Jeremy Jones seeks solid ground in his new hybrid work of nonfiction, part biography, part memoir, part detective story, part ghost story. Readers of Cipher will recognize Jones’ pull toward his Blue Ridge Mountain family land that pulses through his first memoir Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland (Blair, 2014), along with the thoughtful approach to Appalachian—and American—history through a personal lens. But this new book also yearns for a narrative solid ground and the way it can make a meaningful whole of disparate parts, and for the answers to be found in genetic coding about who we are and who we might become.

Twice Laura Julier has fallen deeply in love—with a place. The first is a small Iowa City home with a lush yard where she lived for eight years. The second is the focus of her memoir Off Izaak Walton Road:  a small patch of land and ramshackle cabin on the Iowa River. The eccentric owner lives part time in Belize, so invites Julier to make the place her second home. For seven years, whenever Julier has a break from teaching at Michigan State University, she makes her pilgrimage. The book traces her love affair from love-at-first-sight, through the deep attachment, to complication and self-examination, to letting go–and in the process invites readers to examine their own psychology and relationship to place and to loss.  

In her memoir-in-essays entitled Funeral Playlist, Sarah Gorham prepares an actual playlist befitting an intentional celebration of life. Gorham’s musical choices are real; her analytic response, contemporary. The result is an enthralling series of essays that evoke compassion, provide consolation, and—through music and writing—create art centered around death. Gorham’s exploration of the playlist she would want at her funeral is not morbid, though, and each essay is not necessarily part of the list as the collection is full of shouts and joy.

Who among us knows how we will measure up when the person we love is diagnosed with a terrible illness that will alter the course of our life? Will we run away, wash our hands of the affair, saying we didn’t sign up for this? Or will we hold fast? Imagine being twenty-three years old, recently graduated from college, and falling in love with a twenty-seven-year-old who, though he’s the father of three children and in the midst of a divorce, you fully commit yourself to. An easy enough commitment when in the first throes of love. Now imagine yourself two years later when the man you followed is diagnosed with terminal cancer.  How will you respond to this test of your love and character? That is the underlying question that runs through Maureen Stanton’s harrowing memoir The Murmur of Everything Moving, winner of the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence. 

What makes Nicole Graev Lipson’s debut memoir-in-essays Mothers and Other Fictional Characters (Chronicle Prism) so alluring is that it feels like a transgressive read. This isn’t because its narrator—a wife and mother of three, a former English teacher, happily married, deeply in love with her children—once contemplated an affair with a younger man, or admits her fervent desire for solitude, or struggles with herself over aging and beauty standards, though she does all of these things in clear-eyed yet mellifluous prose that makes these experiences fresh again.

Grace Loh Prasad’s debut memoir, The Translator’s Daughter, both tenderly explores the death of loved ones overseas, and the precariousness and ordinariness of living as a third-culture kid. Prasad details her struggle for belonging as an itinerant woman, trying to maintain connections to her culture and language while still creating a life of her own in California.

It is no criticism of Woman Surrounded by Water to say that this exquisitely lyric memoir, with its remarkable range of narrative forms, contains few plot surprises. Put simply, water and men represent danger, while art, books, food, and female ancestors all seem to provide solace. These themes play across the memoir’s three major sections, land, shore, and ocean, like subtly pleasing musical motifs.

The Exit is the Entrance is a collection of essays on leaving—going to as well as away from—college, the military, relationships, wrong decisions. It is a series of ruminative journeys written in first, second, and third person long-form essays, in which Paar explores creativity, erasure, our connection to the earth and each other in lyrical prose. Set mostly in the Southwestern United States, Paar also travels across back and forth across the country
and down to Peru.

Lucas Mann’s essay collection Attachments: Essays on Fatherhood and Other Performances interrogates fatherhood tropes, both challenging them and recognizing their role in describing and creating the cultural landscape of Mann’s own early fatherhood.

By Joanna Eleftheriou
With this collection of gorgeous new essays, Sayantani Dasgupta designs for her readers a magical craft that transports us to unexpected places. Alongside her, we fly from Moscow, Idaho, to Florence, Italy and from Kolkata, India (population: four and half million) to a cemetery in Beaufort, North Carolina (population: four and half thousand).

By Mark Neely
In the opening essay of this witty and incisive debut collection, Brooke Champagne says that “telling and listening to stories” is her “singular affinity,” and the essays that follow are, in part, an attempt to both explain the origins of this affinity and an exploration of how such stories shape our lives. As far as origins go, Champagne comes from a family of larger-than-life characters who aren’t afraid to sprinkle a little fiction into their tales, which is perhaps one reason Champagne clings so fiercely to the truth. There’s her Ecuadorian grandmother, Lala, equal parts mystical and profane, who teaches her granddaughter how to navigate a world rigged to minimize the contributions of Latina women, particularly free spirits such as herself. Lala “sticks it to the man” by shoplifting cheap toys—justifying her habit by only taking items that lack price tags—and punishes her philandering husband by shoving a hot pepper where the sun don’t shine. 

By Jill Christman
In the interest of full disclosure—which, as an essayist, serial memoirist, and River Teeth editor, is always my interest—I need to tell you that I knew Jeff Muse and Dear Park Ranger when. Many years ago, when I was a faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at Ashland University, Jeff Muse was my student. (“Muse?” we all said, one after another. “What a great writer name!”) Along with the enduring impression that Jeff Muse is a terrifically nice guy—and can write the heck out of a sentence—is my memory that he served as a Hoosier ambassador, deepening this Oregon girl’s appreciation for both the people and the landscape of Indiana where I had landed—and, shockingly, that he wasn’t a fan of Annie Dillard.

By Thomas Larson
One thing we learn from the later-in-life memoir, or the personal essay writ long, is that it allows us to see the many digressive routes we’ve followed only after a good deal of life has resulted in our “ending up” on any one of these routes, a place much different than where we thought we’d be. Soren Kierkegaard spoke of living life forward, understanding it in retrospect, and Carl Jung said, “One finds one’s destiny on the path one takes to avoid it.” Fate never fails us; it’s got our welfare in mind, but bugger that it is, won’t reveal the plot until, well, it’s time. Because of our unexpected “off ramps,” we need to wait a while and then we may recognize a plan—perhaps the plan—that provides us with some sense of meaning. At times, a pattern to our directionlessness emerges, and anyone, even fools, can say it’s been predesigned. Think of Donald Trump assessing his 78 years (I know it’s a stretch) as a kind of Destiny: the TV brand, elected President on a fluke, convinced that he’s America’s Lord and Fricking Savior.

By Joyce Thompson
At ten, Katya Cengel stopped eating lunch so she could give her money—a dollar a day—to her father to help salve his economic woes after her parents divorced. This act of sacrifice, first, a source of pride, brought on an eating disorder that threatened to end as well as change her life. At 56 pounds and shrinking, she was admitted to the Roth Psychosomatic Unit at Stanford’s Children’s Hospital. One of her early comments, already ironic, is: “Grownups are strange. They make me go to the cafeteria, but no one makes me eat. So, I don’t.” At Roth, when you don’t eat, you get fitted with a straitjacket.

By Amber Dawn Stoner
As North Country: A Pedagogical Almanac opens, author Carolyn Dekker with her dog Beckett,
a border collie, is driving north to Hancock, Michigan, in the Upper Peninsula, which juts into
Lake Superior. Dekker has a new job teaching English literature at Finlandia University. She is
fresh out of a relationship and soon to begin another; she has traveled alone from New England
to embark on her a new life; though nervous and excited, she is mostly looking ahead. She sees
the Quincy Mine, structures that once houses a vibrant copper mine during mid-1800s, a stark
site that graces the cover. She writes, “Views that draw the eye upward have a way of lifting the
heart, too. This steep terrain told me at first glance that I could love this place.” This collection
of essays describes Dekker’s journey to fit in and love the people and the place, nestled in the
north country.

By Katya Cengel
Mako Yoshikawa is on a mission. In her memoir, Secrets of the Sun, she sets out to resolve the enigma of her father, Shoichi, a physicist and man plagued by bipolar illness. Through vivid snapshots, Yoshikawa obsesses over the mystery of her father, a brilliant scientist in the field of nuclear fusion who failed to achieve greatness.

By Judith Sara Gelt
S.L. Wisenberg, the author of several memoirs and editor of Another Chicago Magazine, has compiled a collection of twenty-eight essays, most of them new. In The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home she discovers a world of unexplored personal connections while also diving into Judaism, women’s history, and human nature. Throughout, her voice is candid and confident.

By Tarn Wilson
When Steven Harvey was eleven, his mother died by suicide. Three weeks later, his father married a woman with whom he’d been having an affair. The family never spoke of her death, and for much of his life, Harvey blocked this and other bad memories of his childhood.

By Glen Retief
Part bird book, part Native Great Plains history, part meditation on the author’s mixed Irish American and Lakota background, and part exploration of how cultures conceive the relationship between humans and other sentient beings, Birding While Indian provides a thoughtful contribution to Native American and environmental studies.

By Lara Lillibridge
Of course, each person’s experience with a shared disability is different just as every queer person’s experience is different—another aspect of this narrative that drew me in. Graybeal has two distinct marginalized identities to contend with, both resulting in vulnerabilities and marginalization. Yet her memoir has little self-pity or anger. Frustration, certainly, but she’s also humorous and self-deprecating, traits very relatable.

By Richard Terrill
On a thematic level, the book is about loss. It’s about how music intended primarily to entertain and thus make a living for its purveyors also rises to the level of artistry. This business of lost masters and an era of Black music we know precious little about informs Blackwood’s task. No easy one either, given all that’s missing. The artists were Black and marginalized, though they were popular among the “race.” There are few written records of their creation. The players, then and after, were the subject of mythmaking, sometimes of their own doing.

By Reneé E. D’Aoust
Our impulses to categorize grief are often impulses to deny it. Is this essay collection a species of cathartic writing or a reclamation of history? Grief remains shattering, shocking, and unbound.

By Briana Avenia-Tapper
In Moscow, where I taught English in 2001, Americans were rare. This meant we enjoyed a certain celebrity. I was often the first American my students met. At least, that’s what they told me. But not Yulia. I was Yulia’s second American.

By Jeff Darren Muse
The more I chewed on my colleague’s words, the more I realized why I like these books and so many others now emerging in the nature writing genre: their stories. Personal stories. In Conversations, Kumar reveals not only the intricacies of avian life, but also her life, her insight, her wisdom.

by Beth Alvarado
His definition of success was probably John Grisham, maybe Tim O’Brien. I had long ago taken to heart Alice Mattison’s advice to resist comparing my writing career with that of others. Still. I spent way too much time mulling my irritation instead of just letting it go. Joan Frank, in her new essay collection, Late Work, writes about that “falling away” of concerns as a writer ages. We sometimes let friendships go, we don’t finish reading books that don’t compel us, we redefine what ambition means, but we can still be caught in the trap of comparing our work, our successes, to those of others.

By Jan Shoemaker
Now that I have crept back into the world and am warily looking around, my curiosity is growling like an empty stomach, and it’s nutrients I crave again—eloquence and insight, irony, paradox, poetry, wit. I am ready to be instructed and I sure as hell want to laugh. 

by Jen Anne Becker
Sarah Cheshire’s chapbook, Unravelings, published in 2017 by Etchings Press, is a work of creative nonfiction in which the author blurs facts so creatively that it is difficult to know what is fiction and what is truth.

by Robert Root
Macdonald will observe and commiserate and perform but seldom stand aloof or remote. Eventually she reaches a point where the goshawk is the dominant partner in their relationship, and she has to recognize how much their roles have altered.

By David MacWilliams
In Patterson’s memoir, sinkholes are metaphorical—vast spaces of emptiness that we’ve created, and that inevitably rise from below, revealing old damage and creating new damage when they emerge, like unspoken secrets no longer silent.

by Mark Neely
The opening chapters of  Let Me Count the Ways  describe Morín’s complicated relationship with his father, a master bricklayer with “the body of an ox” and an outsized personality, a man his son both idolizes and fears becoming.

by Ashley Espinoza
Even though the book’s essays are not in chronological order and do not add up to a full-length memoir, Eleftheriou’s primary theme is clear—her thoughts about identity. In each essay she tries to find her way back. But to where?

By Jessie van Eerden
In American Honey, a memoir-in-essays, Sarah Wells tells the story of a woman becoming a whole version of herself while navigating marriage and embracing a definition of love that abides mistakes and failures. These interconnected essays present a portrait of a self who is committed to deep relationships with others (husband, children, parents, coworkers) and invested in the bonds of love, place, and work as well as the intentionality required to preserve those at-times fragile bonds.

By Carole Mertz
Jill Kandel’s memoir opens with a famous piece of advice from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet: Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. . .. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

That epigraph, referring to “locked rooms” and to matters of the heart, unsettled and quickened my interest in Kandel’s memoir.

By Cyndie Zikmund
The Fact of Memory is an unusual prose experiment. Using Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29,” which begins with the famous line, “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,” the author Aaron Angello takes each word of the sonnet, 114 in total, and uses each word as a springboard for a short ruminative essay. He writes a single page of prose, 114 in total, which become the book’s chapters, the single words the chapter titles.

As a daily regimen, Angello savored, absorbed, and meditated on the impact the word had on him, then wrote his thoughts out in a sort of altered state of consciousness. The result is a meditation on life and memory that is sometimes directly related to the word being studied, the sonnet itself, or, at other times, the process the project inspired.

By Thomas Larson
Emerging in the midlife of the ongoing memoir explosion is what is variously called the bibliomemoir, the memoir/biography, or the writer-on-writer memoir. I like all three but the third type comes, I think, closest to a book that engages with a writer of central importance in one’s personal life and who deserves a paean of sorts to say and show how and why. It’s a book that ostensibly is about the other author, often borne out via the title— My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead, referring, of course, to George Eliot’s masterpiece: note the my—but it really should cover one’s shared experience via the (usually) dead author’s work and a profound self-discovery that experience has hailed. “I could not have known myself fully without having read X.” I’m intrigued by these books, one, in particular, from 2020, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland.

By Emily Waples
CW: Rancher is an essay with rape. This is not to say that Selah Saterstrom’s Rancher is an essay in which rape happens, or that rape is a peripheral event. I use the phrase “with rape” rather than “about rape” to acknowledge Saterstrom’s own assertion of purpose: “This essay isn’t working towards anything,” she writes. “It is a being-with. It is trying to be with something.”

This enduring presence is no small feat, especially when—as Saterstrom intimates by way of, or rather in lieu of, closure—the dominant cultural narrative is that which comes after: the meaning-of, the healing-from, the accounting-for, the reckoning-with. An essay itself, Saterstrom notes, is conceptualized as motion: it turns, we say. But being-with substitutes suspension for motion: it abides, resides. And Saterstrom is preoccupied with one residence in particular, as she announces in the essay’s first line: “My rapist bought a house with a swimming pool in El Paso.”

By Sebastian Matthews
I must admit, before reading Supremely Tiny Acts, I hadn’t read Sonya Huber’s work. When the book arrived on my doorstep recently, I wasn’t sure about its context. Did I order it? Had someone sent it to me as a gift? Was it an advanced reader’s copy? I read the first few pages with mild curiosity; and, enjoying what I read, I put the slim, key-lime green book on my things-to-read pile and promptly forgot about it.

By Robert Root
The back cover of Robert Miltner’s Ohio Apertures asserts that the book’s “brief pieces of creative nonfiction” include “flash memoir, lyric essays, narrative nonfiction, literary nonfiction, travel writing, and historical excavations of place.” In the text no selections are identified with those labels, leaving readers free to apply some themselves as they read. Having skipped that back cover, I read the book first and enjoyed the range of writing it displayed but had to decide for myself about its organization.

Robert Miltner is best known as a prose poet and most of the pieces here reflect in their brevity the concentrated lyricism of his poetry even as their perspectives are expanded and enhanced.

By Marcia Meier
From Michigan and Milkweed come two new books about writing, personal explorations on self, identity, and nonfiction form. Brenda Miller’s A Braided Heart features lovely meditations on her life and the craft of writing. Victoria Chang’s Dear Memory is a stirring series of letters to her forbears, her children, and her mentors on writing, in tandem with meditations on silence and grief. Chang’s writings accompany collages made from diverse graphic elements: photos, marriage certificates, and other artifacts from her parents and grandparents’ lives in China and in the United States, the textured layout also revealing her reflections as a visual artist.

By Penny Guisinger
Tarn Wilson’s memoir in essays, In Praise of Inadequate Gifts, has things to teach us about unusual topics. For example, the first essay teaches us about teeth. Some people’s teeth arrive on schedule and behave the way they’re supposed to, but some don’t. Teeth fall out and get lost. Teeth require nurturing and care. Teeth can disappoint. And speaking of unusual topics, the second essay teaches us about assembling circuit boards. Circuits are “Pretty striped glass beads with wires on the ends, stamped with little numbers” and “black rectangles with curved legs like centipedes.” Arranging and soldering them in place on green, plastic boards is careful work, and even when you follow the instructions you can get burned if you’re not careful. Like teeth, circuits are sleek jewels that are supposed to conform.

By Emily Dillon
Dara McAnulty, an environmental activist from Northern Ireland, may not yet be an American household name like his peer Greta Thunberg, but he certainly stands among the most accomplished champions of the environmental movement today. In his new book, Diary of a Young Naturalist, McAnulty, who is seventeen and lives with autism, writes autobiographically about environmental conservation and activism. The diary entries, written during his thirteenth year, ultimately build an impressive collection that reads as reminiscent of McAnulty’s age and far beyond his years. He maintains a childlike wonder in his descriptions of nature while offering mature perceptions of other people that challenge even the most ardent stereotypes of autism.

By Katy Major
David Lazar’s latest collection, The Celeste Holm Syndrome: On Character Actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age, is an artfully attuned set of essays that analyzes the delightful nuances of cinema’s Golden Age and the author’s love of its movies. The book’s slim black rectangle is screen-like, and it sits, dark and strangely velvety in one’s hands—a diminutive, dense piece on an expansive topic, rich with possibility, like the moment before an artist’s vision is revealed. A microcosm and a world. From the cover, too, a gleam: Celeste Holm’s level gaze meeting ours, her lit eyes enigmatic and beckoning as Eckleburg’s eyes from the cover of The Great Gatsby.

By Rebekah Hoffer
Jason Schwartzman’s first book, No One You Know, contains sixty-two essays—many of them just a few paragraphs long—in a concise 155 pages. Each tiny essay in this fragmented collection illustrates a brief, memorable interaction with a stranger, creating the effect of a photo collage. Settings and characters pass by rapidly. We are invited to eavesdrop on Schwartzman’s meandering examinations of the world, gleaning small epiphanies as he interacts with strangers. Three consecutive essays, for instance, feature a struggling actress on a long bus ride, a scientist giving a presentation about whales, and a pickup basketball game with nameless men. Most of the people in this book, in fact, are nameless. The author refers to them instead by how he knows them: “the boogeyman of our building,” “someone I bumped into on the street,” or “a Chinese man on the phone.”

by David MacWilliams
To look backward and to look around now are equally valid; his main goal is to bear witness to the environmental evils we’ve inflicted on ourselves, and on a much smaller scale, to record some of the kindnesses we’re still capable of.

by Beth Alvarado
I love essays in all their permutations however we decide to collect them and whatever we come to call them: memoir in essays, essay cycle, essay collection, book-length-essay. When writers use these terms descriptively, they are useful in figuring out how the parts relate to one another and to the whole book.

by Krystal Sierra
Tromblay’s account shifts in time between his childhood at Fond du Lac Reservation to his early days in boot camp as a private in the Armed Forces. Time shifts from one chapter to the next, seemingly haphazard as memory does while theme builds on theme and increases in intensity chapter by chapter.

by Cyndie Zikmund
By the fourth essay in the book, I realized, this was not simply a meditation on uncomfortable truths and mythic delusions. It was also, at times, an insightful demonstration of the craft of writing personal essays, experimenting with form, tone, and structure, and providing guideposts for other writers when crafting their work artistically.

by Mark Neely
Though her former doctors may have questioned her trustworthiness, Sawchyn’s readers should have no such concerns. She is a highly likeable, piercingly honest narrator of her own story, unafraid to shine light on her worst moments, or to celebrate her best.

by Robert Root
Elements of memoir run through most essays—reflections on Sanders’ upbringing, his youth, his intimate surroundings. His reflections on the nature of beauty, in “Useless Beauty,” originate from the shell of a chambered nautilus, purchased at a flea market thirty years earlier by his mother.

by Joanna Eleftheriou
Together, these two exceptional works of nonfiction help us deepen our grasp on one of the hardest human truths to learn: we must absorb as much knowledge as we can, but no matter how hard we seek, we know very little for sure.

by Debbie Hagan
Throughout The Blessing, Orr guides readers with a steady, searching, contemplative voice. He combs the past for meaning—not just how it pertains to the deaths of his brothers and mother, but small moments in life, such as a flicker of grief on his father’s face.

by Tarn Wilson
Her themes, likewise, are not merely intellectual, but vulnerable, human—our essential loneliness and longing for connection. Naturally, McClanahan, new to the city, is lonely, but we soon learn that she has touched loneliness before.

by Jill Christman
There are moments in these essays that aren’t for the squeamish or those who prefer to look away. Winograd holds us by the scruffs of our necks and turns our faces to look, and not just once, at the dead and the dying, over and over—trees, birds, calves, fathers—until we have some chance of seeing with her.

by Renée E. D'Aoust
In Sonja Livingston’s The Virgin of Prince Street: Expeditions into Devotion, the author is drawn to explore her youth in the Catholic Church. She longs to return to the intertwined experience of childhood and faith when the two were inseparable.

by Deborah Hall
I was so immersed in Judith Sara Gelt’s memoir Reckless Steps Toward Sanity about her life growing up in a Denver neighborhood in the 1960s and 1970s that I kept entering a time warp. It’s not fair to Gelt’s story that my own memories of living during the same era kept flashing through.

by Joy Gaines-Friedler
Carol Ann Davis’s collection of nine essays is a memoir, a treatise on aesthetic expression, and a philosophical journey through the aftermath of what was, in 2012, the deadliest school shooting in American history. Her son Willem, seven at the time, was at Hawley Elementary, one mile away from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

by Robert Root
We know what she sees, what she feels, what she comprehends, what she discovers; we come away from the reading with a fuller, richer sense of who she is and what she gains from being in the world; and we value being in her company.

by Richard Goodman
For me, this is the ultimate strength of Siberian Exile: the dramatization of an Oedipus-like weight many of us feel about what our parents and grandparents have imbued us with, through deeds, blood, or both. We are what they were, to some extent, no matter what we do.

by Lindsay Hickman
This book is about the people who try and find a way around the gates, the rules, the barriers of language, culture, dialect, and borders to create a life for themselves and their families.

by Glen Retief
At its apex, the memoir of political witness, like its poetic sibling, transcends simple confessionalism or historic documentation to provide a window into what Faulkner called “the human heart in conflict with itself” and what Forché names as a “wound” in consciousness, where “language breaks, becomes tentative, interrogational, kaleidoscopic.”

by Thomas Larson
The surprise of thinking about his evolution as a writer requires some speculative closure. I don’t believe any of us who knew Mike’s avidity with creative nonfiction really understood how he wrenched himself out of baseball and into a literary art. I understand only now that he’s gone how vexed he was by this transition.

By Brandel France de Bravo
While billed as a memoir, Knock Wood, winner of the 2018 Dzanc Nonfiction Prize, is more akin to a theme-and-variations composition: Think love-child of early Bruce Springsteen and Bach’s Goldberg Variations. An acclaimed poet, Militello tells her story in twenty-nine discrete essays that mostly eschew chronology.

By Detrick Hughes
In To Float in the Space Between , Terrance Hayes writes, “One’s poetics should be liquid.” Before grabbing hold of that line, I had already dipped into this book’s structure, a dialogue between Hayes, Etheridge Knight’s life and his poetry, and interviews and stories by writers acquainted with Knight’s work.

By Katy Major
Be with Me Always is Randon Billings Noble’s first book, although she has been a celebrated essayist for at least a decade now. In 2008 Noble published “War Weary from a Dangerous Liaison” in The New York Times’s Modern Love column, retitled here as “Ambush.” The piece recounts Noble’s reaction to a jolting Valentine’s Day email from a contentious past lover and how the potential of a path not chosen can haunt us irresistibly.

By Jenna McGuiggan
Where—or what—is your hearth of hearths? Where is the place you feel most alive or connected? What is the thing that reminds you who you are and to what (or whom) you belong? In all the world, what do you call home? These are some of the questions that Annick Smith and Susan O’Connor pondered as they edited  Hearth: A Global Conversation on Identity, Community, and Place .

By Thomas Larson
There may be no more startling way to bait readers into an essay than this: “Is there a word for the unsettling sensation of sitting down on an unexpectedly warm toilet seat, because someone used it just before you and sat there for a good long while? Maybe something in German?”

By Ana Maria Spagna
Visit Whitman Mission National Historic Site outside of Walla Walla, Washington, on a fall day, and you see golden rolling hills against rich blue sky. Bright clouds float toward flat-topped ridges lined with windmills. The scenery stretches spacious and bucolic and belies the bloody past. Here, on November 29, 1847, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, a doctor and his missionary wife, and eleven others were famously massacred.

By Robert Root
Most days my wife and I read a book aloud at dinnertime and we each read a book silently at bedtime. Sometimes one book reverberates with the other, cumulatively expanding our consciousness. That happened when we read Hope Jahren’s  Lab Girl  together and I read Elizabeth Rush’s  Rising  over the same period. 

By Judith Sara Gelt
Since the 2016 election, most of us have made up our minds about President Donald J. Trump. He’s either shrewd or incompetent. And, as a human being, either noble or immoral. Thus, according to polls (and my family’s political rifts), these dichotomies have left us with our nation’s “great divide.”

By Tarn Wilson
Karen Babine’s All the Wild Hungers  captures the disorientation we feel when faced with this most ordinary, yet extraordinary, of shocks: the mortality of those dearest to us. Intellectually, we know we all must die, but when the reality of death hovers over our own families, our foundation trembles. When Babine’s mother is diagnosed with embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare cancer, Babine feels untethered.

By Jessie van Eerden
Sarah Viren's debut collection explores the concept of ownership. It begins with an essay on the ownership of material goods—the narrator’s landlord lends her the furniture that belongs to a man on trial for murder. The essays that follow ask what it means to own one’s body, one’s family members, one’s language, even one’s story that is inextricably intertwined with the stories of others.

By Ann Piper
Heartland, by journalist Sarah Smarsh, already a nonfiction finalist for the 2018 National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, is a multigenerational account of a hardworking family caught in the systemic forces that perpetuate the unknown and disdained Americans who are sometimes called "white trash."

By Eric Farwell
In her debut memoir,  For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors, Laura Esther Wolfson, an American essayist and Russian translator for the PEN World Voices Festival, has written a complex book about three interacting subjects: her Jewish heritage, marriage to a Russian man, and her difficulties as a translator of Russian literature.

By Thomas Larson
D’Aoust and Larson reflect on the structure, style, and meaning of Scott-Coe’s research-based prose meditation on the mass murderer Charles Whitman. The ex-Marine sniper killed his mother and wife as well as more than a dozen people from the University of Texas Tower in Austin on August 1, 1966. But there’s a companion story—that of an alcoholic Catholic priest whose friendship with the killer (he married Whitman and his wife) is also core to the tale.

By Jessica Handler
At first glance, the photographic record of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, shows an average town for the time, from 1890 to 1910. The wallpaper was patterned, the furniture solid. Some citizens were old, others young, some were black, others Native American, most were white. The living sang, farmed, posed in their best clothing, played with their children, went on errands. The dead looked out from open coffins in parlors.

By Penny Guisinger
I'm pretty sure that the day Thomas Larson asked me to write a review of creative nonfiction chapbooks was the same day I said to a room full of people at AWP, "I don't know what a chapbook is." The fact that I was on a panel about chapbooks (and am rumored to have published one) only underscores the truth that I am probably the wrong person for this job. Or, conversely, maybe exactly the right one.

By Katharine Coldiron
Sandra Gail Lambert is not interested in being anyone’s inspiration. If this review called her memoir in essays,  A Certain Loneliness , inspiring, the author would recoil. That much is clear from a memorable scene in a laundromat where the author in her wheelchair is doing laundry. A stranger, so intrusive that it’s impossible even to describe her as well-meaning, uses every possible cliché to speak to her. “You are so inspiring,” the stranger says and the essay begins. Just when Lambert thinks she is rid of her, the worst happens:

By Robert Root
The next time you stop by my house, ask to see my copy of Patricia Hampl’s  The Art of the Wasted Day , her most recent book. You may not know that long ago, feeling guilty about writing in the margins of books, I began dogearing pages where the author wrote something I hoped to remember. Some people think that’s as bad as writing in the margins, but I can always turn the corners of the pages back up again.

By David MacWilliams
Meg McGuire's memoir explores addiction, mental disorder, denial, guilt, and the destructive effects of a parent's love. McGuire narrates events over more than two decades during which her son Ryan suffered frantic rises and falls in mood as well as doomed attempts to combat his addiction to heroin and other substances. On the surface, she examines the damage that bipolar disease and the disease of addiction can wreak upon the patient, the family and those closest to the patient. Most poignantly, she examines the role she played—out of love—as his enabler.

By Sarah M. Wells
My yoga instructor calls it “rooted and reaching,” that connection between the earthly and the sacred. I am here, even though somewhere in the past, if you’d asked me to shift into downward dog, I would have warned of some foreign demon taking residence in this Christ-saved jar of clay. I am here, on my mat, Christ-filled yet, rooted and reaching.

By Doug Rutledge
Future ages have indeed wondered at the monuments created in fifth-century Athens, to which Pericles (495-429 BCE) refers in his famous Funeral Oration mourning the first warriors to fall during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. Rather than elegizing the fallen soldiers, Pericles, the ruler of Athens, celebrates the accomplishments of the culture for which they fought. Athens was a democracy, after all, and, unlike Sparta, a military city-state. Athens was also in the midst of a great artistic outburst of sculpture, architecture, and literature as the temple to Athena at the Parthenon testifies, an outburst that would be diminished though the course of the war. War, as Pericles anticipated, would encourage the spread of Athenian monuments everywhere.

By Sarah Cheshire
When I was a senior in college, I was lovingly roped into stepping outside my comfort zone and joining a body-positive arts’ collective, curated by my dear friend Lexie. The collective was called “Attention: People with Body Parts.” The mission of the specific initiative I was involved in, Portable Homes, was bodily reclamation: through art, writing, and movement, survivors of domestic violence found ways to reconnect with parts of their bodies that had been impacted by abuse.

By Elizabeth Dark
“EKG,” the prologue to Alex Lemon’s Feverland: A Memoir in Shards, is a one-paragraph list that runs two-and-a-half pages. In it, Lemon records his heart’s electrical activity through a catalogue of the things he “hearts.” The repetition prepares us for a read in which our categories of convenience quit making sense: “I heart the butcher beneath my ribs. I heart it all wrong. I heart no speed limit and flicking my headlights off. I heart swerving beneath the moonlight. I heart the kitchen with the oven baking bread. I heart the midnight inside me, nailholed with starlight.”

By Amber Anderson
While most humans encounter daily stress, how many, given the chance, would volunteer to face their extreme fears? To be a recipient of a violent act, to pursue violent perpetrators, to report on those who confront violence—willingly, courageously—this is the fascinating world of The Dog Lover Unit: Lessons in Courage from the World’s K9 Cops.

By Katy Major
When a friend of Kate Carroll de Gutes remarked about how often the positive aspects of others’ lives are mentioned on Facebook, as opposed to the negative, de Gutes, in the essayist’s quintessential way, got to thinking. What her musings sparked is The Authenticity Experiment, de Gutes’ attempt at representing the duality (what she calls “the both/and, the dark/light”) of life as it exists outside of a two-dimensional screen. She challenged herself to write a blog post, representing dark and light both, every day for thirty days. The Authenticity Experiment, a tight 167-page essay collection, is the happy result of that blog. It’s a brave interrogation of the truth and a chronicle of an unusually ambivalent year, which includes the death of both her parents and the celebrated publication of her first essay collection, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear. Part of de Gutes’ authenticity is that she does not merely confront the pain she experiences; she is also honest about the fact that, in the midst of it all, she experiences joy.

By Renée E. D'Aoust
In On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction, William Zinsser extols the memoir form: “For me, no other nonfiction form goes so deeply to the roots of personal experience—to all the drama and pain and humor and unexpectedness of life.” Zinsser suggests, “What gives [memoirs] their power is the narrowness of their focus.” “Narrowness” means the writer focuses on particular experiences and crafts their moment-to-moment being. Beth Ann Fennelly exemplifies this skill in her newly released slim and sublime Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs.

By Marilyn Bousquin
Jennifer Sinor’s birth, which is anything but ordinary, sets up the thematic trajectory of Ordinary Trauma, a coming-of-age memoir that doubles as a father-daughter story. In the opening chapter, titled “The Bucket,” we meet Jennifer’s father in the waiting room of the obstetrics ward of Kingsville County Hospital: “A man used to being in charge, only recently released from his tour of duty in Vietnam where he had served as a legal advisor, he does not wait well.” When the doctor finally “bursts into the waiting room,” it is to tell the expectant father that he must choose between his wife and his baby: Saving one will mean the death of the other. “Faced with the possibility of losing the woman that he loves, the young man chooses his wife. He lets the daughter go.” That decision lands infant Jennifer in a bucket—a literal bucket—where she’s left for dead, the cord still wrapped around her neck, until an older doctor “sees the bucket holding the discarded baby on the floor. . . . From what will forever be known as The Dead Baby Bucket, the doctor pulls the baby out. Though bloody and broken and blue from lack of heat and oxygen, it is breathing. The dead baby breathes.”

By Thomas Larson
I suppose it was inevitable. The age of self-disclosure—memoir writing, celebrity tweets, one-person Broadway shows, jihadist pre-bomb goodbye videos—would give way to one editor’s need to order up a new hegemony for that intractable thing we call the essay. In this case, one I want to prosecute, it’s John D’Agata’s twenty-first-century’s politicized obsession-collection, which Graywolf brought out over the last decade and one-half as a course text, an MFA genre, a private breviary on the essay’s evolution, which of these I’m unsure. Under D’Agata’s leadership (he chairs the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Program), this three-volume opus speaks to the essay’s undiscovered past and its experimental future.

By Jennifer Ochstein
Voids—holes, blank spaces, silences—are often interpreted as meaningless. But they shouldn’t be taken that way. Voids may contain even more meaning than filled spaces. It’s what isn’t seen or what isn’t said that causes the most doubt and consternation. Consider an unseen god or a beloved one who fails to say “I love you.” The meaning of such absence is that a void requires rendering, interpretation, guessing. Voids and their uncertainty can be terrifying. Heartrending. Conversely, they can also bring the most profound recognition.

By Krystal Sierra
The Crunk Feminist Collection is a much-needed anthology of short essays written by black women and women of color. Its narratives center on race, gender, pop culture and current events. The collection blends writers who specialize in personal anecdote with razor-sharp critique and who employ a conversational tone as complex issues are carefully dissected and taken to task. Appearing first as blog articles at The Crunk Feminist Collective from 2010-2014, the pieces capture the brevity today’s readers expect: precise techniques that this self-proclaimed riot girl found urgent and timely.

By N. West Moss
Midway into the first semester of her MFA, Melanie Brooks finds herself struggling to begin a memoir about her father, a distinguished thoracic surgeon, who was infected with HIV while undergoing open-heart surgery in 1985. Her father chose to keep his illness a secret thinking he would die within months. The fact that he lived for ten years and kept this information from others meant that, as Brooks put it, “the secret of his disease and the specter of catastrophe” defined her life. “Unearthing the ongoing grief of losing my dad to AIDS in 1995,” she writes, “has been agonizing. And terrifying. And, more often than not, paralyzing.”

By Karen Donley-Hayes
It may seem a foregone conclusion that Should I Still Wish, by John Evans, would make worthwhile reading. Evans is a Stanford University lecturer, memoirist, and winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize for Young Widower: A Memoir, in 2014. His writing has set him apart. What is not unique, however, is the subject of this memoir: death.

By Sebastian Sarti
When the past doesn’t suit you, from what do you build the future? It’s a question that lumps at the throats of many twenty-somethings who know their lives will not follow those of their parents. Though Leslie Lawrence is well past her twenties, she uses the same question to animate her book of essays, The Death of Fred Astaire, an eclectic collection that ranges over decades of its author’s unexpected life.

By Elizabeth Dark
My best childhood friend, Vanessa, suffers from debilitating chronic pain. She has seen multiple specialists, tried numerous treatments, and been diagnosed with a handful of conditions, all of which perhaps come close to naming her experience, but never fully. When the pain first began, she was thirty-four, a nurse practitioner and an avid yoga student. But as the years have dragged on, she’s had to quit working. She spends her days at home trying to manage the pain with both focus and distraction. When I visit her, we do not go out. She can rarely sit for more than twenty minutes before the pain becomes too much, so a restaurant or coffee shop is not a good idea.

By Jo Scott-Coe
I seek out some nonfiction knowing I will find the author’s train of mind as compelling as his subject. This was certainly true with John Edgar Wideman’s latest book, Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File.

By D.L. Hall
I read Jan Shoemaker’s collection of essays while America was casting votes for the forty-fifth president. So, when I say I read this memoir during a time of despair, I mean it was like waking up in the middle of a nightmare, surrounded by folks you love who are bedazzled by flash and bravado, who have fallen for a con man’s promise to return us to the golden age of white middle-class America. It was in this state of reckoning that I entered Shoemaker’s world where the first essay opens in the middle of a white-knuckled cab ride in India, heading to the caves of Ellora, and, right away, I was clicking on my seat belt because here was where I needed to be—engaged in the world and unfearful of others. Flesh and Stone came to me at the right time, bringing a nostalgic reminder of the connections Americans share, why we need literature more than ever, and how our neighbors, our country, and, most important, our families are worth fighting for. Civilization is worth the fight.

By Heather Gemmen Wilson
Body Memory is comprised of five, intimately connected essays. All of the essays, together, weave a story, simultaneously sad and expectant, of a man bereft.

by Michael Steinberg
"As for my part, it’s a no-brainer; Murray’s writing, thoughts about writing, and generous mentorship will continue to inspire, guide, and instruct me for as long I write and teach."

by Mimi Schwartz
"It is a coming-of-age story of his South Chicago life from age six to sixteen, as an African-American child with two blind, finance-strapped parents and five siblings who belong to the Worldwide Church of God that predicts global doom—and soon."

by Richard Gilbert
"Crews devotes the first three chapters, Part One, of this concise twelve-chapter book to extending his risky imaginative and reflective opening. In this way, he shows overtly, implicitly, and spatially how his father’s death reverberated in his life in backwoods Georgia."

by Gail Folkins
"Folkins’ essays hit on all the typical topics of the Pacific Northwest: Bigfoot, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, forest fires, salmon, employment at Boeing (her dad’s boss) and Microsoft (her own)."

by Art Edwards
"With the book, Firstman is ready to give the raw emotions surrounding her relationships with her parents narrative form, utilizing storytelling, science, and the quirks of a 1970s upbringing to make sense of a childhood less than ordinary."

by Lanie Tankard
"Linking concrete and abstract, head and heart, Madden offers us his soul. Such a style elicits our own memories, heightens awareness of life’s minutiae, and deepens our understanding of their connectivity."

by Carolee Bennett
"Implicating us as voyeurs in the opening essay is a wicked trick. When Hollars writes about a “carnival atmosphere” after the Tuscaloosa tornado, we want to stake our claim to righteous indignation. But, as he watches “people clogging the streets in SUVs, the passengers half-hanging out the windows,” we see ourselves."

by Robert Lunday
"The main organizing principle of the collection is borrowed from popular music: the “cover,” or the practice of one musician redoing a song by another. The hope is, the editors write, that “these essays . . . envision Montaigne’s topics through a contemporary sensibility.”"

by Tarn Wilson
The dominant voice of these essays is descended from the lineage of that twenty-two-year-old: witty, smart, funny, self-deprecating, self-aware, and sometimes self-conscious. But Bradley also regularly interrupts that voice with flashes of vulnerability.

by Richard Gilbert
"Dean knows that most Americans lost interest after the 1959–1972 “heroic era” of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. But she forever imprinted on spaceflight as a girl when her engineer father took her regularly to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum."

by Denise Wilkinson
While her research into lobotomy provided much documented information, tracing her family story was more difficult. Complicated by the fact that only one aunt, Pauline, remained alive, and the information Aunt Pauline provided “overturned everything” Sternburg had believed all her life, she questioned whether she could get to the truth.

by Renee E. D'Aoust
"Water Rising functions as a tribute to a shared creative life, but the chance that its creation would work as a thing of beauty was probably far from sure during its making. How do you know that works created independently will come together?"

By Glen Retief
“I want to write the moral history of the men of my generation,” wrote Flaubert to his friend Mademoiselle Leroyer in 1864, talking of what would become his semi-autobiographical novel, Sentimental Education. “It’s a book about . . . passion such as can exist nowadays . . . inactive.” In fact, Flaubert’s Sentimental Education is anything but emotionally dead or passive. It details a young Frenchman’s intensely felt financial, sexual, and romantic mishaps against the background of the 1848 anti-monarchist revolutions.

By Kate Hopper
A couple of months ago, I curled up in chair in the corner of my living room to begin reading Dinty Moore’s latest book, Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy: Advice and Confessions on Writing, Love, and Cannibals. The book, as you can probably guess from the title, is a writing guide in the form of an advice column. In it Moore fields tongue-in-cheek questions from 20 contemporary essayists on topics such as grammar, the writing life, why so many writers write about writing, and how to recapture the humor of a cocktail party story without having to get drunk again. Each of Moore’s equally tongue-in-cheek responses is accompanied by an essay inspired by the exchange. In this way, it’s both a collection of personal essays as well as a (very amusing) dialogue with other essayists.

By Thomas Larson
One of the most poignant, absorbing autobiographical memoirs I’ve ever read is this gem from 1943, The Little Locksmith. I say autobiographical memoir for Katharine Butler Hathaway’s is old school, telling an outwardly undramatic tale about an exuberant inner life: she died at 58 just after this book, the first of several planned, was published. What gives it its memoirish intensity is her probity: she plunges into self-entanglements that would trip up most authors but gives her the freedom to invent herself in prose.

By Allison Backous Troy
Editor Samantha Schoech writes, in her introduction, that there’s nothing run-of-the-mill about this essay collection: it is a “vote for a certain way of life. The bookish life. More specifically, the bookstore life.” The compilation appeared this spring to commemorate Independent Bookstore Day. For Schoech, the indie bookseller provides a necessary space in a world of “tweets and algorithms and pageless digital downloads.” They affirm our need for “aimless perusal,” where a day spent stalking the shelves might lead us to a “novel that expands (the) heart,” or an “art book that changes the direction of your life.”

By Elizabeth Raby
To begin her new book, Joni Tevis, the author of the equally unusual, The Wet Collection, quotes the Midwestern novelist, Sherwood Anderson, in an epigraph: “Just say in big letters, ‘The World is on Fire.’ That will make ’em look up.” So she does and so do we. In well-researched and telling detail, she explores objects, places, and people in danger of being lost or falling apart—closures and collapses of factories, diners, towns, celebrities. She brings them back to life by a plethora of specific images. Of her father’s factory, she says, “Strange to think of the old shop sitting empty now, the machines gone, Barbara’s first-aid kit and I’ve Been Beat Up poster gone, the thumbtacks that held it to the wall gone. But curls of scrap must still be there, corkscrews of brass and steel pressed into the filth of the shop floor.”

By Jeff Muse
I should be clear: I think writing well is terribly hard work, and I admire anyone who endures it. Me, I’ve yet to publish a book of any kind, and I don’t teach writing or literature at any college or university, so maybe you’d just as soon stop reading right here. After all, I’m hardly a professional book reviewer.

By Polly Moore
Andie Mitchell is a “foodie.” She is a serious, hard-core “foodie,” a fact that comes through in delicious, descriptive detail on virtually every page of her 232-page memoir, It Was Me All Along.

By Janice Gary
On the first page of Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso tells us that she started keeping a diary because she didn’t want to lose anything. “I couldn’t face the end of a day without a record of everything that had happened.”

By Samir Atassi
Elissa Washuta’s memoir is a twisting, chameleon-like work of reportage, highly poetic at times, showing how cultural forces and tragic events have left their tracks on her body and mind. The search “for an identity to sink into” in a savage, selfish world is at the heart of this book. The author examines all the moments from her past that have tried to define her, including—her rape while living on the Mid-Atlantic coast, her diagnosis of bipolar disorder, her search for an ancestral connection to the Cowlitz Indian tribe, and her strict upbringing as a Catholic. Tension is felt as Washuta battles to stay sane while being menaced by past experiences.

By Virginia Taylor
Steven Harvey, in his marvelous memoir, The Book of Knowledge and Wonder, is on a journey to discover and understand his mother who committed suicide in April, 1961, when Harvey was eleven years old. Reflecting on her act, Harvey observes that it “had exploded in my life like the flash of a camera at close range, darkening everything around me and casting me into blindness, and when the light returned she was gone. . . . She was there and she was not, and there was no getting her back. Ever.” Missing are his memories of her, of his being with her, and this: “I could not, and this is the heartbreaker, hear her voice. All of this—what do I call it?—this mothering was gone, wiped out by her death.”

By David MacWilliams
In his brief essay, “Dead Weight,” Eric Freeze describes a walk he takes with his dog, Zeke, a walk that ends horribly. He sees a police cruiser descending a hill, his Dalmatian blundering into its path, and there’s nothing he can do but shout and witness the inevitable.

By Amber D. Stoner
First and foremost, Steve Almond wants you to know he’s a football fan: he’s one of you; he’s one of us. But after forty years of watching the game, playing fantasy football, and mourning yet another Oakland Raiders’ loss, Almond no longer indulges his love of watching football and his latest book, Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto, explains why.

by Marilyn Bousquin
"In a culture that separates death from life, The Circus Train is a rare gift. A book that engages us with death through the warmth of Judith Kitchen’s supple and literary mind."

by Josette Kubaszyk
"Since its inception, Shebooks’ digital collection of downloadable fiction, memoir, and journalism has grown to over 70 books, each of which the publishers say can be read “in an hour or two.”"

by Jan Shoemaker
"Moving across the page in her essay collection, You Feel So Mortal, with the same agility she took to the polished wood of the dojo floor, Shinner explores the flesh and blood experience—hers and ours—of having a body."

by Doug Rutledge
"Of course, one is led to ask the inevitable question, why write and why read a book about nothing? In Praise of Nothing offers several answers, some generic, some philosophical, others emotional, but none are completely satisfying—though this lack of satisfaction is part of the book’s point."

by Robert Root
"Much of what Skloot deems "off-kilter" seems the kind of emotional imbalance with which we can all identify. Each chapter is alive not only with narrative memories but also with personal associations, pertinent research, and literary references."

by Jennifer Ochstein
"Harris owns her uncertainties and qualms; she’s honest about the grueling nature of caregiving. Caregiving is not a badge of honor. It’s dirty, ass-washing work."

by Thomas Larson
"How much of Gilbert’s fraught desires and daily inadequacies as a farmer plod on and puddle up. In a testamentary twist, he is shepherding not just the sheep but himself. As I say, co-ruminants with his flock."