And favorite sentence and paragraph of the year

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My favorite essays of the year will take you all over the world—Antarctica, Somalia, Rikers prison in New York, Afghanistan, West Africa, and more—and touch vast topics—our climate, grief, childbirth at 45, abuse, love, and identity.

Favorite Essays I Read in 2023

1. How I Found My Desire to Live After My Wife Died, Matthew Salesses
2. I’m Never Fine, Joseph Lezza
3. I Could Have Killed Him Twice, Narratively
4. The Fearless Activist Taking on Sexual Violence in Somalia, Narratively
5. The Demulcent of Shame, Emerging Writer Series, The Audacity
6. Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison, Joe Garcia
7. I Never Called Her Momma, Jenisha Watts
8. What Gardening Offered After a Son’s Death, Yiyun Li
9. The Train Wrecked In Slow Motion, Grace Glassman. This harrowing essay, where an ER doctor recounts the birth of her third child, is my favorite essay of the year. One can give a master class on pacing from this essay alone. And what a title!—you will see how the title perfectly fits the story when you read the piece.
10. The Things We Do for Love, Roxane Gay
11. The Last Vet, Aminatta Forna. The best profile piece I have read this year. An absolute delight.
12. The Daring Dreams of the First Afghan Drag Queen, Narratively
13. A Good Prospect, Mining Climate Anxiety, Nick Bowlin. This essay is the most researched, detailed, essential reported piece.
14. Off Camera, John Paul
15. Ahead of Time, Kamran Javadizadeh
16. The Protagonist Is Never In Control, Emily Fox Kaplan
17. You Can’t Unsubscribe From Grief, Jenessa Abrams
18. A Mother’s Exchange for Her Daughter’s Future, Jiayang Fan
19. Flipping Grief, James McNaughton
20. The Last Place on Earth Any Tourist Should Go, The Atlantic
21. The Great Forgetting, Summer Praetorius
22. We’re More Ghosts Than People, Hanif Abdurraqib
23. You Will Bear This Pain Long After You’re Gone, Courtney Zoffness
24. A Litany for Survival, Naomi Jackson

Favorite Sentence of the Year

“Knowledge, that night, knowledge of the future, felt like death.” Ahead of Time, Kamran Javadizadeh

Favorite Paragraph of the Year

“Sunlight is a knife in the morning. There is a predatory quality to its intensity. Opening your eyes, you half expect to disappear. To be absorbed into the ether. When, instead, the world appears, you cannot trust it. You have never seen the world without your mother in it. So how can you be sure that you are seeing it or that this is, in fact, the same “it”?” A mother’s exchange for her daughter’s future, Jiayang Fan