Presents a collection of the year's best essays as selected by author and critic Vivian Gornick.

"Although Arthur Krystal shies away from the title of essayist, his essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, the American Scholar, the New York Times Book Review, and other publications. Moreover, such dissimilar critics as Dana Gioia, Morris Dickstein, Edward Mendelson, Christopher Hitchens, and Joseph Epstein have all lauded his work. And his first book, Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature, was a finalist for the 2003 PEN Award...

"In essays that traverse latitudes and continents, John Messick's Compass Lines explores the paths we take toward belonging. Here, broken vehicles mark the porous boundaries between built and natural worlds. Deserted backpacks trace immigration routes along the US-Mexico border. A job fighting wildfire near a ghost town reveals the dangers of a life spent wandering. Slowly, as Messick learns the rhythms of seasons-through wing prints on snow, cupboard...

"Joan Acocella was "one of our finest cultural critics" (Edward Hirsch), and she had the rare ability to examine literature and unearth the lives contained within it-its authors, its subjects, and the communities from which it springs. In her hands, arts criticism was a celebration and an investigation, and her essays pulse with unadulterated enthusiasm. As Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "Hers is a vision that allows art...

H.L. Mencken was the most provocative and influential journalist and cultural critic in twentieth-century America. In this volume and a companion, The Library of America presents all six series of Prejudices (1919-1927), the iconoclastic collections that helped blast American literature out of its complacency and into a new age of frankness and maturity. The fantastic linguistic inventiveness, full-bodied humor, and unwaveringly fierce courage of...

"A compelling record of one year in the life of a writer, including observations about movies, art, music, friendship, travel, and family. The essay is the most pluckily pedestrian and blithely transgressive of literary genres, the one that is most at large and in need, picking through the accumulated disjecta of daily life and personal and social history to take what it needs and remake it as it sees fit. It is, at its lively best, quite indifferent...

"From graffiti gangs and Grand Theft Auto to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, in these essays, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. She asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing. Starting with Hodson's own work experience, which ranges from the mundane to the bizarre--including...

Presents a collection of the year's best essays as selected by best-selling author Alexander Chee.