The Best American Essays series has been running since 1986, and its annual publication does something useful: it takes a form that lives dispersed across dozens of magazines, journals, and websites and gathers it into a single place, making visible the shape of what essayists are thinking about in a given year.
The 2025 volume, guest-edited by Wesley Morris — the Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic at The New York Times — is one of the stronger recent editions. Morris has made choices that reflect his particular intelligence: a journalist's interest in culture and its institutions, a critic's eye for formal ambition, and a willingness to include essays that argue positions rather than merely observe situations.
The essay as a form
The essay is the most elastic of literary forms. It can be a memoir, an argument, a lyric meditation, a reported piece, or any combination of these. What distinguishes it from journalism is the presence of the writer's mind — not as a reporting instrument but as a subject of inquiry in its own right. The essayist is always, to some degree, trying to think something out on the page, and the reader is invited to watch the thinking happen.
Morris has favoured essays that take this idea seriously: pieces that don't know their conclusions when they begin, that change direction in response to their own discoveries, that end in a different place than they started. This is harder than it looks, and it is what separates the best essays from well-written opinion pieces.
Standout pieces
Without spoiling the pleasures of discovery: the collection's most formally ambitious piece concerns grief and its relation to physical space — a meditation that moves between the personal and the architectural in ways that shouldn't cohere but do. There is also an extraordinary essay on competitive eating that manages to be funny, sad, and genuinely analytical simultaneously. And a short essay on the experience of reading on a screen versus on paper that says something new about a topic that has generated a great deal of banality.
The Verdict
An excellent argument for the essay as the most alive form of literary nonfiction currently being practised. Read it alongside a notebook — the best essays demand a response, and the response is often the beginning of your own thinking.