Rebecca Solnit - Best American Essays 2019

Copyright 2019 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Introduction copyright 2019 by Rebecca Solnit

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ISSN 0888-3742 (print) ISSN 2573-3885 (e-book)

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Solnit photograph Trent Davis Bailey

v1.0919

Introduction: Lines from Asphodel, That Greeny Flower, by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems: Volume II, 19391962, copyright 1955 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Comforting Myths by Rabih Alameddine. First published in Harpers Magazine, June 2018. Copyright 2018 by Rabih Alameddine. Reprinted by permission of Rabih Alameddine and Aragi Inc.

We Are Not the Resistance by Michelle Alexander. First published in The New York Times, September 21, 2018. 2018 The New York Times. Reprinted by permission.

Obituary for Dead Languages by Heather Altfeld. First published in Conjunctions, Issue No. 70. Copyright 2018 by Heather Altfeld. Reprinted by permission of Heather Altfeld.

Come Heat and High Water by Mario Alejandro Ariza. First published in The Believer, December 2018. Excerpt from Disposable City by Mario Alejandro Ariza, copyright 2020. Reprinted by permission of Bold Type Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Getting It Twisted by Jabari Asim. First published in The Yale Review, October 2018. Copyright 2018 by Jabari Asim. Reprinted by permission of Jabari Asim.

The Autobiography of My Novel by Alexander Chee. First published in The Sewanee Review, Spring 2018. Reprinted from How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays. Copyright 2018 by Alexander Chee. By permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

Is All Writing Environmental Writing? by Camille T. Dungy. First published in The Georgia Review, Fall 2018. Copyright 2018 by Camille T. Dungy. Reprinted by permission of Camille T. Dungy.

Stories of a Life (originally titled To Be, or Not to Be) by Masha Gessen. First published in The New York Review of Books, February 8, 2018. Copyright 2018 by Masha Gessen. Reprinted by permission of Masha Gessen.

My Father Says Hes a Targeted Individual. Maybe We All Are. by Jean Guerrero. First published in Wired, October 25, 2018. Copyright 2018 by Jean Guerrero. Reprinted by permission of Jean Guerrero.

On Likability by Lacy M. Johnson. First published in Tin House, October 11, 2018 (online). Copyright 2018 by Lacy M. Johnson. Reprinted by permission of Lacy M. Johnson and Tin House.

Guns in the Family by Walter Johnson. First published in The Boston Review, March 21, 2018. Copyright 2018 by Walter Johnson. Reprinted by permission of Walter Johnson.

How to Write About a Vanishing World by Elizabeth Kolbert. First published in The New Yorker, October 15, 2018. Copyright 2018 by Elizabeth Kolbert. Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Kolbert.

Forever Gone by J. Drew Lanham. First published in Orion, Spring 2018. Copyright 2018 by J. Drew Lanham. Reprinted by permission of J. Drew Lanham.

Men Are More Afraid Than Ever by Lili Loofbourow. First published in Slate, September 18, 2018. Copyright 2018 The Slate Group. All rights reserved. Used under license.

Silence Breaking Woman (originally titled Surviving Racism) by Terese Marie Mailhot. First published in Pacific Standard, May 8, 2018. Copyright 2018 by Terese Marie Mailhot. Reprinted by permission of Terese Marie Mailhot.

When a Person Goes Missing by Dawn Lundy Martin. First published in n+1, Winter 2018. Copyright 2018 by Dawn Lundy Martin. Reprinted by permission of Dawn Lundy Martin.

Autobiography of an Iceheart by Kai Minosh Pyle. First published in Prism, Winter 2018. Copyright 2018 by Kai Pyle. Reprinted by permission of Kai Pyle.

Death of an English Major by Gary Taylor. First published in Tampa Bay Times, November 9, 2018. Copyright 2018 by Gary Taylor. Reprinted by permission of Gary Taylor.

The Rage of the Incels by Jia Tolentino. First published in The New Yorker, May 15, 2018. Copyright 2018 Cond Nast. Reprinted with permission.

In the Maze by Dayna Tortorici. First published in Issue 30, n+1, Winter 2018. Copyright 2018 by Dayna Tortorici. Reprinted by permission of Dayna Tortorici.

It is not possible to extricate yourself from the questions in which your age is involved.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Fortune of the Republic (1878)

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art.

George Orwell, Why I Write (1946)

For many years George Orwell avidly collected political pamphlets. After his untimely death at age forty-six in 1950, his collection of some 2,700 pamphlets from across the entire political spectrum (dating roughly from World War I through World War II) found its way to the British Library, where it has since supplied a wealth of information to scholars and historians of those turbulent times. In Pamphlet Literature, a brief essay contributed to the New Statesman in 1943, Orwell describes a small representative sample of his collection, identifying nine trends of the pamphleteering revival he had been following since 1935; he labels these Anti-left and Crypto-fascist, Conservative, Social Democrat, Communist, Trotskyist and Anarchist, Non-party radical, Religio-patriotic, and Lunatic. He also refers to a ninth category, Pacifistbut claims he has no samples of this trend handy to comment on. He then says amusingly that all these headings could be roughly reduced to two main schools, Party Line and Astrology.

Orwell wrote the essay, despite its title, mainly to complain about the decidedly unliterary nature of political pamphlets. They were not merely disappointing to a novelist and essayist whose literary goal was to make political writing into an art, but Orwell thought they were undeniably rubbish: There is totalitarian rubbish and paranoiac rubbish, but in each case it is rubbish. He considered this especially disappointing because of the times. The pamphlet, he said, ought to be the literary form of an age like our own. We live in a time, he continued, when political passions run high, channels of free expression are dwindling, and organized lying exists on a scale never before known. He blamed the publishing and literary worlds for not making the public more aware of the necessity of pamphlets, which are haphazardly printed and rarely advertised or reviewed. As a result, most good writers who have something they passionately want to say dont know how to go about publishing a pamphlet and so they leave the genre to either lunatics or political hard-liners. Orwell then shows his hand: The normal way of publishing a pamphlet is through a political party, and the party will see to it that any deviationand hence any literary valueis kept out. For Orwell, literary value apparently depends on some deviation from party lines.