The Best American Essays 2014

The Best American Series

In our age of “trigger warnings” and jeopardized free expression, The Best American Essays 2014 does not shy away from shocking extremes, ambiguities, or dualities. As guest editor John Jeremiah Sullivan notes, the essay “assumes many two-sided forms,” and these diverse pieces capture all the conceptions of what an essay can be: the loose and the strict, “the flourish and the finished, the try and the trial.” His choices embrace the high and the low, the memoirist’s confession and the journalist’s reportage, and all the gray area in between. From a hotel in Mongolia to a Clockwork Orange–like Baltimore, from a Rome emergency room to Burning Man, these diverse pieces surprise and entertain, inform and titillate.

The Best American Essays 2014 includes Kristin Dombek, Dave Eggers, Leslie Jamison, Ariel Levy, Yiyun Li, Barry Lopez, Zadie Smith, Wells Tower, James Wood, and others.

[INSERT AUTHOR PHOTO] John Jeremiah Sullivan, editor, is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the southern editor of the Paris Review. He’s been the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, two National Magazine Awards, a Pushcart Prize, an M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award, and a fellowship at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He is the author of Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son and Pulphead: Essays.

Robert Atwan, the series editor of The Best American Essays since its inception in 1986, has published on a wide variety of subjects, from American advertising and early photography to ancient divination and Shakespeare. His criticism, essays, humor, poetry, and fiction have appeared in numerous periodicals nationwide.