The Best American Essays 2022
A collection of the year's best essays, selected by award-winning writer Alexander Chee.
Alexander Chee, an essayist of "virtuosity and power" (Washington Post), selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.
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Become an affiliateAlexander Chee is the author of the novels The Queen of the Night and Edinburgh and the acclaimed essay collection How to Write An Autobiographical Novel. He is a contributing editor at the New Republic, an editor-at-large at Virginia Quarterly Review, and a critic-at-large at the Los Angeles Times. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2016, the New York Times Magazine, Slate, Guernica, and Tin House, among others. He is an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College.
"New Yorker writer Schulz (Being Wrong) collects essays that skillfully combine journalistic and literary sensibilities in this powerful addition to the annual anthology series... This is a moving retrospective of a singular year." -- Publishers Weekly on The Best American Essays 2021
"These essays challenge personal and political assumptions and show us life in all its complexities and contradictions. Which in this American moment, and in every other, matters." -- USA Today
"[A] thoughtful entry in the long-running series...The works in this year's collection are a mix of the disconcerting, the probing, and the self-reflective, and well-suited to challenging times." -- Publishers Weekly