best american essays submissions 2021

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The Best American Essays 2021

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“The world is abundant even in bad times; 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,” writes guest editor Kathryn Schulz in the introduction to The Best American Essays 2021 . Featuring essays by Elizabeth Alexander, Molly McCully Brown, Dawn Lundy Martin, and Wesley Morris, to name a few, this installment of the annual anthology captures writers at work during a historic year of grief and tumult. From an intimate account of nursing a loved one during the pandemic to an exploration of the political and aesthetic history of a mustache, this collection demonstrates what it is to be writing during an unprecedented time, offering readers and writers solace and inspiration through rigorous prose.  

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Here are the guest editors for the Best American Series 2021.

Do you like the Best American series? Of course you do! Each book in the annual series showcases of best short fiction and nonfiction in a given year, from short stories to essays, travel writing, to food writing. Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites, and a special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the very best pieces for the anthology.

  We’re excited to announce the guest editors for the Best American 2021 series:

The Best American Short Stories 2021  will be guest edited by Jesmyn Ward (series editor Heidi Pitlor) Ward is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University. She is the author of the novels  Where the Line Bleeds   and  Salvage the Bones , which won the 2011 National Book Award, and  Sing, Unburied, Sing , which won the 2017 National Book Award. She is also the editor of the anthology  The Fire This Time  and the author of the memoir  Men We Reaped , which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The Best American Essays 2021 will be guest edited by Kathryn Schulz (series editor Robert Atwan) Schulz is an American journalist and author, and a staff writer for The New Yorker  who won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.

The Best American Mystery & Suspense 2021 will be guest edited by Alafair Burke (series editor Steph Cha) Burke is the New York Times  and internationally bestselling author of eighteen novels. Her recent novel,  The Wife ,  is being adapted into a film by Amazon Studios, with Alafair writing the screenplay.

The Best American Food Writing 2021 will be guest edited by Gabrielle Hamilton (series editor Silvia Killingsworth) Hamilton is the chef and owner of Prune, a restaurant in New York City, and the author of Blood, Bones, and Butter , a memoir.

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 will be guest edited by Veronica Roth (series editor John Joseph Adams) Roth is the #1 New York Times  best-selling author of the Divergent series, the Carve the Mark duology, and  Chosen Ones . 

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2021 will be guest edited by Ed Yong (series editor Jaime Green) Yong is an award-winning science writer on the staff of the Atlantic  and is the best-selling author of  I Contain Multitudes . 

The Best American Travel Writing 2021 will be guest edited by Padma Lakshmi (series editor Jason Wilson) Lakshmi is the Emmy-nominated host and executive producer of Bravo’s Emmy award-winning  Top Chef , currently in its 18th season, and creator and host of acclaimed Hulu series  Taste the Nation . She is internationally known as an actress, food expert, model, and  New York Times  best-selling author.

These editions go on sale on Oct. 12, 2021.

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ebook ∣ Best American Essays

By kathryn schulz.

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9780358381754

Best American Essays

Kathryn Schulz

HarperCollins

12 October 2021

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The Best American Essays 2021

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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

• Kathryn Schulz - Editor
• Robert Atwan - Author

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• Release date: April 16, 2024

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• ISBN: 9780358381228
• File size: 3246 KB

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Publisher: HarperCollins

Kindle Book Release date: April 16, 2024

OverDrive Read ISBN: 9780358381228 Release date: April 16, 2024

EPUB ebook ISBN: 9780358381228 File size: 3246 KB Release date: April 16, 2024

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• Languages English

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