

  Ken Bode

  Settling Scores: Revenge Louisiana Style, The Antioch Review, Winter

  Kyle Boelte

  Reluctant Citizens: A Juror’s Education, ZYZZYVA, Spring/Summer

  Belle Boggs

  Baby Fever, Orion, November/December

  Leslie Bohem

  What Everybody Wants, Parcel, Summer

  Benedicte Boisseron

  Afro-Dog, Transition, no. 118

  Marc Bookman

  “That’s What That N——​ Deserved,” Mother Jones, March 24

  Katie Booth

  The Sign for This, Vela, June 29

  Robert Boucheron

  Redbud Lane, MAKE, no. 16

  Nina Boutsikaris

  I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry, Redivider, vol. 13, no. 1

  Chandra A. Bozelko

  The Right to Read, Quartz, August 13

  Michelle Bracken

  Eating Together, Baltimore Review, Winter

  Diane Bracuk

  Doughnut Eaters, Prism, Spring

  Gayle Brandeis

  IceTown, Sport Literate, vol. 9, no. 1

  Michael Brandow

  Don’t Buy This Dog, The Village Voice, December 9–15

  Anne Brannen

  Agents of Death, Creative Nonfiction, Fall

  Blair Braverman

  Welcome to Dog World! The Atavist Magazine, June

  Molly Brodak

  Bandit, Granta, no. 132

  Taffy Brodesser-Akner

  Turbulent Calm, Good, Spring

  Mike Broida

  Odysseus at Teleyplos, The Rumpus, November 18

  Victor Brombert

  Between Two Worlds, The Hudson Review, Autumn

  Nick Bromell

  Dignity: A Word for Democracy, Raritan, Summer

  David Bromwich

  Trapped in the Virtual Classroom, The New York Review of Books, July 9

  Victoria Brown

  Nice Girl and Small Man, Apogee, no. 6

  Robert S. Brunk

  We Shall All Be Forgotten, North Dakota Quarterly, vol. 80, no. 3

  Lucy Bryan

  In Between Places, Quarterly West, October 29

  Christopher Buckley

  The Ontology of Hermeneutics, Catamaran, Spring

  Frank Bures

  Beyond Belief, The Rotarian, August

  Rose Burke

  Thirteen Stages of Grief, The Southampton Review, Summer/Fall

  Amy Butcher

  A Slow Kind of Unraveling, Gulf Coast, Winter/Spring

  David Byrne

  A Matter of the Skies, Boston Review, January/February

  Michelle Cacho-Negrete

  First Husband, North American Review, Summer

  Garnette Cadogan

  Black and Blue, Freeman’s, no. 1

  Pablo Calvi

  Secret Reserves, The Believer, Fall

  Shannon Michael Cane

  Xerox, Paper, Scissors, Aperture, Spring

  Kelly Grey Carlisle

  Permutations of X, New England Review, vol. 35, no. 4

  Tom Carson

  Clans of the Cathode, The Baffler,
no. 29

  Liane Kupperberg Carter

  A Room of My Own, Manifest-Station, October 28

  Doug Paul Case

  On Locker Rooms and Looking, December, Spring/Summer

  Christopher Chambers

  Amplifier, The Southern Review, Summer

  J’Lyn Chapman

  The Good Beast, Denver Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 3

  Wynn Chapman

  The War of the Ashes, Blackbird, Fall

  Julie Chinitz

  Sleepless Nights with Khaled El-Masri, Confrontation, Fall

  Roohi Choudhry

  On Island, The Butter, March 2

  Jill Christman

  Going Back to Plum Island, River Teeth, Fall

  Amy Clark

  The Rocks, The Chattahoochee Review, Spring

  Susannah Clark

  Signs (2002), Under the Gum Tree, April

  Ta-Nehisi Coates

  Letter to My Son, The Atlantic, September

  Alexis Coe

  Dispatches from the Russian River: Locked and Loaded, Pacific Standard, May 1

  Judith Ortiz Cofer

  Display Only, Hotel Amerika, Winter

  Andrew D. Cohen

  To the Old Country, Michigan Quarterly Review, Winter

  Helen Degen Cohen

  The Sin of Choreography, West Branch, Winter

  Paula Marantz Cohen

  On Granite Countertops and Wolf Ovens, The Southwest Review, vol. 100, no. 1

  Charisse Coleman

  The Cafe Book, Water-Stone Review, no. 18

  Philip Connors

  Confirmation, n+1, Spring

  Julia Cooke

  The Art of Participation, A Public Space, no. 22

  Beth Cooley

  Colleville-Montgomery, Mid-American Review, vol. 36, no. 1

  Bernard Cooper

  The Uses of the Ghoulish, Story Quarterly, no. 48