The Best American Essays 2022

A collection of the year’s best essays, selected by award-winning writer Alexander Chee.
The volume draws from hundreds of periodical nominations to assemble a roster where nearly every contributor marks their series debut. Series editor Robert Atwan pairs emerging essayists alongside familiar authors to chart the boundaries of contemporary creative nonfiction.
These selections span literary magazines and digital publications to present personal narratives anchored in memory, loss, and resilience. The essays follow writers through grief, physical recovery, and questions of heritage across an unsettled cultural landscape.
Alexander Chee, an essayist of “virtuosity and power” (Washington Post), selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

• Long Form Journalism: Ryan Bradley investigates the science of disorientation, tracing how people lose their way in slot canyons and how a blind navigator maps San Francisco by touch.
• Raw Honesty: Debra Gwartney chronicles the final days of her husband, naturalist Barry Lopez, as wildfire drives them from their Oregon home while he dreams of Arctic ice.
• Personal Stories: Vauhini Vara tests the emerging capabilities of the artificial intelligence program GPT-3 to break through years of silence surrounding her sister’s fatal cancer diagnosis.
• Against the Odds: Erika J. Simpson details the precise survival calculations of childhood poverty in the American South, recounting motel evictions and the fragile hustle of food vouchers.
• Also by This Author: How to Write an Autobiographical Novel.