This is the twelfth post in a twenty-one-day series, counting down the days to publication (October 21, 2025) with a brief passage from each of the twenty-one essays included in The Best American Essays 2025. This year, the essays were selected by critically acclaimed author and essayist Jia Tolentino and edited by Best American Essays Series Editor Kim Dana Kupperman. The excerpts were curated by Best American Essays Editorial Assistant Bayani Young and are presented in the order of the volume’s table of contents.
“The fjords of Norway are one of the places I always hoped to see before I die. If you had told me thirty years ago that when I finally experienced them, I would find myself so racked with the fever and chills of coronavirus that my sweat soaked through to the mattress and my very eyeballs twitched, I would probably only have nodded—in sadness, maybe. Not in surprise. My life has been a succession of illnesses in interesting places.”
—John Jeremiah Sullivan, “Corona,” The Sewanee Review, Spring 2024.
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