The experience of reading How to Disappear and Why is difficult to describe. The book defies easy categorization and like other exceptional, ambitious art, frustrates attempts to reduce it to a summary. But even as I call the book ambitious, I’m reminded of how the essays within it resist that by taking the reader through a deeply personal journey that includes exorcising ambition.

Trains are linear. And while Without Terminus is written in lyric prose lines, it is nonlinear—a hybrid book-length work of lyric nonfiction, memoir, autocriticism, and visual poetics. Ostensibly, Chaun Webster’s collection is “about” his grandfather Reginald, who worked for years as a porter on a Pullman sleeper car, laboring while others rested, laid to rest mere months after he retired, tired, without ever receiving his pension, which was denied his widow. And yet Reginald is but one embarkation point—a hub for an exploration of the history of trains, of transport, of Black enslavement and Black labor—as history itself is nonlinear. Webster’s train of thought spirals backward and forward in time and space, transporting us through photos and records real and imagined, literature, expanding into a dream-time of meetings, and narrowing into the dissection of sentences that parse in branching fractals or reiterate into palimpsestic non-sense, as in one page-spread where Webster takes the clause “ST. PAUL MAKES YOU WONDER ABOUT THE DRAW TO NAME CITIES AFTER SAINTS OF MEN” in large print across the facing pages, then responds to syntactical chunks below the clause so that in one place “St. Paul makes you wonder” derails into “how time / spills from / the body / collides / with it,” while “To name” lists family members “Jerry & / Reginald & / Regina— / to name / a collision / happening / over and / over and / over and,” before those names get printed and overprinted until they are a no-longer-legible blur of black ink.

Julija Šukys often refers to the distinction made by noted Canadian archival studies scholar Terry Cook between an “archive” and an “archives”: the former represents the repository that encapsulates the ongoing work of the latter. An ‘archival essayist’ like Šukys doesn’t merely seek order among assembled materials of an archive but must look beyond the documents into the realm of ideas, with an orientation that is metaphorical and philosophical. “We… come quietly in the wake of such tragedies… to give meaning to such tragedies,” she writes.

Erica Stern’s memoir, Frontier, tells a story so multi-layered that it’s hard to place it in a category with other memoirs. Part memoir, part fictional wild west story, part research/history, Frontier goes back and forth between nonfiction—Stern’s birth story and research/reportage on historical atrocities in childbirth—and fiction—a story she imagines, seemingly as an escape from the brutal reality of the memoir’s present.

America’s purported War on Drugs began more than fifty years ago, yet today it’s still easier to procure fentanyl than methadone, a gold standard treatment for opioid use disorder. That contradiction is not incidental — it is the result of decades of political choices — and it is the tension that haunts Melody Glenn’s Mother of Methadone: A Doctor’s Quest, a Forgotten History, and a Modern-Day Crisis (Beacon Press 2025). As overdose deaths remain higher than pre-pandemic levels, Glenn’s excavation of methadone’s history and her own uneasy entry into addiction medicine arrives at a moment when the United States is moving towards renewing the 1970s-era War on Drugs playbook. 

As children, our parents’ lives are largely hidden from us. We’re only allowed to see the surfaces: their work clothes hanging in the closet, indecipherable paperwork left lying on the counter, muffled, one-sided phone conversations behind closed doors. Veiled by secrecy, it’s tempting for children to wonder whether their parents themselves traffic in secrets. However, for Margot Singer, the question of whether she’s the daughter of a spy is neither a metaphor nor a fantasy. In the title essay of her remarkable 2025 collection, Secret Agent Man, Singer seeks to answer whether her father, a Porsche-driving consultant who traveled to the world’s most exotic cities, was in fact an agent for the Mossad, the Israeli national intelligence agency. Born in Czechoslovakia and raised in pre-Israeli Palestine, her father’s accent was “a mixture of German and Czech and Israeli with a vaguely British lilt.” Though he proudly proclaimed that “he never worked for anyone but himself and never for more than nine months out of every year,” he was often overheard speaking in hushed and hurried tones, returned home from his business trips abroad with such trinkets as “Nigerian sculptures, Japanese kimonos, a fur-covered Ethiopian drum.” Given that several of the most famous modern spies—Valerie Plame, Andrei Bezrukov, and Miles Copeland—also worked as consultants, the prospect that Singer’s father’s work was also merely a front for espionage was too glaring not to consider.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” reads Joan Didion’s famous opening of 1979’s The White Album. In the decades since its publication, that single sentence has surpassed mantra status into the memoirist’s raison d’etre (“I write this, or I die.”). But another thing I’ve learned over my own decades as a writer, teacher, and reader is that we memoirists retell the same fundamental life stories many times over in order to live (another way of putting it: “I write this again, or I die.”). The difference is that in these subsequent narrations, as we continue to grow and change and reconsider past events, we find new forms to tell our stories, and thus new portals of understanding. As poet Mary Oliver wrote, every human born only gets this “one wild and precious life.” But memoirists remain flush in opportunities for inventing fresh shapes, structures, and subgenres within our field to recount that singular life.

Can love exist alongside abuse?

Some writers say yes. Mary Oliver, in contemplating the inevitable cruelties of the world, asked, “When we cut the ripe melon, should we not give it thanks? / And should we not thank the knife also? / We do not live in a simple world.”¹

Other writers say no. For bell hooks, love and abuse are mutually exclusive: “When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abuse cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of nurturance and care.”²

Perhaps the truth lies in the vast gray middle, which is why Jeannie Vanasco, in her third memoir A Silent Treatment (Tin House), hesitates to call her mother’s behavior “emotional abuse.”³

“One is not born, but becomes, a woman,” Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote. In Melissa Fraterrigo’s simmering collection of essays, The Perils of Girlhood, she slowly unwraps a singular truth that life teaches women, beginning in childhood: growing up female is perilous, even when nothing is presently threatening. Tautly crafted and immensely accessible, Fraterrigo’s personal narratives unfold with an ambient tension as she moves through the pivotal milestones of being female and the lessons that stick.

It’s 12:15 a.m. and about an hour ago, I told my iPhone’s bedtime reminder to take a hike because I had to finish the last thirty pages of Tom McAllister’s remarkable memoir, It All Felt Impossible: 42 Years in 42 Essays. The book is a collection of crisp life memories – each essay no more than 1500 words, all with acres more land to cover if McAllister were flowery or long-winded, or, if he were paid by the word. A master sentence-maker, McAllister packs such punch into each of the book’s essays, that you need a minute (or fifteen) to pause at the end of each, just to be sure you caught every detail, and to think about the woven connections from essay to essay and year to year. And perhaps most critically, to consider what the details of his life story tell you about yours.

Samina Najmi’s memoir-in-essays Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time captures her family’s migrations across Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. The circle mentioned in the title holds true both for the form itself—the author uses a meditative, repeating structure—and for the uniting of disparate people, places, and histories central to her identity. A professor of multiethnic literatures at the California State University, Fresno, Najmi writes an ambitious, fascinating multigenerational story, a collective narrative, that resists the erasure of her family and the violence of colonization.

In “My Dad Still Watches the NFL,” the opening essay of Jason McCall’s collection Razed by TV Sets, the prose is shot in bursts, every sentence beginning with the phrase “This is about,” aside from a handful of occasions where the reader is told the opposite: “But it’s not about that.” What initially seems terse and truncated moves ever closer to completion with each addition: “This is about a job. This is about how hard it is for some of us to get a job. . .This is about how it feels like we all got a good job when one of us gets a good job.” The writing continually billows and morphs, expands and contracts. McCall returns to this technique repeatedly throughout the collection; what begin as shallow breaths become deeper and more meditative with each iteration. Stylistically, it is no surprise that the author would employ anaphora, given his background as a poet with several collections to his name. Still, the foundation of McCall’s first book of prose is built on repetition, and yet nothing about it feels repetitive. Instead, the tactic acts as a compass, a way to navigate through seemingly antipodal content, a needle always pointing toward some broadly specific version of the truth.

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.