The Best American Essays 2017

Jamison, author of the award-winning essay collection The Empathy Exams, demonstrates both her mastery of the form and her merit as an editor of this year's "Best American" essays. At first, the anthology's greatness seems the result of chance. After all, 2016 was an exceptional year in America. What happened that wasn't compelling to write about? But Jamison reveals her curatorial talents with her keen eye for specificity and "telling details." Each essay raises important political questions—about war, race, gender, and disparity—yet the universal is revealed subtly and powerfully through the personal. Still, Jamison understands that the best personal essays are compelling not only because of their subject matter but because of the writer's willingness to take risks, to think provisionally, to tolerate ambiguity, to be contradictory or even wrong.