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Essay collections are back in the spotlight. After years of dampened enthusiasm for the genre, long-form musings are once again making must-read lists. Cooped up at home, imprisoned by winter weather and a pandemic – and profoundly weary after months of exposure to hot-take Twitter culture – readers now have both the time and the inclination to join non-fiction writers on long, meandering literary journeys. In this absorbing crop of titles, luminaries join newcomers in exploring themes as esoteric as nostalgia and topics as timely as cancel culture.
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Let Me Tell You What I Mean
Joan Didion
(Knopf, 192 pages)
The thing about Joan Didion is that you don’t realize just how much you’ve missed Joan Didion until you have a new book of hers in your hands. This collection, with a forward from Hilton Als, brings together 12 essays, dating from 1968 to 2000, all of which are imbued with the dry wit, cool detachment and searing social commentary that made the writer famous decades ago. Aside from the relief of once again being in the presence of such exquisitely well-crafted words, it is remarkable to see how well some of the observations in Let Me Tell You What I Mean have aged, from thoughts on self-help (“there was nothing particularly wrong with any of it, and yet there was something not quite right”) to the media (“the problem is not so much whether one trusts the news as whether one finds it”).
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Homo Irrealis
André Aciman
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages)
Those new to the work of the New York-based intellectual will find themselves instantly taken in by his gentle, meditative style. This collection of literary essays opens with a hauntingly beautiful piece about a “strange strain of nostalgia hovering over almost everything I’ve written,” an irrealis mood that “aims to preserve something we know we are about to lose.” Aciman transports his reader back to Egypt, where he was born Jewish and, where, at 14, he was exiled. In the days before his family leaves, as he looks toward a new life in Paris, his young self understands that he is “already homesick for Alexandria in Alexandria.”
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Everybody (Else) Is Perfect
Gabrielle Korn
(Atria, 272 pages)
Readers get a front-row seat for the fast-paced rise of the digital media ethos now driving mainstream culture. Korn, a former editor-in-chief of Nylon Media, weaves together personal essays in a coming-of-age narrative that touches on the highs that the young, very-online and progressive – or “woke,” as she puts it – have experienced on this wild ride, along with the lows, including around-the-clock deadlines and impossibly high expectations, anxiety, stress and Internet nastiness. Everybody (Else) Is Perfect is a readable guide to the fast-paced, chaotic new online world that’s emerged. Likely to be of interest to those living through this era on the ground, but also anyone wanting to explore, and better understand, the current cultural moment.
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In the Land of the Cyclops
Karl Ove Knausgaard
(Archipelago, 350 pages)
In the famed Norwegian novelist’s first collection of essays to be published in English, he muses on a mind-boggling array of topics – including Ingmar Bergman, the northern lights, Madame Bovary, artistic freedom and cancel culture. All in rambling, often deeply personal and sometimes quite challenging prose that highlights his characteristic obsession with detail.