This collection of essays reflects a year of American lives embattled by situations outside of our control as individuals. For this reason, I find it interesting enough to read and recommend. Some of these essays are better than others which could be said of any anthology, I guess. Some don’t read as literary essays in my opinion, as much as an opinion article in a news outlet. But some stand out to me as essays I’d teach: Jesmyn Ward, Hilton Als, Beth Nguyen, Claire Messud, Wesley Morris, Dawn

Best American Essays 2021 guest edited by Kathryn Schulz and series editor Robert Atwan was a healthy antidote to the dark and difficult Best American Short Stories 2021. While BAE 2021 covers many of the same areas of surrus as BASS 2021, it offers more hope and some solutions. BAE 2021 suggests that all is not lost. By far the most stunning essay in the collection is Jesmyn Ward’s “Witness and Respair” in which she tells the story of her partner’s death from Covid and how grief was multiplied

It was OK. I'm sure everything in this volume is very well written but either the topics weren't interesting to me OR they were interesting, or at least, they will be when some time has passed. It's too soon for me to be reading about Covid-19 and pandemics (and endemics)...we're still in several!

The guest editor, Kathyrn Schulz, is a staff writer at the New Yorker (which should really automatically disqualify her from being the judge), so this collection, dissappointingly, over-relies on New York publications. Out of 20 essays selected, 6 are New York publishing world centered: 2 from New Yorker, 3 from the New York Times Magazine (not a place I typically find innovative and inspiring essays), 1 from the New York Review of Books. Then there's 1 from Harper's and 1 from Vanity Fair. Over...

So many of these essays were extraordinary...Loved almost every one. Several about personal experiences during the covid shutdown, and caring for a very sick husband who contracted covid but was told to stay at home, since he didn't have breathing issues. Also Tony Hoagland's gorgeous meditations on his final months. I'm a fan of his poetry and this moved me to a kind of blissful sorrow. "Blissful," because the telling felt so true, and so singular.Elizabeth Alexander's essay, "The Trayvon Gener...

This is an incredible collection of essays published throughout 2020, many of which deal with the grief and pain of that year (that still continues to the present). The crowning achievement here is Jesmyn Ward's "Witness and Respair"--what an incredible piece of writing.

I try to read this anthology cover to cover every year. I have worked some with series editor Bob Atwan, a great guy who’s been supportive of me and many others, but I’ve never been afraid to criticize annual volumes that seem to me to get the idea of the essay wrong. I missed last year, which is ironic, because – in a bucket-list success – my essay “My Mother is a Cat” was included as part of the collection’s long-list. That’s all by way of bolstering my credentials for declaring this the best

Not a great year but Hilton Als’s and Jesmyn Ward’s were amazing

As usual there are some stellar works here. Maybe I am tapped out on Covid content, as I wish there had been a little less about it. Still, it makes perfect sense that the pandemic would weigh so heavily. Well worth reading and teaching from.

These anthologies are always hit or miss - I find that I usually do rank them a 3 on a scale of 5 because of this. While it is published in and titled with the year 2021, this is actual comprised of essays published in 2020, a year of pandemic and protest like no other we had previously experienced. I usually really enjoy how all-encompassing essays in the TBAE editions are, but these felt very much so like current events pieces, which is apt for the editor, who is a staff writer at the New York...

Maybe it's a 4.5 rounded down. Maybe 3.5 rounded up. I cried over a couple of these essays, had to skim passages in others. I nearly gave up entirely early on, reading other books until after completing the Science and Nature Writing collection in this series I came back to the essays. There are a few Covid essays, because nothing in the past two years is distinct from that world disaster, and no one was more touching than Jesamyn Ward right at the end; but Wesley Morris reviewed lifetimes in on...

This is an eclectic collection of essays published in major publications that somewhat vary in quality. Some of the highlights here for me were crushing "Apparent" by Beth Nguyen about meeting her estranged mother after their life so cruelly set them apart and "Witness and Respair" by Jesmyn Ward on the loss of her husband and the grief that followed. Jesmyn Ward's piece is probably the strongest of the selection.Some of these essays were insightful and interesting, if not as personal, like "Kit...

Highlights:The Trayvon Generation by Elizabeth Alexander (The New Yorker)The Broken Country by Molly McCully Brown (Virginia Quarterly Review)The Kitchen is Closed by Gabrielle Hamilton (New York Times Magazine)Insane After Coronavirus? by Patricia Lockwood (London Review of Books)What Money Can't Buy by Dawn Lundy Martin (Ploughshares) The Designated Mourner by Fintan O'Toole (New York Review of Books)In Orbit by Daniel Suarez (The Threepenny Review)Witness and Respair by Jesmyn Ward (Vanity Fa...

The essays included in this book are each unique, emotional, and profound. They look at aspects of both personal and community life in America right now. Many of them I think will stay with me, especially "The Kitchen is Closed" and "Witness and Respair." Many of them tackle the way that life has fundamentally changed with the Pandemic we are all still dealing with, and the suffering that has accompanied those changes.

I thoroughly enjoyed this year's (or rather 2020's) selection of Best American Essays edited by Kathryn Schulz and Robert Atwan. Did I love every essay? No, of course not. There were essays that I found interesting, while aware that they weren't for me ("Acceptance Parenting" by Agnes Callard) and others that I ended up skimming through that used a lot of words to say very little in a very confusing manner. But for the most part, I thought this was a solid selection of essays that both acknowled...

I try to read this series every year, but the 2021 volume (which covers 2020) was disappointing throughout. I naively assumed the 2021 entry would include insightful, even profound, commentary on the first year of the pandemic, but almost all of the pieces were undistinguished. Standouts in my view were the Greg Jackson and Barry Lopez pieces (and it's telling that the Lopez one had nothing to do with the pandemic). The rest were ordinary or worse than ordinary. I give this volume two stars rath...

The standouts for me were Greg Jackson's "Vicious Cycles," Barry Lopez's "Love in a Time of Terror," Dawn Lundy Martin's "What Money Can't Buy," and Wesley Morris's "My Mustache" - though I have to add that reading Claire Messud's "Two Women" at the same time I re-read The Woman Upstairs was...enlightening. 3.5/5 stars for the collection overall.

3.5 stars. Most of the essays in this collection really connected with me, but there were two things really brought the grade down. One was a matter of selection: one of the essays was so terrible, in my view, that I do not understand how it could have been chosen; it went beyond "this doesn't work for me" all the way to "I do not understand how anybody thought this was a best anything." The other was, I believe an accident of the alphabet. The essays are ordered alphabetically by their authors'...

I guess given the 2021 editor's professional trajectory, it's hardly surprising that so many of these essays were just so topical. But, while there were some that I really loved (Gabrielle Hamilton's account of closing her restaurant Prune during the pandemic for instance), a lot just seemed so predictable. While obviously this past year has left us with much to think about, it seems like an unfortunate sign of the times that this collection offered so few escapes into the new.

what's fun about collections is that it's never so much about what's "best" as it is about the editors' preferences, which can be quite revealing. in the case of these essays, i tended to feel quite in the middle about most of them, but perhaps that has more to do with my preference of form than content. i can appreciate that the writers of these essays have something to say, and admire their bravery for putting their personal thoughts, feelings, and opinions out there for public consumption. it...