André Aciman - The Best American Essays 2020

Copyright 2020 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Introduction copyright 2020 by Andr Aciman

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How to Bartend by Rabih Alameddine. First published in Freemans: California, October 2019. Copyright 2019 by Rabih Alameddine. Reprinted by permission of Rabih Alameddine.

Ghost Museum by Elvis Bego. First published in Agni, #90. Copyright 2019 by Elvis Bego. Reprinted by permission of Elvis Bego.

Driving as Metaphor by Rachel Cusk. First published in The New York Times Magazine, January 6, 2019. From Coventry by Rachel Cusk. Copyright 2019 by Rachel Cusk. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Published in Canada by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. by arrangement with Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved.

The Humanoid Stain by Barbara Ehrenreich. First published in The Baffler, #48. Copyright 2019 by Barbara Ehrenreich. Reprinted by permission of Barbara Ehrenreich.

After the Three-Moon Era by Gary Fincke. First published in Kenyon Review Online, January/February 2019. Copyright 2019 by Gary Fincke and KR Online. Reprinted by permission of Gary Fincke and KR Online.

Cosmic Latte by Ron Huett. First published in The Normal School, #12/1. Copyright 2019 by Ron Huett. Reprinted by permission of Ron Huett.

A Street Full of Splendid Strangers by Leslie Jamison. First published in The Atlantic, December 2019. Copyright 2019 by Leslie Jamison. Reprinted by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC.

A Letter to Robinson Crusoe by Jamaica Kincaid. First published in Book Post, June 22, 2019. Copyright 2019 by Jamaica Kincaid. Reprinted by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC.

Maly Trostinets by Joseph Leo Koerner. First published in Granta, #149. Copyright 2109 by Joseph Leo Koerner. Reprinted by permission of Joseph Leo Koerner.

Body Language by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich. First published in Harpers Magazine, December 2019. Copyright 2019 by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich. Reprinted by permission of Alex Marzano-Lesnevich.

A Thing About Cancer by Clinton Crockett Peters. First published in Boulevard, #103. Copyright 2019 by Clinton Peters. Reprinted by permission of Clinton Peters.

The Other Leopold by Susan Fox Rogers. First published in Michigan Quarterly Review, #58/3. Copyright 2019 by Susan Fox Rogers. Reprinted by permission of Susan Fox Rogers.

To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time by Matthew Salesses. First published in Longreads, April 2019. Copyright 2019 by Matthew Salesses. Reprinted by permission of Longreads.com.

77 Sunset Me by Peter Schjeldahl. First published in The New Yorker, December 23, 2019. Copyright 2019 by Peter Schjeldahl. Reprinted by permission of Peter Schjeldahl. In Memory of W. B. Yeats, copyright 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden; from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson. Copyright 1940 and 1968 by W. H. Auden, renewed. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

Under the Sign of Susan by A. O. Scott. First published in The New York Times Magazine, October 13, 2019. Copyright 2019 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license.

Semantic Drift by Lionel Shriver. First published in Harpers Magazine, August 2019. Copyright 2019 by Lionel Shriver. Reprinted by permission of Lionel Shriver.

Ode al Vento Occidentale by Mark Sullivan. First published in The Gettysburg Review, #32/1. Copyright 2019 by Mark Sullivan. Reprinted by permission of Mark Sullivan.

Holiday Review by Mark Sundeen. First published in Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2019. Copyright 2019 by Mark Sundeen. Reprinted by permission of Mark Sundeen.

My Pink Lake and Other Digressions by Alison Townsend. First published in Cimarron Review, 206/207/208, Winter/Spring/Summer. Copyright 2019 by Alison Townsend. Reprinted by permission of Alison Townsend.

Bed by David L. Ulin. First published in Another Chicago Magazine, July 17, 2019. Copyright 2019 by David L. Ulin. Reprinted by permission of David L. Ulin.

Breathe by Jerald Walker. First published in New England Review, 40/3, 2019. Copyright 2019 by Jerald Walker. Reprinted by permission of Jerald Walker.

The Unfound Door by Stephanie Powell Watts. First published in Oxford American, Summer, #105. Copyright 2019 by Stephanie Watts. Reprinted by permission of Stephanie Watts.

Soul-Error by Philip Weinstein. First published in Raritan, XXXVIII/4, 2019. Copyright 2019 by Philip Weinstein. Reprinted by permission of Philip Weinstein.

Was Shakespeare a Woman? by Elizabeth Winkler. First published in The Atlantic, June 2019. Copyright 2019 by Elizabeth Winkler. Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Winkler.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals

The best prose shines with the luster, vigor, and boldness of poetry.

Montaigne, Of Vanity

No, said Brewsie, I wont remember but I will find it out again.

Gertrude Stein, Brewsie and Willie

Back in the late 1970s, I cohosted with my good friend Donald McQuade a weekly call-in radio show on WBAI in midtown Manhattan. We called the show Thinking Things Over, and much of the time we riffed, not too pretentiously I hope, on all sorts of topics: books, public manners, American popular culture, advertising trends, New Age banalities, and so on. Occasionally we would interview a guest. We knew we had some listeners because wed always field a few calls.

On one show we decided to try something different. I pretended to be a psychoanalyst, a Dr. Saul Worriman who had just published a self-help book called The Now Factor. I adopted an unconvincing German accent as Don interviewed me about the books central purpose: how we can make our lives more exciting and meaningful by expanding our sense of the present. Id years before picked up the idea from William James, who claimed in his classic two-volume Principles of Psychology that laboratory experiments showed that most people perceived the present to extend for only about twelve seconds. After about a dozen seconds, we feel that something is no longer now but has receded into the past, as has, say, writing the opening sentence to this paragraph. Not past in the sense of a year or a week or even an hour ago, but writing that sentence has the feel of then, not now. And what would be some of the advantages of extending our sense of a present, Dr. Worriman? Vell, we might feel ve live longer lives. It can increase our ability to focus and concentrate. And, vell, some of my patients tell me their orgasms now seem to last forever. The phones rang off the hook.