This is the fifteenth 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.
“If you asked me then, when I was nineteen, if I ever thought I’d be a man, I would have said it was impossible, but the truth shifts, and I suppose the space you’re in shapes the person you are as much as you shape it.”
—Jarek Steele, “Nesting,” Colorado Review, Spring 2024.
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