A collection of the year’s best essays, selected by Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Wesley Morris and series editor Kim Dana Kupperman. “Imparting some piece of yourself—any part—is arduous and warrants some kind of commendation,” writes guest editor Wesley Morris in his introduction. Both personal and personable, the essayists in this volume use their own vulnerability to guide readers on excursions that unfold on uncomfortable edges. From contemplating the nuances of memory to exploring the complexities of family, romance, gender identity, illness, and death, Morris’s selection of essays presents a roundup of the thinkers who masterfully grapple with the issues of our time. The Best American Essays 2024 includes TEJU COLE • MICHAEL W. CLUNE • YIYUN LI • JAMES McAULEY • RÉMY NGAMIJE • JENNIFER SENIOR • SALLIE TISDALE • JERALD WALKER • JENISHA WATTS and others

In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic observations of the world around them. From an inmate struggling to find purpose during his prison sentence to a doctor coping with the unpredictable nature of her patient, to a widow wishing for just a little more time with her late husband, these narratives—and the others featured in this anthology—celebrate the endurance of the human spirit. The Best American Essays 2023 includes Ciara Alfaro • Jillian Barnet • Sylvie Baumgartel • Eric Borsuk • Chris Dennis • Xujun Eberlein • Sandra Hager Eliason • George Estreich • Merrill Joan Gerber • Debra Gwartney • Edward Hoagland • Laura Kipnis • Phillip Lopate • Celeste Marcus • Sam Meekings • Sigrid Nunez • Kathryn Schulz • Anthony Siegel • Scott Spencer • Angelique Stevens • David Treuer

"From the award-winning author of Stealing Buddha's Dinner, a powerful memoir of a mother-daughter relationship fragmented by war and resettlement. At the end of the Vietnam War, when Beth Nguyen was eight months old, she and her father, sister, grandmother, and uncles fled Saigon for America. Beth's mother stayed-or was left-behind, and they did not meet again until Beth was nineteen. Over the course of her adult life, she and her mother have spent less than twenty-four hours together. Owner of a Lonely Heart is a memoir about parenthood, absence, and the condition of being a refugee: the story of Beth's relationship with her mother. Framed by a handful of visits over the course of many years-sometimes brief, sometimes interrupted, sometimes with her mother alone and sometimes with her sister-Beth tells a coming-of-age story that spans her own Midwestern childhood, her first meeting with her mother, and becoming a parent herself. Vivid and illuminating, Owner of a Lonely Heart is a deeply personal story of family, connection, and belonging: as a daughter, a mother, and as a Vietnamese refugee in America"--

Tracing a loose arc from Edwidge Danticat's childhood to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent events in Haiti, the essays gathered in We're Alone include personal narrative, reportage, and tributes to mentors and heroes such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gabriel García Márquez, and James Baldwin that explore several abiding themes: environmental catastrophe, the traumas of colonialism, motherhood, and the complexities of resilience. From hurricanes to political violence, from her days as a new student at a Brooklyn elementary school knowing little English to her account of a shooting hoax at a Miami mall, Danticat has an extraordinary ability to move from the personal to the global and back again. Throughout, literature and art prove to be her reliable companions and guides in both tragedies and triumphs. Danticat is an irresistible presence on the page: full of heart, outrage, humor, clear thinking, and moral questioning, while reminding us of the possibilities of community. And so "we're alone" is both a fearsome admission and an intimate invitation-we're alone now, we can talk. We're Alone is a book that asks us to think through some of the world's intractable problems while deepening our understanding of one of the most significant novelists at work today. PRAISE FOR EDWIDGE DANTICAT 'In Danticat's hands, with great tenderness, these hidden lives are moved away from the margins' TLS 'Stunning ruminations on the Haitian diaspora identity, as well as the layered complexities of seeking hope after tragedy . . . Read it, you will not be disappointed' Bad Form

Ten Thousand Miles of Clouds and Moons gathers sixteen phenomenal writers of the Chinese language in their English debut: eight fiction writers, six poets, and two essayists. Amongst these dazzling tellings, the planets are being pulled closer to the earth; a treasured classical fiction holds the secrets of the universe; shameful acts of urban ennui are committed over- and underground; a couple navigates the phantasmagoric border between life and death; the classrooms of the eighties and nineties are fleetingly free. Ranging from cityscapes to mountain ranges, ancestral lands to parallel worlds, these authors exhibit a panoramic vista of contemporary Chinese-language writing at its most imaginative and incisive, balancing intellectual power with lyrical enchantment to lend insight into a nation oscillating between tradition and modernity, apocalyptic visions and pedestrian loves, provocation and nostalgia, reality and dreamscapes.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024 An exhilarating tale of twisted desire, histories and homes, and the unexpected shape of revenge - for readers of Patricia Highsmith, Sarah Waters and Ian McEwan's Atonement. It is fifteen years after the Second World War, and Isabel has built herself a solitary life of discipline and strict routine in her late mother's country home, with not a fork or a word out of place. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel's doorstep - as a guest, there to stay for the season... In the sweltering heat of summer, Isabel's desperate need for control reaches boiling point. What happens between the two women leads to a revelation which threatens to unravel all she has ever known. 'A thrilling, razor-sharp, perfectly plotted debut novel' Sunday Times 'Moving, unnerving and deeply sexy' Tracy Chevalier, bestselling author of GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING 'A brave and thrilling debut about facing up to the truth of history, and to one's own desires... Van der Wouden brings stunning power and control to her page-turner about trauma and repression' Justine Jordan, Booker Prize Judge 2024

• Best Selling Book in English Edition for IBPS RRB Officer Scale 1 Main Exam with objective-type questions as per the latest syllabus given by the Institute of Banking Personnel and Selection. • IBPS RRB Officer Scale 1 Main Exam Preparation Kit comes with 10 Practice Tests with the best quality content. • Increase your chances of selection by 16X. • IBPS RRB Officer Scale 1 Main Exam Prep Kit comes with well-structured and 100% detailed solutions for all the questions. • Clear exam with good grades using thoroughly Researched Content by experts.

In The Art of Touch: Prose and Poetry from the Pandemic and Beyond, the unique voices of thirty-nine of some of the most creative thinkers of our times have been brought together to consider the profound impact of one of our five main senses: touch. Psychologists, healers, massage therapists, academics, creative writers, and others reflect on or tell personal stories about what it means to be able to touch or experience touch, or to have to go without it—as so many did and still do because of the COVID-19 pandemic. They explore how transmissions such as texting may impede opportunities for touch, while those like Zoom may make it possible for people who otherwise might be left behind to stay “in touch.” From the experience of touching beloved animals to the life-changing ways in which books and performances can touch us, virtually all aspects of touch are acknowledged in these pages.

S.L. Wisenberg, known for writing that is “seriously funny,” proves in this acerbic chronicle that a cancer diary can be at once hilarious, rageful, and feminist. She passes through the expected rites of breast cancer—diagnosis, surgery, and chemotherapy—but her responses are less expected: she throws a farewell party for her left breast, and rejects a “cranial prosthesis” in favor of using her bare scalp as a canvas for political messages. She insightfully criticizes the ad campaigns of cancer charities, the inept medical staff, and the inequities in the U.S. health care system she encounters as she navigates daily life with cancer and chemo. (There is much she disapproves of, from Brazilian waxes to books that blame patients for their own diseases.) Drawing on a wealth of personal, literary, and historical sources, The Adventures of Cancer Bitch creates an indelible image of a politically engaged, self-aware woman facing a daunting disease while examining her soul and society. (And riding the subway and teaching one-breasted.) It’s a thought-provoking memoir from a woman who questions everything and everyone, including herself. This revised and expanded second edition features new observations and reflections from the author.