Day 0: From the Front Matter
COUNTDOWN TO PUBLICATION, a new feature, begins tomorrow
Tomorrow, the Best American Essays newsletter will launch Countdown to Publication, a twenty-two-day series featuring brief excerpts from each of the twenty-two essays included in The Best American Essays 2024. The final post will appear on October 22, the launch date for this year’s volume.
“It has been a pure delight to collaborate with this year’s guest editor, Wesley Morris, whose style as a reader is abundant with authentic insight, sincerity, and wit, qualities that combined like a magic elixir to assemble the contents of this anthology. I feel as if Wesley and I have danced a once-in-a-lifetime dance, at a banquet whose orchestra featured the esteemed contributors to this volume. I am grateful for their music, and for their courage to not only tell their stories, but to make meaning out of them.”
—Kim Dana Kupperman, Series Editor, “Foreword: For the Sake of Argument,” The Best American Essays 2024, HarperCollins/Mariner, 2024.
JOIN US ON TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22, FOR OUR LAUNCH CELEBRATION (see details below)
“The twenty-two essays collected in this thirty-ninth edition […] did a little of everything to me: surprise, astound, bewitch, reframe, knock me down, crack me up, push, enlighten, inspire. I remember where I was when I read each one of them, too—on the subway, in the window of a coffee shop, on the floor, at the kitchen table, waiting waiting waiting for trains, in the cafeteria at work, at my work desk, at my desk-desk, in a recording studio, in the back seat of a car, at my kitchen table, at my sister’s kitchen table, at my man’s, at restaurant bars and one sushi counter, in bed, in bed, in bed. I recall my shivers and tingles and squeals and moans of ‘mm mm mm.’”
—Wesley Morris, Guest Editor, “Introduction,” The Best American Essays 2024, HarperCollins/Mariner, 2024.
