The Best American Essays is a yearly anthology of magazine articles published in the United States.Robert Atwan (ed.), Adam Gopnick (guest ed.). The Best American Essays 2008, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008. It was started in 1986 and is now part of The Best American Series published by HarperCollins. Articles are chosen using the same procedure with other titles in the Best American series; the series editor chooses about 100 article candidates, from which the guest editor picks 25 or so for publication; the remaining runner-up articles listed in the appendix. The series was edited by Robert Atwan from its inception in 1986 through 2023. Kim Dana Kupperman is the new series editor starting in 2024. Joyce Carol Oates assisted in the editing process until 2000 with the publication of The Best American Essays of the Century.

Guest editors

1986: Elizabeth Hardwick 1987: Gay Talese 1988: Annie Dillard 1989: Geoffrey Wolff 1990: Justin Kaplan 1991: Joyce Carol Oates 1992: Susan Sontag 1993: Joseph Epstein 1994: Tracy Kidder 1995: Jamaica Kincaid 1996: Geoffrey C. Ward 1997: Ian Frazier 1998: Cynthia Ozick 1999: Edward Hoagland 2000: Alan Lightman 2001: Kathleen Norris 2002: Stephen Jay Gould 2003: Anne Fadiman 2004: Louis Menand 2005: Susan Orlean 2006: Lauren Slater 2007: David Foster Wallace 2008: Adam Gopnik 2009: Mary Oliver 2010: Christopher Hitchens 2011: Edwidge Danticat 2012: David Brooks 2013: Cheryl Strayed 2014: John Jeremiah Sullivan 2015: Ariel Levy 2016: Jonathan Franzen 2017: Leslie Jamison 2018: Hilton Als 2019: Rebecca Solnit 2020: André Aciman 2021: Kathryn Schulz 2022: Alexander Chee 2023: Vivian Gornick 2024: Wesley Morris 2025: Jia Tolentino 2026: M. Gessen

Contributing publications

The Alaska Quarterly Review The Baffler The Boston Review BuzzFeed Electric Literature The Florida Review Granta Harper's Magazine The Kenyon Review Lapham's Quarterly n+1 The New York Times Magazine North American Review Oxford American The Threepenny Review Tin House Transition Magazine Virginia Quarterly Review

References