Edited by Alexander Chee; Robert Atwan is the series editor.
October–November 2026
An annual series of… the title says it all. I’m reading it, partly out of a sense of duty to stay abreast of what other’s think of as the vanguard of today’s essay-writing. Reading previous books in this series leaves me with low expectations, but I’ve generally encountered a couple of pieces (and thus essayists) I’ve liked—most recently Laurie(?) Jamieson’s “A Street of Splendid Strangers.” This particular volume is the latest one that Magers and Quinn Booksellers, my local independent bookstore, had on hand.
BRIAN BLANCHFIELD: Abasement —from Territory
An odd essay about the process of buying a house. The buyers are a gay couple, or perhaps one member of a gay couple, trying to conceal their gay-couplehood from the sellers, who seem to be very right-wing and homophobic.
What makes the essay odd is that from the opening describes the narrator as under arrest for having snuck into the to-be-purchased house the night before the inspection and spent the night in the basement. Furthermore, the narrator brought along a manuscript of his autobiography that he left by his cot, and one of the sellers has discovered it and is leafing through it. If taken literally, this behavior seems, at the least to be really strange. Perhaps it is a metaphor for being gay and needing, in this case, to step back into the closet?
A recurring motif, that begins each paragraph, is the phrase “I had the right to say nothing at all.” And then each paragraph fills in a bit of the back story. But nothing explains the narrator’s actions, nor does the story move beyond the apparent moment of interrogation. It’s a snapshot of a bizarre and ambiguous situation.
The writing was OK but not notable. It seems odd to open with such a strange event, and not proffer any explanation.
ELISSA WASHUTA: Drinking Story—from Harper’s Bazaar
A rather disconnected, chaotic account of quitting drinking—all night restaurants, AA meetings, bars, insomnia, depression and malaise. I suppose the structureless of the narrative reflects the experience, or perhaps the narrator’s life. The writing was OK but not notable; the account did not engage me.
DEBRA GWARTNEY: Fire and Ice—from Granta
An account of the weeks (months?) before the death of Barry Lopez, the noted environmental essayist and writer. He is dying of cancer, very focused on writing one last essay to the neglect of spending time with his loved ones, and a wildfire has burned through the neighborhood in which they lived, forcing them into temporary housing which is where he will die. It is an account of difficulties, confusion on his part, sadness and loneliness on the part of his wife, with a dollop of grace at the end. This feels more like a chapter of a memoir than an essay, but, unlike the first two, at least it has a degree of structure to it and a bit of a narrative arc.
VAUHINI VARA: GhOStS—from The Believer
An interesting exercise, if not one that convinced me. The author has never been able to write about the death of her sister, but undertakes the task in the following way. She writes a sentence or short paragraph, and then gives it to ChatGPT to finish. Her words are in bold; GPT’s are in regular face. Then, continuing on from her own words, she adds a bit more, and then asks ChatGPT to finish. And so on, for 9 rounds. She ends with 7 paragraphs of her own words, with a final, single sentence added on by GPT. The final account did not strike me as compelling or even well structured, though I suppose at a personal level it was a victory for her to be able to write about it.
I tried to analyze the text, to see if the words ChatGPT added somehow goaded her own, or pushed her in a different direction, but I could not see any such effects. It would have been nice if she’d reflected on this, but perhaps that’s not the point. Though I’m not sure what the point was. For the purpose of the ‘essay,’ there was a lot of repeated words as a consequence of her process, and quite a lot of the words were by ChatGPT and not, in any way, true.
MELISSA FEBOS: The Wild, Sublime Body—from The Yale Review
Finally, an essay I appreciate, though the concerns it articulates are far from my experience. The author—a lesbian—describes growing up and feeling alienated from her large, strong, active body. The messages she was getting, about how to be feminine, were at such odds with the way she was, and the ways in which she was inclined to behave. It was only gradually, as she grew into her thirties, that she came to a degree of self-acceptance.
There’s a good narrative arc, some nice images—tearing into a watermelon as a young girl, enacting the ‘wildness’ inside her—as well as some excellent writing. A few turns of phrase I like:
- …you could not live with an open channel to the sublime inside of you; it was impossible to hold on to the collective story of human life with the live cord writhing through you, showering sparks like a downed wire in a hurricane.
[…]
I step out of myself, like a wheel that has lost its track.
ANTHONY VEASNA: SO. Baby Yeah—from n+ I
JUNG HAE CHAE: The Gye, the No-Name Hair Salon, the Coup d’Etat, and the Small Dreamers—from New England Review
JUSTIN TORRES: It Had to Be Gold—from Los Angeles Times Image
ALEX MARZANO-LESNEVICH: Futurity—from Harvard Review
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