In Praise of the Essay: Best American Essays 2026

Join us for a panel discussion of THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2026 collection featuring Guest Editor M. Gessen Joining M in the panel discussion are contributors Jennifer Senior, Jia Tolentino and Christian Wiman. The event will be moderated by Kim Dana Kupperman, series editor of Best American Essays and will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street. Can’t make the event? Purchase a signed copy of The Best American Essays 2026 here. ACCESSIBILITY: Strand Book Store is an ADA compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator. Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred. ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at [email protected] by October 7 to request. For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact [email protected]. -------------------------------------------------------------------- A collection of the year’s best essays, selected by critically acclaimed author of The Future Is History and How to Survive Totalitarianism and New York Times columnist, M. Gessen. The Best American series, launched in 1915, is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction, and it is the most respected—and most popular—of its kind. M. Gessen, critically acclaimed essayist, New York Times columnist, and National Book Award winner, selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year. Photo credit: Damon Winter M. Gessen is the author of eleven 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, Gessen is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Opinion Writing, as well as Guggenheim and Carnegie fellowships. Gessen teaches at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and lives in New York City. Kim Dana Kupperman is the series editor of The Best American Essays and the founder of Welcome Table Press. She is the author of an essay collection, I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives from the Other Side of Silence; The Last of Her: A Forensic Memoir; and a historical novel, Six Thousand Miles to Home. Photo credit: Scott Wenger Jennifer Senior is a staff writer at The Atlantic and recipient of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing. Photo credit: Elena Mudd Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of the essay collection Trick Mirror. Photo credit: Danielle Chapman Christian Wiman is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, most recently The Dance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026). He teaches at Yale Divinity School.