The Best American Essays 2016 Read Online Free

another person when I’m reading her words than I do when I’m sitting next to her? The answer, in part, is that both writing and reading demand full attentiveness. But it surely also has to do with the kind of ordering that is possible only on the page.
    Here I might mention two other lessons I learned from Henry Finder. One was “Every essay, even a think piece, tells a story.” The other was “There are only two ways to organize material: ‘Like goes with like’ and ‘This followed that.’” These precepts may seem self-evident, but any grader of high school or college essays can tell you that they aren’t. To me it was especially not evident that a think piece should follow the rules of drama. And yet: Doesn’t a good argument begin by positing some difficult problem? And doesn’t it then propose an escape from the problem through some bold proposition, and set up obstacles in the form of objections and counterarguments, and finally, through a series of reversals, take us to an unforeseen but satisfying conclusion?
    If you accept Henry’s premise that a successful prose piece consists of material arranged in the form of a story, and if you share my own conviction that our identities consist of the stories we tell about ourselves (“I am the person who was born in the Midwest and defected to the Northeast; I am the person who married young and later defected from the marriage”), it makes sense that we should get a strong hit of personal substance from the labor of writing and the pleasure of reading. When I’m alone in the woods or having dinner with a friend, I’m overwhelmed by the quantity and specificity of sensory data coming at me from random stimuli. The act of writing subtracts almost everything, leaving only the alphabet and punctuation marks, and progresses toward nonrandomness. Sometimes the work consists of distilling a familiar story and discovering, in the process, which seemingly essential elements can be omitted and which new elements unexpectedly need to be added. Sometimes—especially in the case of an argument—a completely new story is called for. The discipline of fashioning a compelling narrative can crystallize thoughts and feelings that you only dimly knew you had in you. The default organizing principle for the essayist, therefore, is “This followed that.” Every essay in this volume, with the exception of Ela Harrison’s love letter to the art of translation, tells a chronologically ordered story, advances a sequential argument (“This follows from that”), or both.
    Henry’s other organizing principle, “Like goes with like,” comes in both basic and expert versions. The basic version holds that when you’re looking at a mass of material that doesn’t lend itself to storytelling, you should sort it into categories, grouping similar elements together; again, this may sound self-evident, but the selecting of categories often leads to fruitful insights, as in Richard M. Lange’s investigation of why merely witnessing a violent death is traumatic. In the expert version of the principle, the grouping of like with like becomes the very engine of the essay’s meaning. Two beautiful examples are Jill Sisson Quinn’s “Big Night,” which turns on the alikeness of studying salamanders and entering an adoption lottery, and Justin Phillip Reed’s “Killing Like They Do in the Movies,” which reads the history of American lynchings through the eerie lens of Hollywood horror flicks.
     
    My main criterion in selecting this year’s essays was whether an author had taken a risk. There exist other modes of essay, lyrical modes, free-associative modes, political modes, and I admit to excluding some fine instances of them simply because they didn’t satisfy my taste for intensity. In the essays I did choose, risk itself comes in different forms. There’s the perennial risk of upsetting family and friends by writing about them or revealing secrets to them. There’s the