essay collection website

While We’re On the Subject: 10 of the Best Essay Collections

Liberty Hardy

Liberty Hardy is an unrepentant velocireader, writer, bitey mad lady, and tattoo canvas. Turn-ons include books, books and books. Her favorite exclamation is “Holy cats!” Liberty reads more than should be legal, sleeps very little, frequently writes on her belly with Sharpie markers, and when she dies, she’s leaving her body to library science. Until then, she lives with her three cats, Millay, Farrokh, and Zevon, in Maine. She is also right behind you. Just kidding! She’s too busy reading. Twitter: @MissLiberty

View All posts by Liberty Hardy

One of the great things about being adult is that you only have to read the books you want to read now. No more assigned reading (unless you’re pursuing more education)! And while the word “essay” can conjure up images of homework, it’s actually just another really fun form of writing as a way to get information into your brain. An essay is a short piece of writing about a specific subject. That’s all. And just like all other writing, the subject possibilities are endless! There are so many amazing collections of essays to choose from. That’s why we’re helping you find a few great ones with this list of ten of the best essay collections.

These books cover a variety of topics, such as music, nature, race, and writing. Each of these are written by one particular author, but you can find essay collections with multiple contributors. The Best American Essays are a great place to start — the most recent one was guest edited by Alexander Chee, who has a book also listed below. He knows essays! I also highly recommend A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause by Shawn Wen. I had no idea how much I would love a small collection of essays about the famous mime Marcel Marceau until I picked it up. What a gem!

They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib

Poet, essayist, and critic Abdurraqib’s first collection is an amazing jumping-off point if you’ve not read many essays. These are smart and thoughtful pieces, some about life as viewed through the lens of culture, such as his experience at a Carly Rae Jepsen show and his thoughts on attending concerts in the wake of the shootings in Paris. And some are about his experience as a Black man living in America. This collection was so successful, it got a new five-year anniversary cover, so you might also find this with a blue cover with a wolf in a red track suit.

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

Baldwin’s famous essay collection about racism and the lives of Black people in America was written in the 1940s and early 1950s, at the start of the Civil Rights movement. A powerful writer and activist, Baldwin was one of the early writers discussing the violence and murder perpetrated against Black people. His essays exposed readers to police violence and racial injustice in a time before it was being discussed publicly and nationally.

How To Write An Autobiographical Novel: Essays by Alexander Chee

Chee, who is a brilliant teacher as well as a published writer, discusses how the life of the writer is entangled in work in various ways. While explaining the importance of art and how it gives meaning to our lives, he revisits his own experiences, including the death of his father, the AIDS crisis, and writing his first novel Edinburgh .

Thank you for signing up! Keep an eye on your inbox. By signing up you agree to our terms of use

Loitering: New and Collected Essays by Charles D’Ambrosio

D’Ambrosio tackles very different subjects in this collection of things that loiter in his brain, while weaving very personal, heartbreaking information into each one. There’s a discussion of the trial of jailed teacher Mary Kay Letourneau, the work of J.D. Salinger, a haunted house, weather, and more. It is also an examination of mental illness and suicide in his family.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays by Joan Didion

Like Baldwin, Didion is one of the most famous essayists in the American literary canon. This memorable book includes her sharp, original takes on John Wayne and Howard Hughes, as well as a look at her life growing up in California, and other memorable takes on places around the state.

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby

And if you want a collection that will make you laugh out loud, pick up this (or any of Irby’s other books.) These are screamingly funny, honest essays about relationships, health and bodies, sex, pet ownership, family, and more. (A few more funny essayists to check out: Jenny Lawson, Helen Ellis, Phoebe Robinson, and Mary Laura Philpott.)

Small Wonder: Essays by Barbara Kingsolver

Kingsolver is one of the finest novelists of the last few decades, but did you know she also writes smart, touching nonfiction? Using nature as the underlying them in each one, Kingsolver probes our world, from mountains and trees, to the dangers of genetically modified foods, to what we owe the children of the world. It’s a collection about growth, literally and metaphorically.

Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver was an award-winning poet, and her immense, gorgeous talent for writing poetry is apparent in these beautiful, thoughtful essays. They examine her interest in nature and the world at large from a young age, and how the beauty she found around her influence her life and her work. Get ready to underline pretty much everything.

Let Me Clear My Throat: Essays by Elena Passarello

This is a fascinating collection about voices throughout popular culture, from an 18th century opera singer to Spaceballs to A Streetcar Named Desire . Passarello examines the sound and shape of the sounds that have contributed to the soundtracks of human lives. Equally fascinating is Animals Strike Curious Poses , her essay collection about famous animals throughout history.

Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan

And last but not least, another lesser-known gem. Pulphead is like a road trip in a book that covers pop culture, and events around America. Sullivan investigates a Christian rock festival, Real World alumni, the BP oil spill, Hurricane Katrina, and more. It’s an absorbing collection that belongs on the shelf of every essay lover.

For more essays to enrich your life, be sure to check out 100 Must-Read Essay Collections and Essay Collections That Make You Necessarily Uncomfortable .

You Might Also Like

Keeping Up With The Penguins

Reviews for the would-be booklover.

• Book Reviews
• New Releases
• Recommended Reads

20 Brilliant Essay Collections

Essay collections exist in a kind of literary no-man’s-land. They’re non-fiction, but they don’t often slip neatly into a particular category (like “science” or “history”). Often, they draw from the author’s own life, but they don’t follow the chronology we expect of a memoir or autobiography . But if you can figure out where they’re shelved in your local independent bookshop, essay collections can make for some of the best reads. Check out these twenty brilliant essay collections, from all kinds of authors about all kinds of subjects.

Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit

Men Explain Things To Me is a slim little essay collection with a provocative title and a brilliant premise. Rebecca Solnit writes about the lived experience of women in the patriarchy in seven essays (or nine, if you get a later edition) from the last twenty years. She addresses violence against women, marriage equality, the influence of Virginia Woolf, the erasure of women from the archive, fraught online spaces, and more. Solnit was even credited with coining the term “mansplaining” – even though the word itself doesn’t appear in the title essay, and she later said she didn’t necessarily agree with such a gendered term.

Feel Free by Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith is a once-in-a-generation literary darling, writing beloved fiction and brilliant non-fiction with the same zeal. In Feel Free , her 2018 essay collection, she addresses questions we all find ourselves pondering from time to time. Why do we love libraries? How will we explain our inaction on climate change to future generations? What are online social networks doing to us? Her answers are categorised in the book’s five sections: In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free (from which the essay collection gets its name). Smith interrogates major world-changing events and small personal disruptions with equal fascination, which makes for an illuminating read.

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay has built a career on being forthright, unabashed, and holding a microphone to the best and worst of the little voices in our heads. Bad Feminist is a collection of her essays, most published individually elsewhere prior to the 2014 release, grouped thematically. They’re all loosely tied to the overarching ideas of feminism and womanhood, what it means to do it well, and what the consequences are for doing it badly. As the title suggests, in one of the collection’s most memorable moments, she addresses the difficulty of reconciling her feminism with her love of hip-hop music and the colour pink. She contends throughout this essay collection that it’s better to be a ‘bad feminist’ than to be no kind of feminist at all. Read my full review of Bad Feminist here.

Shrill by Lindy West

Have you ever felt like you just take up too much space in a world that wants you to be small and quiet? Lindy West has, and that’s what she writes in Shrill , the first of her hilarious and insightful essay collections. She lays bear the shame and humiliation that comes with the journey to self-awareness and self-acceptance, in a world that insists you be smaller and quieter. West has battled internet trolls, waged war against rape jokes, and reached an uneasy accord with her unruly body and mind. These essays are brilliant, relatable and hilarious for all women who have felt like they didn’t quite fit.

How To Write An Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee

How To Write An Autobiographical Novel seems like an odd title for an essay collection, but it makes sense once you hear Alexander Chee’s explanation behind it. On book tours and at speaking events regarding his novels, he found himself facing the same question over and over: “how much of this fictional story is autobiographical?”. He started thinking about how we forge identities in literature, giving rise to this brilliant collection of essays. It’s his “manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him”.

Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby

Samantha Irby describes herself as a “cheese fry-eating slightly damp Midwest person… with neck pain and no cartilage in [her] knees… who still hides past due bills under her pillow”. Wow, No Thank You a collection of her essays about… stuff. Life. Ridiculous jobs. Trying to make friends as an adult. The lost art of making a mix-tape. Living in a place where most people don’t share your politics. Getting your period and bleeding all over the sheets of your Airbnb. Trying to remember why you ever found nightclubs fun. There’s even a whole essay of “Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever…” jokes (the format might mystify you if you’re not on Twitter , but it’s hilarious). Read my full review of Wow, No Thank You here.

Dead Girls by Alice Bolin

Are you sick of the trope where a nice, skinny, white girl shows up dead and that’s all we ever get to know about her? You’re not the only one. Alice Bolin’s Dead Girls interrogates “iconic American works from the essays of Joan Didion and James Baldwin to Twin Peaks, Britney Spears, and Serial, illuminating the widespread obsession with women who are abused, killed, and disenfranchised, and whose bodies (dead and alive) are used as props to bolster men’s stories”. This is one of those essay collections that will stick with you, and change the way you consume stories forever.

If you want alternatives to read, check out my list of crime thrillers without dead girls here .

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

Jia Tolentino has been called “a peerless voice of our generation” and a “Joan Didion of our time”. Trick Mirror is one of the most critically acclaimed essay collections of recent years, a “dazzling collection of nine entirely original essays… [that] delves into the forces that warp our vision”. Have you ever wondered why we think what we do and the way we do? Normally, that’s the kind of question we’d leave to marketing professionals and moral philosophy professors, but Tolentino addresses it in an accessible and relatable way. She wants us to understand what advertising, social media, consumerism, and the whole she-bang has done to our consciousness and our understanding of ourselves.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace

I’ll confess: David Foster Wallace is kind of my literary secret shame. The man was hardly a paragon of virtue, he treated the women in his life horribly, and he clearly had a lot of troubles that were never adequately addressed. But damn, if his essays aren’t some of the funniest I’ve ever read! Seriously, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again is one of those brilliant essay collections that will have you howling with laughter so loud your neighbours might call the cops. Wallace is, at turns, cynical, curious, credulous, and cutting – and yet his essays feel seamless. They’re long, they’re stuffed with footnotes that would make a lit professor weep, and yet you’ll read them feeling like no time is passing at all because you’re having so much fun. I can’t speak for his fiction, but his essay collections? Must-reads, especially this one!

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

Any library of brilliant essay collections is woefully incomplete without David Sedaris, especially his 2000 collection Me Talk Pretty One Day . It’s over twenty years old, and yet it’s still as pertinent and resonant as ever. Sedaris’s wry humour and keen observations, of everything from family life to travel to cooking to education, are timeless. It’s truly masterful, a kind of comic genius you don’t see everyday. It’s also a great read for when your attention span is shot. The essays are short enough that you can read the whole thing in bite-sized chunks, but the through-line is strong enough that it will keep pulling you back in. Read my full review of Me Talk Pretty One Day here.

I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron

I find it hard not to build up a head of steam when I talk about Nora Ephron, because she is criminally underrated. Because she wrote about women and their relationships (to each other and themselves), instead of men with businesses or guns, she’s relegated to the “chick lit” and “rom-com” shelves, described as “fluffy” instead of ingenious. Want proof? Pick up I Feel Bad About My Neck , one of the most brilliant and incisive essay collections you’ll read anywhere. With her trademark candour and dry humour, she tackles the unspeakable: aging as a woman in a society that values perpetual youth.

Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud by Anne Helen Petersen

Scan the headlines of any celebrity gossip website, and you’ll notice: times have changed. We’re a long way from Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly. The women of today’s front pages are boundary pushers, provocative and powerful in ways that women of previous generations wouldn’t dare dream about. Anne Helen Petersen has had a lot of cause to study these women in her role as a Buzzfeed editor, and she’s written Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud to explain what she’s seen. She “uses the lens of “unruliness” to explore the ascension of powerhouses like Serena Williams, Hillary Clinton, Nicki Minaj, and Kim Kardashian, exploring why the public loves to love (and hate) these controversial figures”.

All About Love by bell hooks

“The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb,” writes bell hooks in All About Love, one of her most widely-read and lauded essay collections. She posits that our society is descending into lovelessness. Not romantic lovelessness – we’re drowning in smooches – but the kind where we lack basic compassion and empathy for each other, and ourselves. We are divided and discontented, due to “society’s failure to provide a model for learning to love”. You’ll want to set aside a lot of time to read and think about this one, to really absorb its message – if you do, it’ll change your life.

Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge

Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race is Eddo-Lodge’s first essay collection. It started with her blog post of the same name that she published back in 2014, but there’s no need to go trawling the internet for it: Eddo-Lodge reproduces it in full in the preface. It serves as a thesis statement, framing and contextualising everything that is to follow. So, the $64,000 question: why isn’t Eddo-Lodge talking to white people about race? Well, basically, she’s fed up: with white denial, with white self-flagellation, with trying to shake hands with a brick wall. Ironically, this is a collection of essays about race and racism that every white person should absolutely read. Read my full review of Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race here.

Rogues by Patrick Radden Keefe

If you loved Say Nothing and Empire Of Pain (like I did), you’ll be overjoyed (as I was) to get your hands on a copy of Rogues , a collection of Patrick Radden Keefe’s most celebrated essays from The New Yorker . These delightfully detailed investigative pieces focus on his favourite subjects: “crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial”. They’re like delectable bite-sized true crime tales, all meticulously researched and fact-checked so as to ensure they’re completely believable. Each and every one is masterfully crafted, perfectly balanced, and totally gripping. Read my full review of Rogues here.

How To Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran

The best essay collections combine both sweeping views of the way we live our lives and the minutiae of how the author lives their own. How To Be A Woman is the perfect example. Caitlin Moran interrogates what it means to be a woman in the 21st century, with broad observations as well as deeply personal (not to mention riotously funny) anecdotes. From abortions to Brazilian waxes to pop culture to reproduction, Moran explores the opportunities and constraints for women in all areas of life. She “lays bare the reasons why female rights and empowerment are essential issues not only for women today but also for society itself”.

Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton

When you think about it, essay collections are a medium well suited to the millennial generation, with our attention spans ruined by television and our ingrained narcissism and all. Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love is to our generation what Bridget Jones’s Diary was to the Gen Xers. In it, she writes about contemporary young adulthood and all its essential components: “falling in love, finding a job, getting drunk, getting dumped, realizing that Ivan from the corner shop might just be the only reliable man in her life, and that absolutely no one can ever compare to her best girlfriends”.

Figuring by Maria Popova

If you’ve ever Googled any kind of lofty question – what did Toni Morrison say makes life worth living? is stoicism a solution to anxiety? what the heck is a ‘growth mindset’? – chances are you’ve stumbled upon BrainPickings.org (now renamed The Marginalian). The mind behind the brilliant website is Maria Popova, and while her online archives constitute about a hundred essay collections’ worth of material, she’s condensed her best and made her contribution in the form of Figuring . This one is a must-read for the literary nerds and the philosophy students and the history buffs. It features snippets and essential lessons from the lives of figures like Herman Melville , Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman.

Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin

It took Maria Tumarkin nine years to research and write Axiomatic , one of the most powerful essay collections you’ll encounter at your local independent bookstore. She seeks to understand grief, loss, and trauma, and how they inform who we are as people. So, as you can probably already tell, it’s not exactly a light read – but if you’re in the mood to do some deep thinking, it’s an excellent selection. Each of its five sections is based on an axiom about the past and present (like “history repeats itself” or “time heals all wounds”), and examines true stories from Tumarkin’s own life and those around her to illustrate her wider points.

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

The problem with essay collections about successful people is that too many of them are of the “here’s how you can be successful too, invest in this stock and get rich quick!” variety. Outliers is the exception (and you have no idea how hard it was not to call it an ‘outlier’ just now). Malcolm Gladwell takes an intellectual look at the best and the brightest, the shining stars of innovation and industry, with the aim of finding out what exactly makes them different. This isn’t just about waking up early or taking cold showers; there are very specific concoctions of culture, community, and cunning that get people to the very top of the game, and Gladwell lays them out for us.

Keep up with these too:

Features & Discussion

Previous post

November 26, 2022 at 1:54 AM

Wow this is such a great list and now I want to read them all? I have, in fact, read a handful of them – but am adding a whole bunch more to my wishlist.

Some brilliant essay collections I’ve read in recent years are Notes To Self by Emilie Pine, Notes Made While Falling by Jenn Ashworth, Miss Fortune by Lauren Weedman, How We Love by Clementine Ford. Notes From No-Man’s Land by Eula Biss is uneven, but the first essay in it is unforgettable. It’s only now that I realise I apparently never read essay collections by men…

December 13, 2022 at 9:16 PM

Interesting, I was fifty-fifty on whether I’d check out How We Love, but your commendation is definitely weighing the scale in its favour! Thank you 😀

December 3, 2022 at 2:47 PM

A favorite genre of mine that I don’t read enough in. Bookmarking this post for future reference. (One of my favorite essayists is C.S. Lewis, the master philosopher and apologist IMHO.)

Oooh! I’ve not read any of C.S. Lewis’s essay, great tip Hannah – I’ll be keeping an eye out for them!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Looking For Something?

Love keeping up subscribe.

Keep Up On Facebook

Here’s the latest….

• Go Lightly – Brydie Lee-Kennedy
• 10 Funny Books By Australian Authors
• The Eyre Affair – Jasper Fforde
• Servo – David Goodwin
• 10 Books with Bisexual Characters

KEEP UP ON INSTAGRAM

Keepingupwiththepenguinsonline.

Book reviews and reading recommendations for the would-be booklover 📚

Keep Up On Pinterest

Keeping Up With The Penguins operates on the lands of the Gadigal people, of the Eora nation. This land was never ceded or sold. Our First Nations communities have the oldest continuing storytelling tradition in the world, and custodianship of the land always was, always will be, theirs.

Privacy Policy

Want to know what we’re up to with this whole website thing? Check out our full Privacy Policy here .

Keeping Up With The Penguins is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

© 2024 Keeping Up With The Penguins

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑

The 25 Greatest Essay Collections of All Time

Today marks the release of Aleksandar Hemon’s excellent book of personal essays, The Book of My Lives , which we loved, and which we’re convinced deserves a place in the literary canon. To that end, we were inspired to put together our list of the greatest essay collections of all time, from the classic to the contemporary, from the personal to the critical. In making our choices, we’ve steered away from posthumous omnibuses (Michel de Montaigne’s Complete Essays , the collected Orwell, etc.) and multi-author compilations, and given what might be undue weight to our favorite writers (as one does). After the jump, our picks for the 25 greatest essay collections of all time. Feel free to disagree with us, praise our intellect, or create an entirely new list in the comments.

The Book of My Lives , Aleksandar Hemon

Hemon’s memoir in essays is in turns wryly hilarious, intellectually searching, and deeply troubling. It’s the life story of a fascinating, quietly brilliant man, and it reads as such. For fans of chess and ill-advised theme parties and growing up more than once.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem , Joan Didion

Well, obviously. Didion’s extraordinary book of essays, expertly surveying both her native California in the 1960s and her own internal landscape with clear eyes and one eyebrow raised ever so slightly. This collection, her first, helped establish the idea of journalism as art, and continues to put wind in the sails of many writers after her, hoping to move in that Didion direction.

Pulphead , John Jeremiah Sullivan

This was one of those books that this writer deemed required reading for all immediate family and friends. Sullivan’s sharply observed essays take us from Christian rock festivals to underground caves to his own home, and introduce us to 19-century geniuses, imagined professors and Axl Rose. Smart, curious, and humane, this is everything an essay collection should be.

The Boys of My Youth , Jo Ann Beard

Another memoir-in-essays, or perhaps just a collection of personal narratives, Jo Ann Beard’s award-winning volume is a masterpiece. Not only does it include the luminous, emotionally destructive “The Fourth State of the Matter,” which we’ve already implored you to read , but also the incredible “Bulldozing the Baby,” which takes on a smaller tragedy: a three-year-old Beard’s separation from her doll Hal. “The gorgeous thing about Hal,” she tells us, “was that not only was he my friend, he was also my slave. I made the majority of our decisions, including the bathtub one, which in retrospect was the beginning of the end.”

Consider the Lobster , David Foster Wallace

This one’s another “duh” moment, at least if you’re a fan of the literary essay. One of the most brilliant essayists of all time, Wallace pushes the boundaries (of the form, of our patience, of his own brain) and comes back with a classic collection of writing on everything from John Updike to, well, lobsters. You’ll laugh out loud right before you rethink your whole life. And then repeat.

Notes of a Native Son , James Baldwin

Baldwin’s most influential work is a witty, passionate portrait of black life and social change in America in the 1940s and early 1950s. His essays, like so many of the greats’, are both incisive social critiques and rigorous investigations into the self, told with a perfect tension between humor and righteous fury.

Naked , David Sedaris

His essays often read more like short stories than they do social criticism (though there’s a healthy, if perhaps implied, dose of that slippery subject), but no one makes us laugh harder or longer. A genius of the form.

Against Interpretation , Susan Sontag

This collection, Sontag’s first, is a dazzling feat of intellectualism. Her essays dissect not only art but the way we think about art, imploring us to “reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it.” It also contains the brilliant “Notes on ‘Camp,'” one of our all-time favorites.

The Common Reader , Virginia Woolf

Woolf is a literary giant for a reason — she was as incisive and brilliant a critic as she was a novelist. These witty essays, written for the common reader (“He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole- a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing”), are as illuminating and engrossing as they were when they were written.

Teaching a Stone to Talk , Annie Dillard

This is Dillard’s only book of essays, but boy is it a blazingly good one. The slender volume, filled with examinations of nature both human and not, is deft of thought and tongue, and well worth anyone’s time. As the Chicago Sun-Times ‘s Edward Abbey gushed, “This little book is haloed and informed throughout by Dillard’s distinctive passion and intensity, a sort of intellectual radiance that reminds me both Thoreau and Emily Dickinson.”

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man , Henry Louis Gates Jr.

In this eloquent volume of essays, all but one of which were originally published in the New Yorker , Gates argues against the notion of the singularly representable “black man,” preferring to represent him in a myriad of diverse profiles, from James Baldwin to Colin Powell. Humane, incisive, and satisfyingly journalistic, Gates cobbles together the ultimate portrait of the 20th-century African-American male by refusing to cobble it together, and raises important questions about race and identity even as he entertains.

Otherwise Known As the Human Condition , Geoff Dyer

This book of essays, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year of its publication, covers 25 years of the uncategorizable, inimitable Geoff Dyer’s work — casually erudite and yet liable to fascinate anyone wandering in the door, witty and breathing and full of truth. As Sam Lipsyte said, “You read Dyer for his caustic wit, of course, his exquisite and perceptive crankiness, and his deep and exciting intellectual connections, but from these enthralling rants and cultural investigations there finally emerges another Dyer, a generous seeker of human feeling and experience, a man perhaps closer than he thinks to what he believes his hero Camus achieved: ‘a heart free of bitterness.'”

Art and Ardor , Cynthia Ozick

Look, Cynthia Ozick is a genius. One of David Foster Wallace’s favorite writers, and one of ours, Ozick has no less than seven essay collections to her name, and we could have chosen any one of them, each sharper and more perfectly self-conscious than the last. This one, however, includes her stunner “A Drugstore in Winter,” which was chosen by Joyce Carol Oates for The Best American Essays of the Century , so we’ll go with it.

No More Nice Girls , Ellen Willis

The venerable Ellen Willis was the first pop music critic for The New Yorker , and a rollicking anti-authoritarian, feminist, all-around bad-ass woman who had a hell of a way with words. This collection examines the women’s movement, the plight of the aging radical, race relations, cultural politics, drugs, and Picasso. Among other things.

The War Against Cliché , Martin Amis

As you know if you’ve ever heard him talk , Martin Amis is not only a notorious grouch but a sharp critical mind, particularly when it comes to literature. That quality is on full display in this collection, which spans nearly 30 years and twice as many subjects, from Vladimir Nabokov (his hero) to chess to writing about sex. Love him or hate him, there’s no denying that he’s a brilliant old grump.

Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts , Clive James

James’s collection is a strange beast, not like any other essay collection on this list but its own breed. An encyclopedia of modern culture, the book collects 110 new biographical essays, which provide more than enough room for James to flex his formidable intellect and curiosity, as he wanders off on tangents, anecdotes, and cultural criticism. It’s not the only who’s who you need, but it’s a who’s who you need.

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman , Nora Ephron

Oh Nora, we miss you. Again, we could have picked any of her collections here — candid, hilarious, and willing to give it to you straight, she’s like a best friend and mentor in one, only much more interesting than any of either you’ve ever had.

Arguably , Christopher Hitchens

No matter what you think of his politics (or his rhetorical strategies), there’s no denying that Christopher Hitchens was one of the most brilliant minds — and one of the most brilliant debaters — of the century. In this collection, packed with cultural commentary, literary journalism, and political writing, he is at his liveliest, his funniest, his exactingly wittiest. He’s also just as caustic as ever.

The Solace of Open Spaces , Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich is a poet, and in this collection, you’ll know it. In 1976, she moved to Wyoming and became a cowherd, and nearly a decade later, she published this lovely, funny set of essays about rural life in the American West.”Keenly observed the world is transformed,” she writes. “The landscape is engorged with detail, every movement on it chillingly sharp. The air between people is charged. Days unfold, bathed in their own music. Nights become hallucinatory; dreams, prescient.”

The Braindead Megaphone , George Saunders

Saunders may be the man of the moment, but he’s been at work for a long while, and not only on his celebrated short stories. His single collection of essays applies the same humor and deliciously slant view to the real world — which manages to display nearly as much absurdity as one of his trademark stories.

Against Joie de Vivre , Phillip Lopate

“Over the years,” the title essay begins, “I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre , the knack of knowing how to live.” Lopate goes on to dissect, in pleasantly sardonic terms, the modern dinner party. Smart and thought-provoking throughout (and not as crotchety as all that), this collection is conversational but weighty, something to be discussed at length with friends at your next — oh well, you know.

Sex and the River Styx , Edward Hoagland

Edward Hoagland, who John Updike deemed “the best essayist of my generation,” has a long and storied career and a fat bibliography, so we hesitate to choose such a recent installment in the writer’s canon. Then again, Garrison Keillor thinks it’s his best yet , so perhaps we’re not far off. Hoagland is a great nature writer (name checked by many as the modern Thoreau) but in truth, he’s just as fascinated by humanity, musing that “human nature is interstitial with nature, and not to be shunned by a naturalist.” Elegant and thoughtful, Hoagland may warn us that he’s heading towards the River Styx, but we’ll hang on to him a while longer.

Changing My Mind , Zadie Smith

Smith may be best known for her novels (and she should be), but to our eyes she is also emerging as an excellent essayist in her own right, passionate and thoughtful. Plus, any essay collection that talks about Barack Obama via Pygmalion is a winner in our book.

My Misspent Youth , Meghan Daum

Like so many other writers on this list, Daum dives head first into the culture and comes up with meat in her mouth. Her voice is fresh and her narratives daring, honest and endlessly entertaining.

The White Album , Joan Didion

Yes, Joan Didion is on this list twice, because Joan Didion is the master of the modern essay, tearing at our assumptions and building our world in brisk, clever strokes. Deal.

• Search Results

The best essay collections to read now

From advice on friendship and understanding modern life to getting a grasp on coronavirus, these books offer insight on life. 

What better way to get into the work of a writer than through a collection of their essays? 

These seven collections, from novelists and critics alike, address a myriad of subjects from friendship to how colleges are dealing with sexual assaults on campus to race and racism. 

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino (2019)

As a staff writer at The New Yorker , Jia Tolentino has explored everything from a rise in youth vaping to the ongoing cultural reckoning about sexual assault. Her first book Trick Mirror takes some of those pieces for The New Yorker as well as new work to form what is one of the sharpest collections of cultural criticism today.

Using herself and her own coming of age as a lens for many of the essays, Tolentino turns her pen and her eye to everything from her generation’s obsession with extravagant weddings to how college campuses deal with sexual assault.

If you’re looking for an insight into millennial life, then Trick Mirror should be on your to-read list.

In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens by Alice Walker (1983)

Sometimes essays collected from a sprawling period of a successful writer’s life can feel like a hasty addition to a bibliography; a smash-and-grab of notebook flotsam. Not so In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens , from which one can truly understand the sheer range of the Pulitzer Prize winner’s range of study and activism. From Walker’s first published piece of non-fiction (for which she won a prize, and spent her winnings on cut peonies) to more elegiac pieces about her heritage, Walker’s thoughts on feminism (which she terms “womanism”) and the Civil Rights Movement remain grippingly pertinent 50 years on.

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (2000)

That David Sedaris’s ascent to literary stardom happened later in his life – his breakthrough collection of humour essays was released when he was 44 – suited the author’s writing style perfectly. Me Talk Pretty One Day is both a painfully funny account of his childhood and an enduring snapshot of mid-forties malaise. First story ‘Go Carolina’, about his attempt to transcend a childhood lisp, is told from a perfect distance and with all the worldliness necessary to milk every drop of tragic, cringeworthy humour from his childhood. It never falters from there: by the book’s second half, in which Sedaris is living in France, he’s firmly established his niche, writing about the ways that even snobs experience utter humiliation ­– and Me Talk Pretty One Day is all the more human for it. 

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

By signing up, I confirm that I'm over 16. To find out what personal data we collect and how we use it, please visit our Privacy Policy

Online Recreational Reading

• Featured Books
• May 2023 - New Books
• April 2023 - New Books
• March 2023 - New Books
• February 2023 - New Books
• January 2023 - New Books
• December 2022 - New Books
• November 2022 - New Books
• October 2022 - New Books
• September 2022 - New Books
• August 2022 - New Books
• July 2022 - New Books
• June 2022 - New Books
• May 2022 - New Books
• April 2022 - New Books
• March 2022 - New Books
• February 2022 - New Books
• January 2022 - New Books
• December 2021 - New Books
• November 2021 - New Books
• October 2021 - New Books
• September 2021 - New Books
• August 2021 - New Books
• July 2021 - New Books
• June 2021 - New Books
• May 2021 - New Books
• April 2021 - New Books
• March 2021 - New Books
• February 2021 - New Books
• January 2021 - New Books
• December 2020 - New Books
• November 2020 - New Books
• October 2020 - New Books
• September 2020 - New Books
• August 2020 - New Books
• July 2020 - New Books
• June 2020 - New Books
• May 2020 - New Books
• April 2020 - New Books
• General Fiction
• Historical Fiction
• Horror & Ghost Stories
• Juvenile Fiction
• Mysteries & Thrillers
• Science Fiction & Fantasy
• Young Adult Fiction
• Art & Photography
• Biography & Memoir
• Business, Economics & Finance
• College & Career Success

Essay Collections

• Crafts, Hobbies & DIY
• Film, Television, & Performing Arts
• Food & Cooking
• Games & Amusements
• Juvenile Non-Fiction
• Pets & Animals
• Political Science
• Religion & Spirituality
• Science, Nature, Technology & Medicine
• Self-Help & Self Improvement
• Social Science
• Sports & Recreation
• Anthologies
• Comic Strips & Cartoons
• Comics History & Criticism
• Kids & Young Adults
• Manga & Manhwa
• Non-Fiction
• Super-Heroes

Guide No Longer Updated

As of July 2023 this guide—started during the early days of the COVID 19 pandemic—is no longer being actively updated or maintained. For an up-to-date listing of essay eBooks (and audio books) please see the Essays section in OverDrive/Libby.

Books are listed by author's surname.

• << Previous: College & Career Success
• Next: Crafts, Hobbies & DIY >>
• Last Updated: Dec 20, 2023 9:32 AM
• URL: https://guides.lib.umich.edu/onlinerecreading

Your path to academic success

Improve your paper with our award-winning Proofreading Services ,  Plagiarism Checker , Citation Generator , AI Detector & Knowledge Base .

Proofreading & Editing

Get expert help from Scribbr’s academic editors, who will proofread and edit your essay, paper, or dissertation to perfection.

Plagiarism Checker

Detect and resolve unintentional plagiarism with the Scribbr Plagiarism Checker, so you can submit your paper with confidence.

Citation Generator

Generate accurate citations with Scribbr’s free citation generator and save hours of repetitive work.

Happy to help you

You’re not alone. Together with our team and highly qualified editors , we help you answer all your questions about academic writing.

Open 24/7 – 365 days a year. Always available to help you.

Very satisfied students

This is our reason for working. We want to make  all students  happy, every day.

Life saver!

Life saver! I have been using Scribbr for years and it saves me so much time. Editing is easy, and the info pages are very handy.

It's FREE!!!

It's FREE!!!! Simple and easy to use for making citations and saving them in different folders.

User friendly citing tool

It is an excellent tool for students who need assistance with citing.

Really helpful way to reference. Still double check

Really helpful way to reference. APA7 style is still tricky to do properly so make sure to double check and correct the title in case they are in caps. Otherwise great.

I have used Scribbr throughout my…

I have used Scribbr throughout my doctoral experience. The Citation Generator is the best around. THANK YOU

Keeper for any college student

This is helping improve my writing in Graduate School, and I am learning a lot about how to be better at academic writing. Great resource!

Good, works really well and is effective

I love using the site

I love using the site, it makes it easy to check myself and the formatting I'm using for any given resource.

This place is amazing

This place is amazing. Let's be honest. Always so helpful, great, thorough. Used it for years. Second to Refworks IMO, sometimes better. Thanks.

love how easy it is to cite sources

love how easy it is to cite sources. The best tool I have used.

Best site ever

Scribbr citation generator is ideal for school homework!

I really enjoy using the scribbr online citation generator! It is free and easy to use and formats my APA citations wonderfully for school.

I have been using this app for my…

I have been using this app for my bachelor's and master's degrees, and I find it very useful. Keep up the excellent work.

It has taken alot less time than…

It has taken alot less time than manually writing in the cite and references

its easy to use

COLLEGE MUST HAVE!

I have been using Scribber for my college class homework. I love this program and recommend it to anyone that needs help with writing. 5 STARS!!

I love the ease of use with the website…

I love the ease of use with the website and citing papers. It makes citing paper so much easier. I use scribbr for every paper I write now.

it is very good for my assignment at…

it is very good for my assignment at university and I can make APA reference

A total lifesaver

A total lifesaver! Scribbr has assisted in my graduate work, and I will continue to use it for all academic work in the future!

Makes referencing so much quicker and I love that you can change the font and the size to match the rest of your work.

Everything you need to write an A-grade paper

Free resources used by 5,000,000 students every month.

Bite-sized videos that guide you through the writing process. Get the popcorn, sit back, and learn!

Lecture slides

Ready-made slides for teachers and professors that want to kickstart their lectures.

• Academic writing
• Citing sources
• Methodology
• Research process
• Dissertation structure
• Language rules

Accessible how-to guides full of examples that help you write a flawless essay, proposal, or dissertation.

Chrome extension

Cite any page or article with a single click right from your browser.

Time-saving templates that you can download and edit in Word or Google Docs.

Help you achieve your academic goals

Whether we’re proofreading and editing , checking for plagiarism or AI content , generating citations, or writing useful Knowledge Base articles , our aim is to support students on their journey to become better academic writers.

We believe that every student should have the right tools for academic success. Free tools like a paraphrasing tool , grammar checker, summarizer and an  AI Proofreader . We pave the way to your academic degree.

Ask our team

Want to contact us directly? No problem.  We  are always here for you.

• Email [email protected]
• Start live chat
• Call +1 (510) 822-8066
• WhatsApp +31 20 261 6040

Frequently asked questions

Our team helps students graduate by offering:

• A world-class citation generator
• Plagiarism Checker software powered by Turnitin
• Innovative Citation Checker software
• Professional proofreading services
• Over 300 helpful articles about academic writing, citing sources, plagiarism, and more

Scribbr specializes in editing study-related documents . We proofread:

• PhD dissertations
• Research proposals
• Personal statements
• Admission essays
• Motivation letters
• Reflection papers
• Journal articles
• Capstone projects

Scribbr’s Plagiarism Checker is powered by elements of Turnitin’s Similarity Checker , namely the plagiarism detection software and the Internet Archive and Premium Scholarly Publications content databases .

The add-on AI detector is powered by Scribbr’s proprietary software.

The Scribbr Citation Generator is developed using the open-source Citation Style Language (CSL) project and Frank Bennett’s citeproc-js . It’s the same technology used by dozens of other popular citation tools, including Mendeley and Zotero.

You can find all the citation styles and locales used in the Scribbr Citation Generator in our publicly accessible repository on Github .

• Skip to main content
• Skip to primary sidebar

Writing Tips Oasis - A website dedicated to helping writers to write and publish books.

How to Write a Collection of Essays

By Georgina Roy

Table of Contents

1. Defining the genre

2. the writing process, 3. choosing the right essays, 4. publishing multiple collections, 5. selecting compatible themes, 6. the importance of arrangement, 7. chronological arrangement, 8. arranging for impact, 9. dealing with difficult themes, 10. the importance of second opinion, 11. analysis: are you offering something new, 12. presenting radical ideas, 13. writing and language style, 14. pre-publication options, 15. publishing the collection of essays.

Welcome to Writing Tips Oasis and our newest guide – how to write a collection of essays.

This guide will be different than others, and this is due to the fact that the type of work you’re trying to publish will not fall into a traditional genre – and by that, we mean literary fiction, non-fiction, and genre fiction , including everything from chic lit to dystopian fantasy and science fiction.

If we can call philosophy a genre – and not an academic discipline – then that’s where a collection of essays would belong to. However, philosophy is not isolated from other scientific studies, it encompasses learnings from many other academic disciplines, from history to psychology. A collection of essays may touch upon these, however, most often, a collection of essays is the place where a writer shares their own views and perspective on the world, the life they’ve lived, and the lessons they’ve learned along the way.

In other words, a collection of essays can be quite a niche, and that comes with its own consequences. In this guide, we will analyze the different aspects and things that you need to be careful about when writing a collection of essays, and, at the end, we will take a look at the publishing process and how it differs from publishing a fiction or a non-fiction book.

A collection of essays might fall under the umbrella of philosophy – barely, but it has an even more difficult time falling into a genre. It’s a mix of autobiography, memoir, and, well, blog posts, and as such, it can be a tough ordeal to even find the right audience for it.

For example, you may want to explore the things you learned while in your teens, and maybe your essays will provide a fascinating insight into what it’s like to be a teenager and what you would’ve liked to know at that age. However, who will read that? The teenagers you’re writing about may be more interested in reading YA vampire novels, people in their early twenties or even thirties may not be so keen to go back to those years – or even think about what they should have known at that age – and people who are older than that may have different things on their minds, which means your book of insightful essays may fall into the hands of other writers or a small group of people who like to think about those things.

Similarly, you may want to document everything you’ve learned as a new parent. Now, that, is a different story altogether, because there will be a lot of people who will relate to that – and be interested in reading it in order to see what they could learn from you. So, from a pure business and marketing point of view, a collection of essays on parenthood will have a better chance at attracting many readers than a collection of essays on being a teenager.

So, what can you do?

Well, for starters, write the essays first. So, let’s cover that aspect before we continue.

The writing process of a collection of essays is quite different compared to a novel or a non-fiction book. Could you decide upon each title in your collection and sit down to write them? Of course, but would those essays be genuine? Chances are, they would sound more like textbook passages, or, even worse, schoolwork assignments.

As such, what you really need to have when you decide to publish a collection of essays are written essays. Whether these will be written over the course of a year, five years, or a decade, is up to you and your writing habits. However, there is one truth that we may be able to claim with relative certainty: all writers write essays. If you’re a writer and you’re not writing essays at the moment, chances are you haven’t noticed that you do. For example, many writers would write essays as a warm up to writing in their novel. Moreover, what are non-fiction books these days but the author’s knowledge and opinion on a certain, specific topic? Of course, good non-fiction novels are supported by facts and a lot of research, but at the core of it, they are still a series of essays in a very specific, very narrow even, topic.

Of course, now, you may find yourself thinking that you should better give up on your goal to publish a collection of essays because you have none at the moment. Our advice is twofold. First, dig into your writing – especially your free writing, musings in your notebooks or forgotten word files in your laptop. Chances are, there is a lot of wisdom hiding in there. Second, make a habit to write down your thoughts. Life is chaos, that’s true, but we learn something every day, and we create the narrative of our lives through our thought processes. Start creating the habit to write these things down, as often as you can. Soon, you will begin to want to do it, because writing can also serve as a form of therapy where we make sense of things. Before you realize it, you will begin to write essays, and you may have enough essays to publish in a collection within a few months or a year.

But, the process does not end there. If the first goal is to have the essays already written, the second goal is to choose the right essays.

Let’s take a look at what that means.

In the first section, we talked about two different types of collections of essays, teenage years and parenthood. But, those two are nothing but examples of the themes and topics that your collection of essays will cover. In other words, you can have collections of essays on many aspects of life. From finding love in a busy world to being a new pet owner after a lifetime of fear of animals, for example. Dealing with hypochondria, dealing with mental illnesses, becoming a parent, choosing not to be a parent and the consequences of that – both personal and social and where and how they meet. You can have collections of essays on sociology, social issues, psychology, even history – if you can offer a different perspective on past events.

The opportunities are endless. Meanwhile, chances are, your essays will revolve around your own life, and what you learn along the way. This means that there will be a variety of topics that you will cover in your essays.

As such, welcome to the one and only rule of writing and publishing an essay collection: choose the correct essays, essays that will revolve around either a single topic or a variety of topics that will revolve around a similar theme or phase in life. You will write many essays in the course of your writing career – even more so if you decide to adopt the habit of writing things down – but that does not mean that every essay you’ve ever written will get to be published. To double down on it even, not every essay you’ve written will be publishable in the first place.

But, of those that are publishable, they will cover a variety of topics, each topic as different from the other as night and day, and those essays will ideally belong in different collections. So, let’s cover that first before we continue on what it means to combine different themes and topics in a single collection.

Some authors have found their niche and publish their essay collections and that is what their career as an author is based upon. Can you do the same?

The answer to that question is complicated. In theory – yes, you can. If you have enough material for many different collections, then you have completed the first step in achieving such a goal. The second step, unfortunately, depends on the wheel of fortune and lady luck herself. You can self-publish, yes; but will your first publication be successful without the backing (and the marketing team) of a publishing house that specializes in publishing essays? Moreover, will you even have the luck to get published traditionally without an agent – who, yes, also specializes in authors who write essay collections?

However, you can publish different collections of essays even if you are predominantly a fiction author. Look at how many authors from the 20 th century, like Bukowski, Bradbury, Vonnegut, and yes, even Stephen King have published their collections of essays throughout the years. Stephen King’s On Writing is one of the most famous books that aspiring writers are recommended to read (and again, consider this mention a recommendation too, because Stephen King is the king of writer discipline, which is what has made him so prolific over the years).

So, maybe after you analyze your essays, you will realize that you have material for three or four different collections. Which then begets the task of organizing the essays into a cohesive whole.

And that’s when you need to begin to think in terms of themes.

Before you even begin to think about which essays to select for your collection, you need to decide on the theme or themes that you will talk about. As writing essays can often be a stream-of-consciousness effort rather than a planned one, you may be tackling different themes as you write them. So, when the moment comes to decide which theme will be prevalent in the essays, you may feel strangled by the need to choose just one.

However, that is the furthest thing from the truth. The goal here is to not promise something that you will not deliver upon – in the title, in the description, in the blurb of the book. If you wish to gather all the essays you’ve written while living in a certain town – whether your hometown or not – then, by all means, allow the reader to understand that the town will be what connects all of them. On the other hand, if you wish to cover your life experiences as an expat for example, or what living as an expat has taught you, then make sure to keep within that margin. The difference between the first and the second example is that the first one is a lot narrower. To continue with the example, let’s say that you were born in one town, but are writing about your experiences while living in another town. In this case, your essays about your hometown will not belong in that collection.

On the other hand, if what connects all your essays together is your life as an expat (still continuing on the other example above), then you can include not only essays about your hometown, and the new town where you moved, but you can include every other essay where your perspective as an expat comes into play.

Again, these two are just examples. You may wish to write about being a feminist (or, as is the case of Roxane Gay, about being a Bad Feminist), and what that means to you. In this case, you would include all the essays where the ideas you express come from that aspect – and it doesn’t matter whether you are talking about the interpretation of dreams or the most prevalent pop culture ideas of the current times.

As such, do not mix essays that do not have a correlation between them. For example, you should not really mix essays on the prevalent homelessness in NYC, while in the same collection, include an essay about what partying at Columbia University was really like. Not only are those two topics quite disconnected from one another, but it would also be in bad taste and give an impression that you, as the writer, are unaware of your own privilege.

Once you make a decision on what would be the theme or aspect about yourself or your life that will connect all of the essays in your collection, you can begin to think about the arrangement of the essays.

How you arrange the essays in your collection is just as important as the essays themselves. There are a few different ways that you can do this: chronologically, for impact, or, to create a cohesive narrative whole.

First and foremost, each essay you have chosen needs to present a point and argue for or against that point, based on your perspective. A collection of essays is not a memoir or an autobiography that will recount past events or experiences – but, an essay will contain those past experiences, along with a certain amount of established, confirmed research findings if you’re dwelling into themes and topics where you need the support of such findings to argue your points. But, an essay needs to have a point, it should end on an abrupt note where it feels unfinished, even if that note may seem powerful to you personally.

A collection of essays, in turn, needs two things: each essay needs to correspond well with the overall theme that connects all of them, and, ultimately, it needs to form a cohesive collection of ideas on the established theme. Whether this will be done through a chronological arrangement, an arrangement for impact, or through an arrangement that hints at a narrative without delving too much into fiction, will depend on both the theme and the author themselves – or, upon you as the author. But, once you decide on which path to take, then make sure to stick to it to ensure that reader gets to close your book after reading all of your essays with the feeling that they have, by reading your essays, gained a new perspective of the theme you are talking about in the essays.

Since it’s impossible to distil these different arrangements without using examples, we will go back to our two previous examples: a collection of essays written in one town, and a collection of essays about your (supposed) life as an expat. And, since we mentioned three ways, we will add another example theme, which can be feminism.

Of our previous examples of themes, the example of life as an expat works best for chronological arrangement of essays. There will be a difference in the essays one would have written in the beginning of such a major change in life, and as time goes along, those essays will have gained a different tone and perspective.

There are other themes that can benefit from chronological arrangement. For example, coming of age in a certain country, coming of age in a certain time period (the 60’s, the 70’s, the 80’s and so forth), coming of age in the time period of the early to late 2000’s, and the major worldwide changes that ensued as a result of the technology boom, or, growing up with a smartphone in hand (something that we assume newly fledged adults will be writing about in the next decade).

The common correlation between all of these themes is time: as time passes, the perspective changes. There is always a change in the tone from the first to the last essay, and the last essay should wrap things up and offer a conclusion on the overall theme presented in the collection. In the end, reading such a collection makes the reader feel that they have gone through a philosophical journey just as much as the author did, and are able to understand the author’s perspective and ideas – even if they don’t agree with them.

Another title for this section could be “arranging due to impact” because there are two different paths the author can take here. First, you can arrange the essays to create a different impact with each of them. Meaning, each essay’s impact will be calculated and placed specifically in that spot in the collection because that essay will be more painful, powerful, or maybe, more humorous than the ones before and after it. Depending on the difficulty of the themes you’re tackling, you might want to arrange the essays in such a way so as to not overwhelm your readers.

To go back to our example, let’s say that your collection is about living a single town. Life in a single town, in which case you can have essays about life, which yes, will include death and birth and everything in between. For example, if your first essay is about death, grief, or mourning, you may have exhausted the reader completely, even though they’ve just begun reading your collection of essays.

However, on the other hand, maybe you do want to start with a bang and then continue on with the other essays. In this case, you want to ensure that you do not use up the most powerful essays all at once in the beginning of the collection, because then your readers might not stick around when the individual themes and topics of the essays become lighter.

In the end, when it comes to arranging for impact – or as a result of the impact of the individual essays – you are the one who should make the final decision on which way you will go. However, it’s very important to keep this impact in mind because ultimately, you want the readers to enjoy reading your collection, even if it deals with difficult themes (and, truthfully, though often humorous, most collection of essays do deal with difficult themes that would make most people even a little uncomfortable). So, the idea is to ease your readers into it before presenting them with some of the most difficult essays – essays that would have a great emotional impact on the readers.

Which brings us to arranging with hints of narrative – and dealing with difficult themes.

When it comes to dealing with difficult themes – or, perhaps the better word here would be traumatic themes – like rape, grief, mourning, murder, suicide, – arranging the essays in such a collection can be a huge challenge.

And the truth is that there is no “correct” way of arranging the essays when it comes to themes like these. Your readers will always fall into two categories: people who have gone through that traumatic experience, and people who haven’t. And each individual from both groups will experience your collection differently.

The reason why we mentioned arranging the essays with a hint of a narrative is because when it comes to themes like dealing with trauma and grief, arranging the essays in such a way can give the reader hope – especially if you do have essays that focus on the aspect of healing. If that’s the case, you have the opportunity to divide the essays in three parts (just like a novel has a beginning, a middle, and an ending). You have the essays that talk about life before the traumatic event, the traumatic event, the post-traumatic period, and the healing period.

Please note that this doesn’t mean that you need to create a fictional story or to rewrite your essays so that they read like fiction, or a string of loosely connected short stories. If you do that, you’ve delved either into fiction territory, or the territory of a memoir or an autobiography (about a certain time period of life). What we talk about is having the essays arranged in such a manner as to show the process of dealing with the trauma and healing.

Or, in other words, you are not always right. Here, we will get a bit away from difficult themes and talk about the other type of difficult topics that we are dealing with today: social issues. As the year 2020 showed, the world is full of social injustices based on race, religion, ethnicity, wealth, sexual orientation, gender (or non-gender) … we can go on and on.

And you may have some strong opinions on these issues. That, however, automatically, will not make you right. In fact, these issues are so complicated, and each person’s views will differ so much that the writer’s background always gets involved into the importance of their opinion – which is not necessarily a good thing – but it happens. Even when a woman writes about what it means to be a feminist, there may be other women who will disagree with her views. Or, a person of color might write about what it means to be oppressed, and then another person of color may come forward and dispute all of those claims. Alas, that is the world we live in.

The best thing you can do is try to get a second opinion – not from a friend, a lover, or a family member, or a person who you know will agree with your views. Quite the opposite actually. Have your essays read by someone who may actually disagree with your views. Have your essays beta read by strangers whose opinion you cannot gauge before you give them your collection. Try to get as many unbiased opinions as possible, and then listen to their feedback.

And this isn’t just because you’re not always right. Additionally, there will always be the chance that some people will not understand your essays. Maybe you did not express your views in the correct manner (which happens quite often), maybe you said something that can be easily taken in a negative connotation out of context – which can later on be posted in reviews of your collection. And don’t forget that cancel culture exists – these days, any public figure can get “cancelled” really quickly because of a wrong word in a wrong spot in a single sentence. It’s not just about not offending a person, a group of people, or a whole nation or gender, it’s about not having your career ruined before it has even begun.

We’ll talk more later about the difference between being honest in your views and being offensive, but first, let’s take a look at what you would be offering in the essays themselves.

Like with any other genre of fiction or non-fiction niche, before you start with the publishing process of your essay collection, read other author’s collections – yes, in the particular theme or topic you wish to tackle.

Read as many as you can. And then, start analyzing.

In fiction, it is advisable to read as many novels in your genre so that you will ensure that you will not publish something that has been seen before. For example, you may have a great idea about a love story between an overbearing, overprotective Alpha-male, and a not-quite-submissive heroine who still needs the hero to rescue her on occasion. And if you thought how that sounds like Twilight (and its adult spawn, 50 Shades of Grey ), you’d be correct.

The same applies to non-fiction niches too. You may have a great idea about a cookbook full of your grandmother’s southern cooking recipes. But then, you do your research and discover that there are about a hundred books out there on southern cooking, and about half of them have the same recipes that you thought were unique to your grandmother’s kitchen.

The same applies to essay collections. You may think that you have great ideas and great insight into life, the universe, and everything, but you may also discover that about a hundred other authors have already said the same thing in different words.

However, do not despair! The chances of that particular scenario happening with a collection of essays is quite slim (but not impossible). Worst case scenario, a few of your essays may present ideas that have been explored by other authors. But, that doesn’t mean that your particular individual perspective will not offer anything new to the table. Because of that, read as many collections as you can, and then analyze your own essays. Decide which essays fall into the category of “no one has said this before” and the category of “someone has talked about this, but they haven’t proposed this idea’ and “people have already talked at length about this, and I’m not really offering anything new.”

And, even better news: the chances of your essays falling into the third category are even slimmer, unless you’re talking about how it’s really bad to hit and abuse street animals, for example. In other words, your essays would need to be written about universal topics with views that are easily shared by most good and kind people in the world. On the other hand, if you’re proposing new and radical ideas about what society should do to protect these street cats and street dogs, then, most of the same good and kind people in the world would probably be all ears.

So, what happens when you do have radical ideas?

First and foremost, the term “radical idea” is both vague and specific, because an idea that was radical fifty years ago is a normal and accepted idea today. An idea that goes against the established common norm is a radical idea, even if it may seem like a normal idea to you, personally. Some radical ideas are positive, however, some can be quite negative. And then, there are the ideas that appeared radical at a first glance, but in reality, they are what should have been the norm all along (like, for example, women having the right to vote and the right to equal wages in comparison to men).

As such, the first thing to do is to analyze – in the same way as in the previous section – whether your ideas can or would be considered radical by your readers. The second step is to see whether you are presenting your ideas properly. As we talked before, you do not want to be misunderstood, because that can be something that will kill your career before you’ve even begun it properly, and this can be especially important if you are planning on making a career as a public speaker and writer of essay collections.

To put it into an example, let’s use feminism as a theme here. Today, the word feminist can often be correlated with a person who believes in equal rights for all genders. On the other hand, a feminist can be also correlated with a person who believes that women need and should not only get special rights, but also special treatment. And, the line between those two gets really, really blurry quite often, so much so that, as we’ve mentioned before, a feminist can read an essay written by another feminist and disagree with the writer and call their views radical (and maybe even harmful).

The best thing to do to avoid being mislabeled and misunderstood is to be very clear in your essays that you do not discard the established norm – or the general view of the idea, but that your idea also deserves merit and consideration. To go back to feminism, or, even deeper, rape culture. Today, it is widely considered that one in five women will be the recipient of unwanted sexual and/or romantic attention. A study in the The New England Journal of Medicine suggested that this number can be lessened by teaching young girls and women to speak up when they feel that their boundaries are being threatened. However, it would be easy for that statement to be misinterpreted as “we need to teach women how to defend themselves, but there is no need to teach men about consent.”

You might think, “Oh, they are my essays, and I will write them in any writing style I want.”

You’d be very wrong.

The language and writing style is your choice – however, remember what we talked about in a previous section: you do not wish to alienate your readers by false advertising. Meanwhile, different topics will require a different writing style. For example, observations about life in the modern small town will sound the best written in a language style that would be easy to follow and understand. You might even call it, workman-like prose that does not ask the readers to have had a high SAT score to understand.

On the other hand, if you’re writing about grief and dealing with grief, your language style will have a different requirement. Yes, it’s okay to use workmanlike prose in it too; but, since you would also want to add credibility to your opinions through established psychological research, you might want to find a balance between an academic style and workmanlike prose.

Moreover, you have essays on topics that require a more academic-sounding voice, like societal issues and similar topics. In this case, it’s best to lean slightly towards a more formal, more academic prose that will convince the readers that you know what you’re talking about.

The good news is that this is an issue you would have to deal with in the editing process – after you have chosen your essays and determined their arrangement in the collection. When the time comes for you to edit the collection – and editing is necessary, even if your essays have already been written – you can work on the writing style and use of language in your prose. That is to say, you will not be changing your views or opinions on anything, you will basically be tightening the prose.

Another thing to ensure when you’re editing the essays (which is the final step before starting the publication process), is that all of the essays use the same writing style – regardless of whether the style is humorous, serious, academic, or workmanlike prose. Even so, we would not recommend using workmanlike prose too much in your essays as this can harm your credibility and make people feel that they are reading your blog posts in print – or eBook version of them. Your writing style needs to reassure the readers that your opinions are worth reading about, that they are worth something, and that your insights into the topics you’re talking about are valuable and worth paying for (since ultimately, readers would be buying your essay collection, and you want to ensure that they have gotten their value for the money).

Finally, you would have to proofread your collection. In this step, you should pay attention to spelling and grammar mistakes, yes, but also, pay attention to repetitive words and phrases. When you’re writing in free form (or free writing), you may tend to use the same phrases over and over again without even realizing it. If your essay collection will be beta read, then ask your beta readers (even if they are your friends), to tell you about the phrases that you use most often. In fact, a good beta reader will tell you this even without you asking for that.

Finally, your collection will be ready and in mint condition. And the question that arises after that is: what now?

Well, let’s take a look at some of your options.

First and foremost, understand that publishing any book requires a lot of patience. The road to a successful release of a book is long and difficult, and it will ask you to work for a long time before you will see the fruits of your labor. This is true for any book.

Sure, you might say, but how did this author or that author do it? Well, the answer to that is: it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what the experience was for another author because each author will have their own unique story of how they got published, and, even if you follow their way step by step, you still might not get the same result because publication – successful publication – depends half on luck, and half on the quality of your work.

However, the good news is that there are some things that you can do to make the road to publication for your own essay collection easier.

1) Get out there: Meaning, establish yourself online. Create professional social media accounts for yourself, create a website and a blog. Make sure you’re not an unknown commodity because in that case, publishers will not bet on your book collection being successful, which will make it more difficult for you to get traditionally published. And, if you’re self-publishing, the same applies. A self-published book by an author with a large following online will get more traction, because you would already have a fan base waiting for your book – even if that fan base is small.

2) Get published in magazines: Both online and in print. This will require you to do your homework – meaning, do a lot of research. There are plenty of online magazines out there, as well as magazines that are still in print. Analyze your essays. The good news is that you can publish your essays individually in these magazines to gain traction, and then you will be able to attract publishers for the whole collection. The bad news is that you need to pitch your essays to the right magazines. First, you want to get published in magazines that have a large reader base. Second, you need to make sure that the content and writing style will match the magazine’s style and content. However, you can try to get published in many different magazines, which in this case, can be very helpful because it might enable you to gain traction as an essay writer (or a columnist) quicker. In other words, depending on the content of your essays, you can seek out different types of magazines that will match different essays from your collection.

3) Be a columnist or a guest blogger: Seek out bloggers who have a wide audience and try to be a guest blogger on their blog. Make sure, again, that the topics of your essays will match the topics of the blogger, and, make sure that that particular blogger is a person whom you would not mind to be associated with later on. On the other hand, when it comes to magazines, instead of trying to sell your essays to them, try to become their guest columnist. Again, this doesn’t mean that you need to track down a cooking magazine and try to write a column for them. The magazine should be publishing material that fits you as a writer and fits the themes that you like to write about, especially because a column is a piece that is very close to an essay – meaning, the writer shares their own personal opinion about a certain theme, topic or an issue.

To conclude here, before you begin the publishing process – of which we’ll talk about next – try to make a name for yourself out there. For example, some vloggers from YouTube have landed publishing deals due to garnering a big following there. Having a platform that will wait for your work to get published can be a huge help in having a successful publication that will kick-start your career as a writer – even if you’re not getting traditionally published.

As with any other publication process, you can take two different routes: self-publishing, or traditional publishing. And, if you think that one or the other is easier, you’d be terribly wrong, because both routes are difficult, and, as we’ve already said in this guide, it will require patience.

First, getting an online platform – or getting followers online on social media and websites like YouTube or even Twitch, can be a huge help. It’s not a guarantee that when you publish your essay collection, it will be a major success. You may sell a lot of copies, but the general feedback might not be as optimal as you’d hoped (and nothing will hurt your ratings like bad reviews or Goodreads and Amazon, the two platforms that people use the most these days when they choose the next books).

But, let’s talk about the two publishing processes so far.

Self-publishing: it can be done through Amazon and other platforms, but Amazon also offers print-on-demand, which means that you can get published both in print and in eBook format easily. In this case, your job will involve becoming your own marketing consultant, your own publicist, and your own sponsor for ads and other paid promotion options. And yes, this can be a huge cost for you, and you will not have the guarantee that your investment will pay off. What you can do is ensure that the book has a catchy title and a blurb. Focus on who you are: what makes you unique? Is it your cultural background, or is it your personal experience with the topics you would be covering in your essay collection? Whatever makes you, the writer, unique, needs to be put in the blurb for your essay collection. Read other books’ blurbs.

For example, Roxane Gay’s extremely successful Bad Feminist has what makes her unique in the title: she considers herself an unconventional feminist, and the essays in that essay collection all revolve around that topic. On the other hand, you have Aleksandar Hemon’s The Book of My Lives , which chronicles his life in Sarajevo before the war, and his life in Chicago while his hometown is under siege, where the only thing he was able to do was watch from afar. The one similarity it has with Bad Feminist is in the title: it immediately points to what makes the author unique and what makes their perspective unique. So, your book collection’s title itself should point out to both what makes you, as the writer, unique, and it should point to the topics you are talking about in your essays.

Meanwhile, don’t forget about the cover. Again, it should suit the themes and topics you are covering, and, it should look professional and well done. If you have the skills to create a cover on your own, that’s great, but if your cover looks like something a teenager created while writing fanfiction on Wattpad (and even on that platform, fanfiction covers have become better and better), then you might consider hiring a professional to do it for you.

Traditional publishing: you might think that getting traditionally published will save you the headache of dealing with everything we’ve described above. Again, you’d be wrong. Getting traditionally published means finding a publisher for your novel. Many publishing houses do not accept unsolicited manuscripts, no matter how well written they are, and if they do, you might end up in the slush pile that gets touched upon once or twice every quarter. With a lot of other manuscripts, essay collections written by authors like yourself.

To avoid this, you would need an agent, someone who will pitch your essay collection to the correct publishing houses that, in turn, might want to sign you on. First, you need the right agent – someone who is established in the niche that is essay collections, and who has successfully worked with other authors who’ve published similar works, like biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Even so, your best bet might be an agent who’s worked with author’s who’ve published essay collections – or at least one or two authors. Next, it would be a good idea if the agent also has experience in publishing essay collections in similar topics to the ones in your collection.

Furthermore, the publishing house you will be aiming for – if you have a good agent, they will probably already know which publishing houses would be interested in publishing your work. However, if you do not have an agent yet and you still want to send your manuscripts to publishing houses that do accept unsolicited manuscripts, make sure it’s the right publishing houses – meaning, again, they will have published similar work before. Do not send your manuscript of essay collections to a publishing house – or an imprint of a publishing house – that publishes collections of short stories or anthologies. First, they will probably not sign you on, second, even if they do, their audience is not the right audience for your essay collection.

Again, even if you do get an agent, that agent will need something to work with, and not just your essays and the topics you’re covering. For example, sure, you might have written several essays on race and social injustice, but, today, there are many essay collections that deal with that topic, so, there has to be something about you – or your essays – that sets your work apart from all of those that have come before. Moreover, a publisher might reject your manuscript simply because you’re an unknown author who hasn’t established themselves yet, and, even though your essays are well written and have great insights into many problems of the world today, they might not sign you on because they don’t believe that your essay collection will sell well.

That’s why we can’t recommend this enough: create an online presence for yourself, first and foremost. Even if it takes you a year to actually publish your essay collection, start building that online presence right now. Moreover, there are different ways to use social media in a way that will benefit you, the author, and your brand (or the brand you will build around your name as an author). Be careful not to post something or say something online that will backfire on you in the future.

If you want to self-publish, do not do it immediately. Start with the online presence. Then, create a book page for your book on Goodreads. Set up a publication date some months in the future, and create a pre-order page on Amazon. Create a website and a blog, and connect your online presence with the website and the blog. Send out ARCs (advanced reading copies) to reviewers who have a following, and, more importantly, who have reviewed essay collections before. Try to gain traction by being a guest blogger with bloggers who focus on similar themes as yours, and who, ideally, have a large platform themselves and are willing to have you on their blog.

Ultimately, whichever publication route you take, prepare yourself for a lot of work and a lot of patience. It might be a while before your work sees the light of day. Make sure that your essays in the collection have a timeless value (for example, if your essay is talking about a topic that was prevalent and specific when you originally wrote it in 2014, it might not be quite relevant in 2021). More importantly, once you start building your author’s brand online, do not stop, and do not quit. Keep going, even if it takes you a while to build your platform – because, without it, all of your effort might not lead to the commercial success you want. And again, while a platform is no guarantee, it certainly will help to an extent.

Georgina Roy wants to live in a world filled with magic. As a screenwriting student, she is content to fill notebooks and sketchbooks with magical creatures and amazing new worlds. When she is not at school, watching a film or scribbling away in a notebook, you can usually find her curled up, reading a good urban fantasy novel, or writing on her own.

• Craft and Criticism
• Fiction and Poetry
• News and Culture
• Lit Hub Radio
• Reading Lists

• Literary Criticism
• Craft and Advice
• In Conversation
• On Translation
• Short Story
• From the Novel
• Bookstores and Libraries
• Film and TV
• Art and Photography
• Freeman’s
• The Virtual Book Channel
• Behind the Mic
• Beyond the Page
• The Cosmic Library
• The Critic and Her Publics
• Emergence Magazine
• Fiction/Non/Fiction
• First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
• Future Fables
• The History of Literature
• I’m a Writer But
• Just the Right Book
• Lit Century
• The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan
• New Books Network
• Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre
• Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
• Write-minded
• The Best of the Decade
• Best Reviewed Books
• BookMarks Daily Giveaway
• The Daily Thrill
• CrimeReads Daily Giveaway

The Best Reviewed Essay Collections of 2020

Featuring zadie smith, helen macdonald, claudia rankine, samantha irby, and more.

Zadie Smith’s Intimations , Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights , Claudia Rankine’s Just Us , and Samantha Irby’s Wow, No Thank You all feature among the Best Reviewed Essay Collections of 2020.

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald (Grove)

18 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed

Read Helen Macdonald on Sherlock Holmes, Ursula Le Guin, and hating On the Road  here

“A former historian of science, Macdonald is as captivated by the everyday (ants, bird’s nests) as she is by the extraordinary (glowworms, total solar eclipses), and her writing often closes the distance between the two … Always, the author pushes through the gloom to look beyond herself, beyond all people, to ‘rejoice in the complexity of things’ and to see what science has to show us: ‘that we are living in an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us’ … The climate crisis shadows these essays. Macdonald is not, however, given to sounding dire, all-caps warnings … For all its elegiac sentences and gray moods, Vesper Flights  is a book of tremendous purpose. Throughout these essays, Macdonald revisits the idea that as a writer it is her responsibility to take stock of what’s happening to the natural world and to convey the value of the living things within it.”

–Jake Cline  ( The Washington Post )

2. Intimations by Zadie Smith (Penguin)

13 Rave • 7 Positive • 3 Mixed

Listen to Zadie Smith read from Intimations here

“Smith…is a spectacular essayist—even better, I’d say, than as a novelist … Smith…get[s] at something universal, the suspicion that has infiltrated our interactions even with those we want to think we know. This is the essential job of the essayist: to explore not our innocence but our complicity. I want to say this works because Smith doesn’t take herself too seriously, but that’s not accurate. More to the point, she is willing to expose the tangle of feelings the pandemic has provoked. And this may seem a small thing, but it’s essential: I never doubt her voice on the page … Her offhandedness, at first, feels out of step with a moment in which we are desperate to feel that whatever something we are trying to do matters. But it also describes that moment perfectly … Here we see the kind of devastating self-exposure that the essay, as a form, requires—the realization of how limited we are even in the best of times, and how bereft in the worst.”

–David L. Ulin  ( The Los Angeles Times )

3. Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf)

11 Rave • 6 Positive • 5 Mixed

Read an excerpt from Just Us here

“ Just Us  is about intimacy. Rankine is making an appeal for real closeness. She’s advocating for candor as the pathway to achieving universal humanity and authentic love … Rankine is vulnerable, too. In ‘lemonade,’ an essay about how race and racism affect her interracial marriage, Rankine models the openness she hopes to inspire. ‘lemonade’ is hard to handle. It’s naked and confessional, deeply moving and, ultimately, inspirational … Just Us , as a book, is inventive … Claudia Rankine may be the most human human I’ve ever encountered. Her inner machinations and relentless questioning would exhaust most people. Her labor should be less necessary, of course.”

–Michael Kleber-Diggs  ( The Star Tribune )

4. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong (One World)

7 Rave • 10 Positive • 2 Mixed

Listen to an interview with Cathy Park Hong here

“Hong’s metaphors are crafted with stinging care. To be Asian-American, she suggests, is to be tasked with making an injury inaccessible to the body that has been injured … I read Minor Feelings  in a fugue of enveloping recognition and distancing flinch … The question of lovability, and desirability, is freighted for Asian men and Asian women in very different ways—and Minor Feelings  serves as a case study in how a feminist point of view can both deepen an inquiry and widen its resonances to something like universality … Hong reframes the quandary of negotiating dominance and submission—of desiring dominance, of hating the terms of that dominance, of submitting in the hopes of achieving some facsimile of dominance anyway—as a capitalist dilemma … Hong is writing in agonized pursuit of a liberation that doesn’t look white—a new sound, a new affect, a new consciousness—and the result feels like what she was waiting for. Her book is a reminder that we can be, and maybe have to be, what others are waiting for, too.”

–Jia Tolentino  ( The New Yorker )

5. World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Milkweed Editions)

11 Rave • 3 Positive

Read an excerpt from World of Wonders here

“In beautifully illustrated essays, poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil writes of exotic flora and fauna and her family, and why they are all of one piece … In days of old, books about nature were often as treasured for their illustrations as they were for their words. World of Wonders,  American poet and teacher Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s prose ode to her muses in the natural world, is a throwback that way. Its words are beautiful, but its cover and interior illustrations by Fumi Mini Nakamura may well be what first moves you to pick it up in a bookstore or online … The book’s magic lies in Nezhukumatathil’s ability to blend personal and natural history, to compress into each brief essay the relationship between a biographical passage from her own family and the life trajectory of a particular plant or animal … Her kaleidoscopic observations pay off in these thoughtful, nuanced, surprise-filled essays.”

–Pamela Miller  ( The Star Tribune )

6. Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby (Vintage)

10 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed

Watch an interview with Samantha Irby here

“Haphazard and aimless as she claims to be, Samantha Irby’s Wow, No Thank You  is purposefully hilarious, real, and full of medicine for living with our culture’s contradictory messages. From relationship advice she wasn’t asked for to surrendering her cell phone as dinner etiquette, Irby is wholly unpretentious as she opines about the unspoken expectations of adulting. Her essays poke holes and luxuriate in the weirdness of modern society … If anyone whose life is being made into a television show could continue to keep it real for her blog reading fans, it’s Irby. She proves we can still trust her authenticity not just through her questionable taste in music and descriptions of incredibly bloody periods, but through her willingness to demystify what happens in any privileged room she finds herself in … Irby defines professional lingo and describes the mundane details of exclusive industries in anecdotes that are not only entertaining but powerfully demystifying. Irby’s closeness to financial and physical precariousness combined with her willingness to enter situations she feels unprepared for make us loyal to her—she again proves herself to be a trustworthy and admirable narrator who readers will hold fast to through anything at all.”

–Molly Thornton  ( Lambda Literary )

7. Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing (W. W. Norton & Company)

5 Rave • 10 Positive • 3 Mixed • 1 Pan

“Yes, you’re in for a treat … There are few voices that we can reliably read widely these days, but I would read Laing writing about proverbial paint drying (the collection is in fact quite paint-heavy), just as soon as I would read her write about the Grenfell Tower fire, The Fire This Time , or a refugee’s experience in England, The Abandoned Person’s Tale , all of which are included in Funny Weather … Laing’s knowledge of her subjects is encyclopaedic, her awe is infectious, and her critical eye is reminiscent of the critic and author James Wood … She is to the art world what David Attenborough is to nature: a worthy guide with both a macro and micro vision, fluent in her chosen tongue and always full of empathy and awe.”

–Mia Colleran  ( The Irish Times )

8. Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America by Laila Lalami (Pantheon)

6 Rave • 7 Positive • 1 Mixed • 2 Pan

“A] searing look at the struggle for all Americans to achieve liberty and equality. Lalami eloquently tacks between her experiences as an immigrant to this country and the history of U.S. attempts to exclude different categories of people from the full benefits of citizenship … Lalami offers a fresh perspective on the double consciousness of the immigrant … Conditional citizenship is still conferred on people of color, women, immigrants, religious minorities, even those living in poverty, and Lalami’s insight in showing the subtle and overt ways discrimination operates in so many facets of life is one of this book’s major strengths.”

–Rachel Newcomb  ( The Washington Post )

9. This is One Way to Dance by Sejal Shah (University of Georgia Press)

7 Rave • 2 Positive 

Watch an interview with Sejal Shah here

“Shah brings important, refreshing, and depressing observations about what it means to have dark skin and an ‘exotic’ name, when the only country you’ve ever lived in is America … The essays in this slim volume are engaging and thought-provoking … The essays are well-crafted with varying forms that should inspire and enlighten other essayists … A particularly delightful chapter is the last, called ‘Voice Texting with My Mother,’ which is, in fact, written in texts … Shah’s thoughts on heritage and belonging are important and interesting.”

–Martha Anne Toll  ( NPR )

10. Having and Being Had by Eula Biss (Riverhead)

5 Rave • 4 Positive • 4 Mixed

Read Eula Biss on the anticapitalist origins of Monopoly here

“… enthralling … Her allusive blend of autobiography and criticism may remind some of The Argonauts  by Maggie Nelson, a friend whose name pops up in the text alongside those of other artists and intellectuals who have influenced her work. And yet, line for line, her epigrammatic style perhaps most recalls that of Emily Dickinson in its radical compression of images and ideas into a few chiseled lines … Biss wears her erudition lightly … she’s really funny, with a barbed but understated wit … Keenly aware of her privilege as a white, well-educated woman who has benefited from a wide network of family and friends, Biss has written a book that is, in effect, the opposite of capitalism in its willingness to acknowledge that everything she’s accomplished rests on the labor of others.”

–Ann Levin  ( Associated Press )

The Book Marks System: RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

• Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Previous Article

Next article, support lit hub..

Join our community of readers.

to the Lithub Daily

Popular posts.

Follow us on Twitter

Michelle Buteau on Translating Her Comedy Into a (Mostly) PG-13 Book

• RSS - Posts

Literary Hub

Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature

Sign Up For Our Newsletters

How to Pitch Lit Hub

Advertisers: Contact Us

Privacy Policy

Support Lit Hub - Become A Member

Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter

For the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet.

Become a member for as low as $5/month

Essay Collections

Items features thematic essay collections that explore a broad range of areas of concern, including key terms, concepts, fields, and empirical zones of inquiry; the political economy of social knowledge production; changes in the landscape of higher education and the institutional ecology of social science research; the relationship between social knowledge and its uses; and more.

Before the present iteration of Items , the Council published occasional essay collections that addressed contemporary events and topics through a social science lens. These can now be found archived here alongside ongoing and concluded series.

Current Collections

Crisis and collaboration across the indian ocean, where heritage meets violence, covid-19 and the social sciences, democracy papers, what is inequality, past collections, reflecting on dpd, 10 years after the arab spring, beyond disinformation, extremism online, disinformation, democracy, and conflict prevention, ways of water, layered metropolis, chancing the storm, sexuality & gender studies now, sociolinguistic frontiers, race & capitalism, understanding gun violence, just environments, reading racial conflict, can social science matter, interdisciplinarity now, the cities papers, the inaugural democracy papers, 10 years after september 11, the minerva controversy, making communications research matter, change in cuba, crisis in the horn of africa, how genocides end, border battles, understanding katrina, the privatization of risk, riots in france, contemporary conflicts, after september 11.

Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

MLA In-Text Citations: The Basics

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.

Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

MLA (Modern Language Association) style is most commonly used to write papers and cite sources within the liberal arts and humanities. This resource, updated to reflect the MLA Handbook (9 th ed.), offers examples for the general format of MLA research papers, in-text citations, endnotes/footnotes, and the Works Cited page.

Guidelines for referring to the works of others in your text using MLA style are covered throughout the  MLA Handbook  and in chapter 7 of the  MLA Style Manual . Both books provide extensive examples, so it's a good idea to consult them if you want to become even more familiar with MLA guidelines or if you have a particular reference question.

Basic in-text citation rules

In MLA Style, referring to the works of others in your text is done using parenthetical citations . This method involves providing relevant source information in parentheses whenever a sentence uses a quotation or paraphrase. Usually, the simplest way to do this is to put all of the source information in parentheses at the end of the sentence (i.e., just before the period). However, as the examples below will illustrate, there are situations where it makes sense to put the parenthetical elsewhere in the sentence, or even to leave information out.

General Guidelines

• The source information required in a parenthetical citation depends (1) upon the source medium (e.g. print, web, DVD) and (2) upon the source’s entry on the Works Cited page.
• Any source information that you provide in-text must correspond to the source information on the Works Cited page. More specifically, whatever signal word or phrase you provide to your readers in the text must be the first thing that appears on the left-hand margin of the corresponding entry on the Works Cited page.

In-text citations: Author-page style

MLA format follows the author-page method of in-text citation. This means that the author's last name and the page number(s) from which the quotation or paraphrase is taken must appear in the text, and a complete reference should appear on your Works Cited page. The author's name may appear either in the sentence itself or in parentheses following the quotation or paraphrase, but the page number(s) should always appear in the parentheses, not in the text of your sentence. For example:

Both citations in the examples above, (263) and (Wordsworth 263), tell readers that the information in the sentence can be located on page 263 of a work by an author named Wordsworth. If readers want more information about this source, they can turn to the Works Cited page, where, under the name of Wordsworth, they would find the following information:

Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads . Oxford UP, 1967.

In-text citations for print sources with known author

For print sources like books, magazines, scholarly journal articles, and newspapers, provide a signal word or phrase (usually the author’s last name) and a page number. If you provide the signal word/phrase in the sentence, you do not need to include it in the parenthetical citation.

These examples must correspond to an entry that begins with Burke, which will be the first thing that appears on the left-hand margin of an entry on the Works Cited page:

Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method . University of California Press, 1966.

In-text citations for print sources by a corporate author

When a source has a corporate author, it is acceptable to use the name of the corporation followed by the page number for the in-text citation. You should also use abbreviations (e.g., nat'l for national) where appropriate, so as to avoid interrupting the flow of reading with overly long parenthetical citations.

In-text citations for sources with non-standard labeling systems

If a source uses a labeling or numbering system other than page numbers, such as a script or poetry, precede the citation with said label. When citing a poem, for instance, the parenthetical would begin with the word “line”, and then the line number or range. For example, the examination of William Blake’s poem “The Tyger” would be cited as such:

The speaker makes an ardent call for the exploration of the connection between the violence of nature and the divinity of creation. “In what distant deeps or skies. / Burnt the fire of thine eyes," they ask in reference to the tiger as they attempt to reconcile their intimidation with their relationship to creationism (lines 5-6).

Longer labels, such as chapters (ch.) and scenes (sc.), should be abbreviated.

In-text citations for print sources with no known author

When a source has no known author, use a shortened title of the work instead of an author name, following these guidelines.

Place the title in quotation marks if it's a short work (such as an article) or italicize it if it's a longer work (e.g. plays, books, television shows, entire Web sites) and provide a page number if it is available.

Titles longer than a standard noun phrase should be shortened into a noun phrase by excluding articles. For example, To the Lighthouse would be shortened to Lighthouse .

If the title cannot be easily shortened into a noun phrase, the title should be cut after the first clause, phrase, or punctuation:

In this example, since the reader does not know the author of the article, an abbreviated title appears in the parenthetical citation, and the full title of the article appears first at the left-hand margin of its respective entry on the Works Cited page. Thus, the writer includes the title in quotation marks as the signal phrase in the parenthetical citation in order to lead the reader directly to the source on the Works Cited page. The Works Cited entry appears as follows:

"The Impact of Global Warming in North America." Global Warming: Early Signs . 1999. www.climatehotmap.org/. Accessed 23 Mar. 2009.

If the title of the work begins with a quotation mark, such as a title that refers to another work, that quote or quoted title can be used as the shortened title. The single quotation marks must be included in the parenthetical, rather than the double quotation.

Parenthetical citations and Works Cited pages, used in conjunction, allow readers to know which sources you consulted in writing your essay, so that they can either verify your interpretation of the sources or use them in their own scholarly work.

Author-page citation for classic and literary works with multiple editions

Page numbers are always required, but additional citation information can help literary scholars, who may have a different edition of a classic work, like Marx and Engels's  The Communist Manifesto . In such cases, give the page number of your edition (making sure the edition is listed in your Works Cited page, of course) followed by a semicolon, and then the appropriate abbreviations for volume (vol.), book (bk.), part (pt.), chapter (ch.), section (sec.), or paragraph (par.). For example:

Author-page citation for works in an anthology, periodical, or collection

When you cite a work that appears inside a larger source (for instance, an article in a periodical or an essay in a collection), cite the author of the  internal source (i.e., the article or essay). For example, to cite Albert Einstein's article "A Brief Outline of the Theory of Relativity," which was published in  Nature  in 1921, you might write something like this:

See also our page on documenting periodicals in the Works Cited .

Citing authors with same last names

Sometimes more information is necessary to identify the source from which a quotation is taken. For instance, if two or more authors have the same last name, provide both authors' first initials (or even the authors' full name if different authors share initials) in your citation. For example:

Citing a work by multiple authors

For a source with two authors, list the authors’ last names in the text or in the parenthetical citation:

Corresponding Works Cited entry:

Best, David, and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations , vol. 108, no. 1, Fall 2009, pp. 1-21. JSTOR, doi:10.1525/rep.2009.108.1.1

For a source with three or more authors, list only the first author’s last name, and replace the additional names with et al.

Franck, Caroline, et al. “Agricultural Subsidies and the American Obesity Epidemic.” American Journal of Preventative Medicine , vol. 45, no. 3, Sept. 2013, pp. 327-333.

Citing multiple works by the same author

If you cite more than one work by an author, include a shortened title for the particular work from which you are quoting to distinguish it from the others. Put short titles of books in italics and short titles of articles in quotation marks.

Citing two articles by the same author :

Citing two books by the same author :

Additionally, if the author's name is not mentioned in the sentence, format your citation with the author's name followed by a comma, followed by a shortened title of the work, and, when appropriate, the page number(s):

Citing multivolume works

If you cite from different volumes of a multivolume work, always include the volume number followed by a colon. Put a space after the colon, then provide the page number(s). (If you only cite from one volume, provide only the page number in parentheses.)

Citing the Bible

In your first parenthetical citation, you want to make clear which Bible you're using (and underline or italicize the title), as each version varies in its translation, followed by book (do not italicize or underline), chapter, and verse. For example:

If future references employ the same edition of the Bible you’re using, list only the book, chapter, and verse in the parenthetical citation:

John of Patmos echoes this passage when describing his vision (Rev. 4.6-8).

Citing indirect sources

Sometimes you may have to use an indirect source. An indirect source is a source cited within another source. For such indirect quotations, use "qtd. in" to indicate the source you actually consulted. For example:

Note that, in most cases, a responsible researcher will attempt to find the original source, rather than citing an indirect source.

Citing transcripts, plays, or screenplays

Sources that take the form of a dialogue involving two or more participants have special guidelines for their quotation and citation. Each line of dialogue should begin with the speaker's name written in all capitals and indented half an inch. A period follows the name (e.g., JAMES.) . After the period, write the dialogue. Each successive line after the first should receive an additional indentation. When another person begins speaking, start a new line with that person's name indented only half an inch. Repeat this pattern each time the speaker changes. You can include stage directions in the quote if they appear in the original source.

Conclude with a parenthetical that explains where to find the excerpt in the source. Usually, the author and title of the source can be given in a signal phrase before quoting the excerpt, so the concluding parenthetical will often just contain location information like page numbers or act/scene indicators.

Here is an example from O'Neill's  The Iceman Cometh.

WILLIE. (Pleadingly) Give me a drink, Rocky. Harry said it was all right. God, I need a drink.

ROCKY. Den grab it. It's right under your nose.

WILLIE. (Avidly) Thanks. (He takes the bottle with both twitching hands and tilts it to his lips and gulps down the whiskey in big swallows.) (1.1)

Citing non-print or sources from the Internet

With more and more scholarly work published on the Internet, you may have to cite sources you found in digital environments. While many sources on the Internet should not be used for scholarly work (reference the OWL's  Evaluating Sources of Information  resource), some Web sources are perfectly acceptable for research. When creating in-text citations for electronic, film, or Internet sources, remember that your citation must reference the source on your Works Cited page.

Sometimes writers are confused with how to craft parenthetical citations for electronic sources because of the absence of page numbers. However, these sorts of entries often do not require a page number in the parenthetical citation. For electronic and Internet sources, follow the following guidelines:

• Include in the text the first item that appears in the Work Cited entry that corresponds to the citation (e.g. author name, article name, website name, film name).
• Do not provide paragraph numbers or page numbers based on your Web browser’s print preview function.
• Unless you must list the Web site name in the signal phrase in order to get the reader to the appropriate entry, do not include URLs in-text. Only provide partial URLs such as when the name of the site includes, for example, a domain name, like  CNN.com  or  Forbes.com,  as opposed to writing out http://www.cnn.com or http://www.forbes.com.

Miscellaneous non-print sources

Two types of non-print sources you may encounter are films and lectures/presentations:

In the two examples above “Herzog” (a film’s director) and “Yates” (a presentor) lead the reader to the first item in each citation’s respective entry on the Works Cited page:

Herzog, Werner, dir. Fitzcarraldo . Perf. Klaus Kinski. Filmverlag der Autoren, 1982.

Yates, Jane. "Invention in Rhetoric and Composition." Gaps Addressed: Future Work in Rhetoric and Composition, CCCC, Palmer House Hilton, 2002. Address.

Electronic sources

Electronic sources may include web pages and online news or magazine articles:

In the first example (an online magazine article), the writer has chosen not to include the author name in-text; however, two entries from the same author appear in the Works Cited. Thus, the writer includes both the author’s last name and the article title in the parenthetical citation in order to lead the reader to the appropriate entry on the Works Cited page (see below).

In the second example (a web page), a parenthetical citation is not necessary because the page does not list an author, and the title of the article, “MLA Formatting and Style Guide,” is used as a signal phrase within the sentence. If the title of the article was not named in the sentence, an abbreviated version would appear in a parenthetical citation at the end of the sentence. Both corresponding Works Cited entries are as follows:

Taylor, Rumsey. "Fitzcarraldo." Slant , 13 Jun. 2003, www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/fitzcarraldo/. Accessed 29 Sep. 2009. 

"MLA Formatting and Style Guide." The Purdue OWL , 2 Aug. 2016, owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/. Accessed 2 April 2018.

Multiple citations

To cite multiple sources in the same parenthetical reference, separate the citations by a semi-colon:

Time-based media sources

When creating in-text citations for media that has a runtime, such as a movie or podcast, include the range of hours, minutes and seconds you plan to reference. For example: (00:02:15-00:02:35).

When a citation is not needed

Common sense and ethics should determine your need for documenting sources. You do not need to give sources for familiar proverbs, well-known quotations, or common knowledge (For example, it is expected that U.S. citizens know that George Washington was the first President.). Remember that citing sources is a rhetorical task, and, as such, can vary based on your audience. If you’re writing for an expert audience of a scholarly journal, for example, you may need to deal with expectations of what constitutes “common knowledge” that differ from common norms.

Other Sources

The MLA Handbook describes how to cite many different kinds of authors and content creators. However, you may occasionally encounter a source or author category that the handbook does not describe, making the best way to proceed can be unclear.

In these cases, it's typically acceptable to apply the general principles of MLA citation to the new kind of source in a way that's consistent and sensible. A good way to do this is to simply use the standard MLA directions for a type of source that resembles the source you want to cite.

You may also want to investigate whether a third-party organization has provided directions for how to cite this kind of source. For example, Norquest College provides guidelines for citing Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers⁠ —an author category that does not appear in the MLA Handbook . In cases like this, however, it's a good idea to ask your instructor or supervisor whether using third-party citation guidelines might present problems.

Paper Writing Service Price Estimation

Customer Reviews

Sophia Melo Gomes

What is the best essay writer?

The team EssaysWriting has extensive experience working with highly qualified specialists, so we know who is ideal for the role of the author of essays and scientific papers:

• Easy to communicate. Yes, this point may seem strange to you, but believe me, as a person communicates with people, he manifests himself in the texts. The best essay writer should convey the idea easily and smoothly, without overloading the text or making it messy.
• Extensive work experience. To start making interesting writing, you need to write a lot every day. This practice is used by all popular authors for books, magazines and forum articles. When you read an essay, you immediately understand how long a person has been working in this area.
• Education. The ideal writer should have a philological education or at least take language courses. Spelling and punctuation errors are not allowed in the text, and the meaning should fit the given topic.

Such essay writers work in our team, so you don't have to worry about your order. We make texts of the highest level and apply for the title of leaders in this complex business.

We are quite confident to write and maintain the originality of our work as it is being checked thoroughly for plagiarism. Thus, no copy-pasting is entertained by the writers and they can easily 'write an essay for me’.

Useful Links

• Request a call back
• Write For Us

260 King Street, San Francisco

Updated Courtyard facing Unit at the Beacon! This newly remodeled…

There are questions about essay writing services that students ask about pretty often. So we’ve decided to answer them in the form of an F.A.Q.

Is essay writing legitimate?

As writing is a legit service as long as you stick to a reliable company. For example, is a great example of a reliable essay company. Choose us if you’re looking for competent helpers who, at the same time, don’t charge an arm and a leg. Also, our essays are original, which helps avoid copyright-related troubles.

Are your essay writers real people?

Yes, all our writers of essays and other college and university research papers are real human writers. Everyone holds at least a Bachelor’s degree across a requested subject and boats proven essay writing experience. To prove that our writers are real, feel free to contact a writer we’ll assign to work on your order from your Customer area.

Is there any cheap essay help?

You can have a cheap essay writing service by either of the two methods. First, claim your first-order discount – 15%. And second, order more essays to become a part of the Loyalty Discount Club and save 5% off each order to spend the bonus funds on each next essay bought from us.

Can I reach out to my essay helper?

Contact your currently assigned essay writer from your Customer area. If you already have a favorite writer, request their ID on the order page, and we’ll assign the expert to work on your order in case they are available at the moment. Requesting a favorite writer is a free service.

Finished Papers

I ordered a paper with a 3-day deadline. They delivered it prior to the agreed time. Offered free alterations and asked if I want them to fix something. However, everything looked perfect to me.

Finished Papers

Compare Properties

A professional essay writing service is an instrument for a student who’s pressed for time or who doesn’t speak English as a first language. However, in 2022 native English-speaking students in the U.S. become to use essay help more and more. Why is that so? Mainly, because academic assignments are too boring and time-consuming. Also, because having an essay writer on your team who’s ready to come to homework rescue saves a great deal of trouble. is one of the best new websites where you get help with your essays from dedicated academic writers for a reasonable price.