The Best American Essays 2020 (2020)
The Best American Essays 2020 is a 2020 book written by André Aciman and Robert Atwan.
Each fall this series gathers the year's strongest short nonfiction, and the 2020 edition carries André Aciman's fingerprints as guest editor alongside series editor Robert Atwan. The pieces range across memory, family, place, illness, politics, and the small private reckonings that essayists do best. Aciman, a writer drawn to longing and the texture of the past, favors work that thinks on the page rather than lectures from it. The result is a cross-section of American voices working in the form's most flexible register, personal one moment, reported the next, always moving toward some earned insight.
Quick answers
What is The Best American Essays 2020 about?
Each fall this series gathers the year's strongest short nonfiction, and the 2020 edition carries André Aciman's fingerprints as guest editor alongside series editor Robert Atwan. The pieces range across memory, family, place, illness, politics, and the small private reckonings that essayists do best. Aciman, a writer drawn to longing and the texture of the past, favors work that thinks on the page rather than lectures from it. The result is a cross-section of American voices working in the form's most flexible register, personal one moment, reported the next, always moving toward some earned insight.
When was The Best American Essays 2020 published?
The Best American Essays 2020 was published in 2020.
Who made The Best American Essays 2020?
The Best American Essays 2020 was written by André Aciman and Robert Atwan.
A few thoughts on The Best American Essays 2020
Read it beside André Aciman's own Call Me by Your Name for the same attention to memory and desire. On screen, the documentary anthology feel carries over to Five Came Back, which treats craft and witness with equal seriousness. Joan Didion's essays remain the high bar this collection reaches toward.
André Aciman's own essays and fiction on memory and longing
Aciman guest edits this anthology with his own preoccupations showing through: memory, exile, and desire examined slowly rather than resolved. His memoir, his novel, and the film adapted from his fiction share that same patient attention to longing, the register he clearly looked for when choosing which essays belonged in this collection.
More essay anthologies from the same 'Best American' tradition
This 2020 volume is one snapshot in a series that runs every year, and the range holds even when the guest editor changes. These neighboring anthologies gather nonfiction, travel writing, and offbeat picks from other years and other editors, proof the format keeps finding strong, varied American voices worth collecting.
Single-author essay collections that think instead of lecture
The 2020 volume favors essayists who work things out on the page rather than argue a point, and these single-author collections do the same at book length. E. B. White, Gore Vidal, Jonathan Franzen, Truman Capote, James Baldwin, Zadie Smith and Audre Lorde each turn private observation into essays that stay personal even while reaching toward something larger.