The Best American Essays 2016 Read Online Free Page A

professional risk that Laura Kipnis took in publishing “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe.” There’s the risk of advancing a potentially controversial theory of anti-Semitism or postcombat stress; the risk of being called a bad person for sleeping with married men or for severing contact with a parent; the risk of looking beyond racial identity at a moment when #BlackLivesMatter is focusing national attention on it. There is, finally, the risk I feel most grateful to a writer for taking: shame. As Arthur Miller once said, “The best work that anybody ever writes is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.” The writer has to be like the firefighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames, is to run straight into them. Your material feels too hot, too shameful, to even think about? Therefore you must write about it.
    Shame , in digital media, occurs most frequently as a transitive verb, an action you inflict on someone else. As a noun—a thing you might fear experiencing yourself—it tends to remain carefully hidden. Social media, in particular, are celebrated by their advocates for enabling the construction of personas through which the user can “safely” experiment with different aspects of his or her personality. But most of these personas are self-flattering in one way or another, cooler or cockier or handsomer than the real person behind them, and the Internet is structured to create communities of the intensely like-minded. Although the virtual world may look from a distance like a free-for-all of essayistic self-exposure, it actually functions more like a system of avoiding the potentially shameful self.
    What distinguishes the essay from most of the writing that occurs within this system isn’t the presumption that your private story is of interest to strangers. The difference is that the essayist’s experiments aren’t safe. Risk is implicit from the minute you decide to write “an essay” rather than something casual, fragmentary, impromptu. The sheer act of carefully crafting a story raises the stakes. And the rigors of craft—the demands of form, the solitary sustained engagement with twenty-six letters and some punctuation marks—have the terrible power to reveal where you’ve been lying to yourself and what you haven’t properly thought through. The rigors of craft give you substance. And then, instead of sharing with a closed circle of friends or with a community safely known to be like-minded, you submit the finished written thing to an audience of readers who may or may not be sympathetic. To publish an honest essay is, always, to risk shame. But the reward, if you’re lucky enough to get it, is connection with a grateful stranger. The essay as a species may be verging on endangered, but a mediated world of buried shames has greater need of it than ever.
     
    J ONATHAN F RANZEN

FRANCISCO CANTÚ
    Bajadas
    FROM Ploughshares
     
     
ba·ja·da noun
1: a steep curved descending road or trail
2: an alluvial plain formed at the base of a mountain by the coalescing of several alluvial fans
—Origin 1865–70, Americanism: from the Spanish feminine past participle of bajar: to descend
     
     
    20 December
     
    S ANTIAGO QUIT THE academy yesterday. We were on our way into town when I heard the news, speeding across the cold and brittle grasslands of New Mexico. Morales must have told me, or maybe it was Hart. I called Santiago as soon as I found out. You don’t have to quit, I told him, you can still finish, you should stay. I can’t, he said, it’s not the work for me. I have to go back to Puerto Rico; I have to be with my family. I wished him luck and told him I was sorry to see him go. He thanked me and said to finish for the both of us, and I promised that I would.
    Of all my classmates, it was Santiago I most wanted to see graduate. He marched out of step, his gear was a mess, he couldn’t handle his weapon, and it took him over fifteen minutes to run the mile and a half.