The Best American Essays 2021 – Kathryn Schulz

A collection of the year’s best essays, selected by award-winning journalist and New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz

“The world is abundant even in bad times,” guest editor Kathryn Schulz writes in her introduction, “it is lush with interestingness, and always, somewhere, offering up consolation or beauty or humor or happiness, or at least the hope of future happiness.” The essays Schulz selected are a powerful time capsule of 2020, showcasing that even if our lives as we knew them stopped, the beauty to be found in them flourished. From an intimate account of nursing a loved one in the early days of the pandemic, to a masterful portrait of grieving the loss of a husband as the country grieved the loss of George Floyd, this collection brilliantly shapes the grief, hardship, and hope of a singular year.

The Best American Essays 2021 includes
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER – HILTON ALS – GABRIELLE HAMILTON – RUCHIR JOSHI – PATRICIA LOCKWOOD- CLAIRE MESSUD – WESLEY MORRIS – BETH NGUYEN – JESMYN WARD and others.

ROBERT ATWAN has been the series editor of The Best American Essays since its inception in 1986. He has edited numerous literary anthologies and written essays and reviews for periodicals nationwide.

KATHRYN SCHULZ is an American journalist and author and the former book critic for New York magazine. She joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2015 and won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing at The New Yorker.