We made it! This is the twenty-first and final post in our twenty-one-day series, counting down the days to publication (that’s today, 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.
“Narcissism governs the contemporary stance toward art as well. Instead of going to it in the fearful hope that art will trouble us out of ourselves—confront us with genuine difference, and therefore make us different— we insist that it affirm us.”
—William Deresiewicz, “Respect, or the Missing Relation,” Liberties, Fall 2024.
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