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Personal essays are as much about the readers as the writers. While all the essays in this list demonstrate exceptional writing—each piece struck a distinct chord with the editor who chose it. For Seyward, it was an essay on grief. For Krista, a piece on community experience. Peter was drawn to video game writing (Red Dead Redemption 2!), Cheri to the immigrant experience and caring for loved ones, and Carolyn to the fear of missed opportunities as we age (and a vicious jungle tick).

We hope you find a piece to resonate with you as you read these beautiful personal stories.

Ahead of Time

Kamran Javadizadeh | The Yale Review | June 12, 2023 | 3,285 words  

Grief is unpredictable. Sometimes it stabs you, sometimes it suffocates you; when it isn’t making you weep or scream, it’s leaving you numb. Grief is also unfathomable: we cannot see, much less reach, the edges of the permanent absence of someone we love. “Grief may be the knowledge … that the future won’t be like the past,” Kamran Javadizadeh writes in this exquisite essay about the death of his sister, Bita. “Like water to the page, it spreads in all directions, it thins the surface, it touches what you cannot touch.” Javadizadeh reflects on his grief through the lens of poetry he encountered during the experience of losing Bita: a volume of Langston Hughes he located in their shared childhood bedroom; a copy of The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds, filled with Bita’s notes from college; a Hafez verse that Bita texted to him one day. The best poetry is not unlike grief: it is vast, complex, elusive. And in reading verse, Javadizadeh shows, we can find lessons for mourning. I’ve thought about this essay countless times since I read it last summer, and I suspect I will reread it many times in the years to come. —SD

The Butchering

Jake Skeets | Emergence Magazine | June 22, 2023 | 3,901 words

Consider what it means to truly feel full—with a full stomach and a full heart—when your physical and spiritual hungers are satiated for a time. Diné poet Jake Skeets mulls these layers of resonance in his beautiful essay “The Butchering,” in which he prepares to kill a sheep for “the Kinaałda. . . .loosely translated as the Diné puberty ceremony.” For Skeets and members of his Indigenous community, story is wonderfully entangled with preparing the food that will nourish his family both physically and spiritually. Community members teach and learn interchangeably, switching roles naturally in a space of safety, free from shame. Skeets meditates on the open mindset needed to fully participate; sometimes he is a child, earning knowledge passed on from family and sometimes he is an uncle, offering an example for others. There’s a slowness to savor in Skeets’ writing, a gentle quickening you observe in the essay as he educates you on what it takes to sustain his community and their Indigenous way of life. “The next time I butcher I’ll have my own story to tell, my own memory to share, knowledge to offer. One more voice to add to the chorus on those nights when you’re out in the desert under the night sky, no sound for miles, just the moon and the ground beneath you, reminding you it’s all real. That and your full stomach. Generations heard through wind, the air, the stirring gleaming stars. All that knowledge, all that story, all that beauty,” he writes. Be sure to make time for this piece; it will ignite your sense of wonder and spark your curiosity, feeding you in a way that’s truly satisfying. —KS

We’re More Ghosts Than People

Hanif Abdurraqib | The Paris Review | October 16, 2023 | 3,922 words

Not long after I started at Longreads, I put together a reading list detailing some of my favorite pieces of video game writing over the previous decade. If people could enjoy reviews of movies they haven’t seen, I reasoned, then they could do the same with gaming criticism and journalism—even if they’d never held a controller. That conviction hasn’t wavered in the years since; however, this year brought a piece powerful enough to vault back through time and land on that list. Hanif Abdurraqib’s Paris Review essay (which also appears in the newly published collection Critical Hits) is nominally about the experience of playing Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar Games’ critically acclaimed title set in the American West in 1899. The word “nominally” carries more weight than usual, though. In Abdurraqib’s able hands, the game instead becomes a portal to grief and salvation, futility and loss. Some characters can’t be redeemed by virtue of their programming. Others can. The trajectory of the character of you is another story altogether. “If there is a place of judgment where I must stand and plead my case for a glorious and abundant afterlife, I hope that whoever hears me out is interested in nuances, but who’s to say,” Abdurraqib writes. “I don’t think about it, until I do.” As with the very best of arts writing, this meditation teases apart its medium’s limitations to find the universal truths and questions embedded within. No virtual revolver necessary. —PR

A Mother’s Exchange for Her Daughter’s Future

Jiayang Fan | The New Yorker | June 5, 2023 | 6,197 words

Jiayang Fan was 25 when her mother was diagnosed with ALS. She writes: “The child became the mother’s future, and the mother became the child’s present, taking up residence in her brain, blood, and bones.” This was the first personal piece Fan wrote after her mother’s death; it’s a devastating tale of the immigrant experience in America, of illness, of the intimate and complicated relationship between a mother and daughter. Fan’s descriptions of her bedridden mother range from exquisite to grim to satisfyingly peculiar. She is “shipwrecked in her own body,” with skin like “rice paper” that will inevitably tear. Even a line detailing how literal shit excretes out of her mother’s body—a “rivulet” down the “limp marble of her thigh”—manages to read beautifully. Fan writes with vulnerability about caring for an elderly loved one, love and sacrifice, the intertwining of two lives, and the story about them that’s ultimately written. I had to pause and collect myself a number of times as I thought about my own aging mother, and the decisions made over the course of our lives that have made us who we are. “One creature, disassembled into two bodies,” Fan writes of their shared life. This is extraordinary writing that hit me in a spot deep within. —CLR

How I Survived a Wedding in a Jungle That Tried to Eat Me Alive

Melissa Johnson | Outside | July 18, 2023 | 4,273 words

A key sentence in this essay goes as follows, “Behold my nightmare: a tick has bitten my vagina.” The incident—relayed with “the gravitas of Obi-Wan Kenobi describing the destruction of planet Alderaan”—occurs in 2017, while Melissa Johnson is enduring a five-day trek in northern Guatemala to attend the wedding of two ex-military women. (She reflects on how during the days of Trump America, the middle of the jungle felt a safer spot for such nuptials.) Johnson embarks on this quest fresh from harvesting her eggs. Single at the age of 39, she is not only wrestling ticks from her “holy garden” but with her fear of missing out on love and motherhood. Trudging along the soggy trails, Johnson dwells on her cloudy future with trepidation. But, by the time she is released from the jungle’s insect-infested innards, she has come to terms with the fact that she is an adventurer—someone comfortable with the unknown. This piece has many layers: an adventure story, a character study of people with names such as “Tent Dawg,” and a thoughtful take on aging and motherhood. It’s also just plain funny. I loved going through the jungle with Johnson, and I also loved the last sentence of her bio: She had a baby girl in March. —CW

The sheriff’s office has yet to publish an official cause of death, but rescuers told Holby that Moore had likely died of hypothermia and exposure. He was lost, stranded on a steep ridge on the eastern side of the peak, far from the trail. He had smashed his glasses and probably could not see where he was going. His body was about 500 yards from the farthest boundary of the search.

Holby has a final theory of how her dog made it through the ordeal, one that she thinks about on lonely afternoons. From her living room in Pagosa Springs, Holby can look out her windows and across the valley to the east and see the scraggly profile of Blackhead Peak rising in the distance.

“I keep feeling as though she was sent to me by Rich,” Holby says, “Who probably told her to go home and take care of me.”

A lot of people are dubious about these contests. The banner on the bosom, the high-heeled hobble, the ramble down the runway. But in a very particular way, this pageant can tell you something special about these women and the way they grew up, about what someone taught them once, about a certain way of life. I mean there are things here that can cloud the issue, and it can all make for a clash in styles. But you should remember that these rodeo queens have roared into the arenas of Ranger, Texas; Ringling, Oklahoma; Roundup, Montana; and Rifle, Colorado, on the foulest, greenest, dumbest, and rankest of horses, shot their salutes to the crowd, and raced out to standing ovations. I want you to remember that Miss Rodeo America 1980 laid a leg over 200 head of weirdo horses and ran the rail in 300 rodeo performances. “Ah, the arena is a little wet, ma’am,” they told her in Oregon. “The rain has made it a little slick. And that horse there don’t like to see his reflection in no mud puddle. Makes him hoppy.”

The dark side of the seafood industry. The morality of mortality. Memory versus belief. The flying cowboys lighting up the skies of the West. The food-service secrets of a tableside firestarter. All that (and more!) in this week’s edition.

1. The Crimes Behind the Seafood You Eat

Ian Urbina | The New Yorker | October 9, 2023 | 9,573 words

Where does your seafood come from? Who caught and handled it? The more I read about overfishing, illegal industry practices, and horrific work conditions, the more it stinks. Each year, China catches more than five billion pounds of seafood, much of it squid, through its distant-water fleet. These ships roam all over the world, often in unauthorized areas; analysts believe the country disguises some of them as fishing vessels when they’re in fact part of a “maritime militia” surveilling the sea, looking to expand control over contested waters. Onboard, workers are abused and held against their will. Ian Urbina, who runs The Outlaw Ocean Project, spent four years visiting the fleet’s ships and investigating their conditions. (To communicate with fishermen on ships that prohibited him on board, he tossed up plastic bottles, “weighed down with rice, containing a pen, cigarettes, hard candy, and interview questions.”) He also tracked where squid caught irresponsibly would end up: first to plants in China, some employing Xinjiang labor, and then continuing on to the very places we buy our seafood, like Costco and Safeway. This is a massive report on how China has become a fishing superpower, but Urbina also weaves within it an emotional, devastating story of an Indonesian worker who joined one of these ships in order to give his family a better life. Extraordinary reporting that’ll make you reconsider your next plate of calamari. —CLR

2. We’re More Ghosts Than People

Hanif Abdurraqib | The Paris Review | October 16, 2023 | 3,922 words

Looking back at the last few months of my selections for this newsletter, I realize that I prize writing that escapes the presuppositions of its genre—or, rather, writing that escapes your presuppositions of its genre. Take this essay from the great Hanif Abdurraqib. When you first find your way to it in The Paris Review, you might notice the rubric “On Games” and see a screenshot from the video game Red Dead Redemption 2, and decide then and there to keep browsing. Would I begrudge you that decision? Probably not. But I’d also know that you were unwittingly denying yourself something marvelous. From the very first sentence—”I don’t find myself investing much in the kingdom of heaven”—the piece thrums with a keen melancholy that never tips into sorrow or indulgence. When Abdurraqib writes about the futility and powerlessness of playing to save the doomed, he’s of course writing about something larger, and he has no hesitation in drawing the line for you: this is about real redemption. About the sins of youth and the circumstances that absolve them, or don’t. About the love we extend to others but not ourselves. About how we face our own ever-shortening lives. The word “spiritual” is a slippery one, used as it is to mediate our own discomfort with the unknowable, but there’s no better word to apply to this essay. Abdurraqib’s spirit shimmers here, its full spectrum diffracted through his 19th-century avatar; that it does so in the service of what some might flatten to “game writing” only proves my point. This is something special. —PR

3. Mere Belief

Sallie Tisdale | Harper’s Magazine | October 16, 2023 | 6,222 words

In my earliest memory, I’m peering under my uncle Raymond’s bedroom door. He lives with me and my parents in the second bedroom of the duplex we all share. My mom’s given me his mail and I’m flicking the envelopes under the door, watching them spin over the parquet floor and disappear from view after crossing a patch of bright sunlight. I am not yet 5 years old. This is an autobiographical memory, according to Sallie Tisdale and her fascinating piece on memoir and memory for Harper’s Magazine. As a memoirist, Tisdale trades in remembering, but this is no romanticized account of an unlimited well of perfect recall that fuels her writing. She looks at the science behind what we remember and how memories morph, shifting in shape and color in the liminal spaces of our brain, while she wrestles with the conundrum of her own evolving identity, and how what seems like fact can become blurred. “It is tempting to substitute today’s psychological truth for history. Memory is wet sand,” she writes. “This is what I want to interrogate: the slipperiness, the uncertainty.” Is there nothing more beautiful—and more human—than searching for truth in the blurry spaces of our memory? —KS

4. Winging It with the New Backcountry Barnstormers

Brad Rassler | Outside | October 18, 2023 | 10,300 words

Off-airport pilots. Strip baggers. Flyboys. The recreational bush pilots in this piece sport many names. But are these social media-savvy flyers bringing new people into an exciting sport or just “boys with pricey toys” who clog up the skies and take reckless risks? Brad Rassler is dedicated to his discovery mission—even braving some terrifying maneuvers while in the passenger seat of planes that weigh no more than a golf cart. I love meeting big characters, and this piece is jam-packed with them, all sporting varying amounts of facial hair, from “a thick soul patch ornamenting [a] chin” to “a ginger-brown beard that doesn’t quite attach to the mustache part.” (One lucky exception has a “handsome face smooth of whiskers but strong of jaw.”) You cannot fail to be impressed by such a range of beard-related eloquence. Culminating in a chaotic rally in the evocatively named Dead Cow Lakebed, Nevada, this feature is quite the ride. —CW

5. Confessions of a Tableside Flambéur

Adam Reiner | Eater | October 11, 2023 | 1,553 words

Adam Reiner’s short but sweet Eater piece on food as entertainment is perfectly satisfying. For three years Reiner worked as a captain at a Manhattan chophouse called The Grill, where he prepared food tableside, including Dover sole and Bananas Foster, the flaming pièce de résistance. Reiner serves more than stories of boorish patrons as seen from behind the gueridon. (The fancy trolley containing cooking ingredients and utensils.) He gives us a taste of food-as-performance at his restaurant and others, such as Papi Steak, where the $1,000 wagyu ribeye’s reveal is meat theater—complete with special effects that could rival Taylor Swift in concert. “The steak even has its own designated entrance music that blares in the dining room to announce its arrival,” he writes. Reiner also reveals the perils of performance, and the very real anxieties that go along with it. For every Bananas Foster or cherries jubilee, there’s always the potential that the flambé is a flop, “like striking a book of matches in the rain.” Steak entrances and fancy flaming bananas aside, it’s Reiner’s writing that will keep you coming back for more in a story that’s less about the food and more about his uneasy relationship with the distastefulness of restaurant showmanship. —KS

Audience Award

What was our readers’ favorite this week? Drumroll, please!

I sat to Palmer’s right, a motion-sickness bracelet on my left wrist, anti-nausea gum in my mouth, and a gallon-size ziplock at my feet. The copilot’s control stick started bobbing around between my legs in sync with Palmer’s. The Freedom Fox,an immaculately maintained, high-wing, single-engine tail-wheel plane with burly 29-inch bush tires, monster shocks, extended wings, and a 140-horsepower fuel-injected turbocharged engine, climbed from Reno-Stead Regional Airport at 1,500 feet a minute. The stamped alkaline flats of the Great Basin gave way to the dense pine forests of California’s Lost Sierra, a huge swath of mountainous backcountry about an hour north of Reno. On the horizon, the jagged crest of the Sierra Buttes came into view. Palmer, who was piping a Shakey Graves tune through the headsets, exuded competence, bonhomie, and (in the confines, I couldn’t help but notice) a pleasant, soapy smell.

Twenty-six minutes into the episode, Mike and Jeff were hanging on every turn of Bye’s dire situation, as described to them by Wes Larson, a wildlife biologist who is also Jeff’s older brother. Each week for the past three years, Wes has shared a harrowing tale of human-wildlife conflict, peppered with scientific insights, conservation intel, and tips on surviving dustups with nature’s scariest predators—or, in this case, predators the color of a Barbie Dreamhouse.

There’s a scene in Torn where Max interrogates his mom about falling in love with Anker so soon after Alex died. It’s tense to watch, and it strips away any sense that Max is going to be delicate or easy on his subjects. “I was surprised, and thought, How dare you ask me that?” Jenni says. “But I was able to answer because I’m just as forthright as he is.”

Perhaps that’s why, as small as my jumps were, they felt like magic. It reminded me of being a ten-year-old on Peter Pan’s Flight at Disney World in the 1970s, when the roller-coaster-like track you’re riding in your pirate ship comes to a visible end and then you somehow soar into the air.

Human ingenuity in the face of crumbling infrastructure. One man’s quest to save a bird that might already be extinct. The cultural schism dividing a major musical genre. A personal essay braiding space and family. And a jungle trek gone horribly, horribly awry. These are our editors’ favorite reads of the week.

1. The Balkans’ Alternative Postal System: An Ad-Hoc Courier’s Tale

Ilir Gashi | The Guardian & Kosovo 2.0 | July 13, 2023 | 4,061 words

In 2012, I lived in Pristina, Kosovo for a few months. Much to the chagrin of my mother, I couldn’t receive mail at my apartment. I had no postal box or number; as far as I could tell, no one in the brutalist residential complex did. I informed my mom, who wouldn’t take “no address” for an answer, that she should send mail to the nearby NATO base; I had met someone posted there who offered to serve as a middleman. (Thanks again, Drew.) I had the privilege of being an American with a connection to a powerful institution. Still, I did what many people in the Balkans do when they need to get something from point A to point B: I asked a friend. Ilir Gashi’s essay—a runner-up for a European Press Prize—details how informal networks that move packages, letters, and passengers have developed in response to the Balkans’ disputed borders and entrenched poverty. Gashi worked as an ad-hoc courier, delivering medicine, documents, homemade food items, and even a doll, which a little girl on a trip to Belgrade left behind when her family returned to Pristina. “While the weather map on Radio Television of Serbia shows Pristina as part of Serbia,” Gashi writes, “as far as the Serbian postal service is concerned, this city doesn’t exist, just like other places in Kosovo where Serbs aren’t the majority. Private delivery services are way too expensive. The only way the doll could reach Pristina was for somebody to take it with them.” This is a beautiful story of everyday resilience. —SD

2. Chasing the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

Lindsey Liles | Garden & Gun | May 24, 2023 | 4,371 words

Does the ivory-billed woodpecker still exist in Arkansas? If you ask Bobby Harrison, the answer is yes. If you ask pretty much everybody else, the answer is no. That hasn’t stopped Harrison from 2,000 sojourns into Arkansas swampland to find a bird that hasn’t been officially sighted since 1944. At any time, the U.S. federal government may declare the bird extinct, ending all environmental protections for the species; Harrison is trying to prove everyone wrong and the clock is ticking. Lindsey Liles’ piece for Garden & Gun is much more than simply a superbly written profile of Harrison and his majestic quarry. It is more than the story of one man’s quest. It is a paean to faith and perseverance, to belief, and above all, hope. “As it turns out, searching for the ivorybill feels exactly like buying a lottery ticket,” writes Liles. “Rationally, you know it won’t happen, but the if and could of it all—plus the mystery of the deep woods, where anything can be lost or found—keeps your heart racing and your eyes combing the landscape.” Take a chance and spend some time on this piece. It won’t take long before you’re rooting for Harrison to hit the jackpot. —KS

3. Country Music’s Culture Wars and the Remaking of Nashville

Emily Nussbaum | The New Yorker | July 17, 2023 | 9,528 words

I’m not what you’d call a country music fan. I’ve never been to Nashville. So in many ways, I’m exactly not the audience for Emily Nussbaum’s grand unpacking of the schism currently wracking the genre and the city. But I love a good cultural shift, and I love having my expectations upended—and her feature accomplishes both of those without breaking a sweat. It feels cheap to call what’s happening an ideological divide, but nothing else feels like it comes close. For years, Nussbaum demonstrates, country music has been ruled by the so-called “bro” variant of the genre, facile cosplay of working-class platitudes performed by wealthy suburbanites; yet, as more queer and Black and female and politically progressive artists find success, in part by pushing against the prevailing mores, they’re inevitably shunted into the country-adjacent genre “Americana.” In the long run, that means less radio play, lower sales, and ultimately a ghettoizing: y’all over there, us over here. Again and again, Nussbaum finds people and places that underscore this struggle; her scene work is effortless and plentiful, whether gathering with members of the musical collective Black Opry or soaking in the atmosphere at bro-country star Jason Aldean’s Nashville club. It’s tempting to write this off as parachute journalism, but Nussbaum has been a country fan for decades, so there’s little baggage to weigh down the keen eye that made her such a dynamite TV critic for The New Yorker. What emerges is a memorable, hopeful, and sometimes maddening portrait of a machine in flux. It might not have made me a country fan, but it made me a fan of the people who are pushing that machine in long-overdue directions. —PR

4. Black Hole Paradox

Erica Vital-Lazare | The Baffler | July 19, 2023 | 3,914 words

Do you feel a certain tingle when you’ve stumbled on a great piece? I do. Erica Vital-Lazare’s beautiful braided essay on black holes—both those in space and the void her father created in deserting his family for the lure of Las Vegas—exacted a gravitational pull on my reading brain. Vital-Lazare doesn’t blame, chastise, or attempt to excuse her father’s neglect; she simply tries to understand. “Black holes are remnants,” she writes. “Their absence creates unfathomable weight…where no-thing can exist or escape. It is the uncreated space, where what was can never be again.” Humanity exists in the space where she cares for her aged, ailing father, in cooking turkey sausage instead of pork and serving unsugared jam to a man who abdicated his responsibility to take care of her as a child. For an essay that mines absence, it’s Vital-Lazare’s thoughtful observation and incisive prose that will fill you up. —KS

5. How I Survived a Wedding in a Jungle That Tried to Eat Me Alive

Melissa Johnson | Outside | July 18, 2023 | 4,273 words

I defy you not to squirm as you read Melissa Johnson’s account of her Guatemalan trek. Her visceral descriptions conjure up the sticky, itchy, sweaty reality of the jungle until you feel enveloped by it; a written Jumanji, if you will. The only romance here lies in the purpose of the trek: A marriage at El Mirador, the ruins of a Mayan city. (The ultimate in an inconvenient destination wedding.) Ten friends attend, and each struggles on the trek, but only Johnson gets bitten on the vagina by a tick, an incident she describes with as much eloquence as she does the wedding ceremony. It’s fun and funny but also an honest reflection on aging and lost time—not to mention a brutally effective reminder to remember bug repellant spray on your next jungle trip. —CW

Audience Award

Now for the piece that our readers loved the most this week:

My eyes widen and find Angela’s with the same question. Do they know about the wedding? But no. Today is Tent Dawg’s birthday, and they wanted to surprise us. The air dissolves into toasts and merriment while the red sun sinks below the horizon. I gorge my body with sugar and caramel-vanilla rum, offering a small blood sacrifice to the mosquitoes who float like spirits above the feast.