Presenting THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2026

Guest edited by M. Gessen

Guest edited by M. Gessen and with cover art by Dutch abstract artist Wouter Tjeenk Willink, this year’s anthology will be published by Mariner Books/HarperCollins on October 20, 2026.

The 2026 volume features an introduction by guest editor M. Gessen, a foreword by series editor Kim Dana Kupperman, and essays published in 2025 in The Atlantic, Current Affairs, Equator, Granta, Harper’s, Liberties, Literary Hub, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, n +1, New York, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, World Literature Today, and The Yale Review.

The Best American Essays 2026 guest editor M. Gessen is the author of eleven books, including the National Book Award–winning The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. An Opinion columnist for The New York Times, Gessen is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Opinion Writing, as well as Guggenheim and Carnegie fellowships. Gessen teaches at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and lives in New York City. Photo by Damon Winter.

The twenty contributors to the 2026 volume are: Hilton Als, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Elizabeth Bruenig, Andrea Long Chu, Peter Coviello, Fernanda Eberstadt, Ha-yun Jung, Ben Lerner, Dawn Lundy Martin, Benjamin Moser, Sy Safransky, Tatiana Schlossberg, Jennifer Senior, Marci Shore, Alex Skopic, Zadie Smith, Jia Tolentino, Mary Turfah, Christian Wiman, and Audrey Wollen.

Since 1986, The Best American Essays series® has showcased the best short nonfiction published in the periodical literature. The series editor selects notable work from hundreds of print and digital magazines and journals, and a guest editor makes the final selection for the anthology.

The Best American Essays 2026 is available for preorder here.