THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2025

Capturing the moment.

In her foreword to this 40th volume, series editor Kim Dana Kupperman ominously describes how the collection “preserves the history unfurling in the liminal zone between democracy and tyranny.” Editor Tolentino, a staff writer at The New Yorker, echoes Kupperman in her introduction. When screening essays, she was “looking for vigor rendered from the depths of exhaustion.” Palestinian Sarah Aziza’s painful opening essay, “The Work of the Witness,” confronts visions of death, suffering, and destruction in Gaza. Christina Sharpe’s “The Shapes of Grief” explores the 2022 Buffalo, New York, grocery store mass shooting and the bombings in Gaza, while “meaning is in crisis.” Growing up impoverished in Mandaluyong, Manila, is the subject of Hannah Keziah Agustin’s “Homeland Fictions.” Eula Biss paints a devastating portrait of another homeland in “Love and Murder in South Africa.” “The Pain of Traveling While Palestinian,” by Mosab Abu Toha, is about more than pain; there’s frustration, fear, anger, hopelessness. Khalil AbuSharekh’s light “Zeppole (aka Awama),” about his wanting new shoes as a boy, is a breath of fresh air. The gem in this collection is Summer Hammond’s “A Little Slice of the Moon,” a brilliantly written, complex piece about a young girl and her dysfunctional rural Iowa family. “Nesting,” by Jarek Steele, is a humorous essay about her pregnancy and living in a rat-infested garage-house. Other offerings include psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir’s “On Boredom,” Christian Lorenzen’s “Literature Without Literature,” and Matthew Denton-Edmundson’s “How To Love Animals,” on the dangers of raising goats.

A potent collection that speaks to dark times.