The Contemporary American Essay

from the Introduction by Phillip Lopate


The first quarter of the twenty-first century has been an uneasy time of rupture and anxiety, filled with historic challenges and opportunities. In that close to twenty-five-year span, the United States witnessed the ominous opening shot of September 11th, followed by the seemingly unending Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the effort to control HIV/AIDS, the 2008 recession, the election of the first African American president, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the contentious reign of Donald Trump, the stepped-up restriction of immigrants, the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, and the coronavirus pandemic, just to name a few major events. Intriguingly, the essay has blossomed during this time, in what many would deem an exceptionally good period for literary nonfiction if not a golden one, then at least a silver: I think we can agree that there has been a remarkable outpouring of new and older voices responding to this perplexing moment in a form uniquely amenable to the processing of uncertainty.

When the century began, essays were considered box office poison; editors would sometimes disguise collections of the stuff by packaging them as theme-driven memoirs. All that has changed: a generation of younger readers has embraced the essay form and made their favorite authors into bestsellers. We could speculate on the reasons for this growing popularity the hunger for humane, authentic voices trying to get at least a partial grip on the truth in the face of so much political mendacity and information overload; the convenient, bite-sized nature of essays that require no excessive time commitment; the rise of identity politics and its promotion of eloquent spokespersons. Rather than trying to figure out why it s happening, what s important is to chart the high points of this resurgence, and to account for the range of styles, subgenres, experimental approaches, and moral positions that characterize the contemporary

Introduction by Phillip Lopate

I Am the Happiness of This World by Hilton Als
One Summer by Nicholson Baker
Portrait of the Bagel as a Young Man by Thomas Beller 
"Brave Face" by Sven Birkerts       
Excerpt from "On Immunity" by Eula Biss     
Tactless by Mary Cappello          
Decreation by Anne Carson         
Home Alone by Terry Castle       
Girl by Alexander Chee        
Black Body by Teju Cole
Greedy Sleep by Bernard Cooper
The Doctor Is a Woman by Sloane Crosley      
Loitering by Charles D'Ambrosio            
Matricide by Meghan Daum        
Joyas Voladoras by Brian Doyle
Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (with particular reference to Doughnut Plant doughnuts) by Geoff Dyer          
CID LAX BOG by Lina Ferreira                
Doing No Harm: Some Thoughts on Reading and Writing in the Age of Umbrage by Lynn Freed 
The Case of the Angry Daughter by Rivka Galchen      
Scat by Ross Gay    
On Revenge by Louise Glück      
Faculty Wife by Emily Fox Gordon    
Other People s Secrets by Patricia Hampl          
The Aquarium by Aleksandar Hemon     
The Terror of Love by Samantha Irby    
The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison    
Negroland by Margo Jefferson    
Domestic Gulags by Laura

PHILLIP LOPATE is the author of To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction and four essay collections, Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, and Portrait Inside My Head. He is the editor of the anthologies The Glorious American Essay, The Golden Age of the American Essay, The Art of the Personal Essay, Writing New York, and American Movie Critics. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. He is a professor of writing at Columbia University's nonfiction MFA program and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

What s marvelous is the way Lopate s anthologies . . . manage to be not only comprehensive monuments of deep expertise, but such continuously fresh and thrilling reading companions. Jonathan Lethem, author of The Feral Detective
 
Phillip Lopate is one of the most brilliant and original essayists now working. Louise Glück, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature