by Writing Workshops Staff
36 minutes ago
Every fall, one anthology quietly redraws the map of American nonfiction, and this October, it arrives with an especially luminous lineup. The Best American Essays 2026, guest edited by M. Gessen, with cover art by Dutch abstract artist Wouter Tjeenk Willink, will be published by Mariner Books/HarperCollins on October 20, 2026. You can read the full announcement here.
This is the series’ fortieth year of doing what it has done best since 1986: showcasing the finest short nonfiction published in the periodical literature, with a series editor surfacing notable work from hundreds of magazines and journals and a guest editor making the final call. The guest editor is formidable. Gessen is the author of twelve books, including the National Book Award–winning The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin — an opinion columnist for The New York Times and the recipient of a 2026 Pulitzer Prize along with Guggenheim and Carnegie fellowships, who teaches at Bard College. The collection also carries a foreword by series editor Kim Dana Kupperman.
The essays themselves were drawn from some of the most consequential pages in the country. The selections were published in 2025 across The Atlantic, Current Affairs, Equator, Granta, Harper’s, Liberties, Literary Hub, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, n+1, New York, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, World Literature Today, and The Yale Review.
And then there are the writers. The twenty contributors to the 2026 volume are Hilton Als, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Elizabeth Bruenig, Andrea Long Chu, Peter Coviello, Fernanda Eberstadt, Ha-yun Jung, Ben Lerner, Dawn Lundy Martin, Benjamin Moser, Sy Safransky, Tatiana Schlossberg, Jennifer Senior, Marci Shore, Alex Skopic, Zadie Smith, Jia Tolentino, Mary Turfah, Christian Wiman, and Audrey Wollen. It is the kind of table of contents you read twice — a roll call of essayists working at the very top of the form, each of them proof of how much range and force the essay still holds.
We’ll be reading every one of them come October, and counting down until then.
One small, glad footnote from our corner: among those twenty names is Mary Turfah, who participated in our #OwnVoices: Helping Writers of Color Get Published seminar with Alex Temblador here at WritingWorkshops.com — a brief stop, surely, on a road that was always headed somewhere like this.
If anything, we’re simply thrilled to read all of the work in this issue! Congratulations to all of the contributors!
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