From time to time, I’ve written here of novels, short stories, and poems. An essay isn’t any of those. It’s a short piece of nonfiction by someone who has something to say. It may inform, entertain, persuade, delight, or shatter you. Its subject may be of cosmic import or trivial; some go both ways at once.
There are many kinds of essays, but when I was a schoolboy, we knew only one: the essays our teachers made us write. I found no joy in writing them; nor did anyone I knew. Later we called them papers, which didn’t help.
Even when I discovered—in eighth grade and again in college—that I could win money writing essays for contests, it never dawned on me that reading essays could be a reliable joy. It was several more years before I discovered that.
Maybe it’s just me, but essays are the wallflowers of the bookshelf. One of my favorite essayists, Joseph Epstein, is a celebrated master of the form, but have you ever heard of him? Two other favorites are acclaimed novelists, but it’s their essays I love. Two others are mostly political columnists who are, for me, at their most moving and memorable when they’re personal instead.
Last year I read a collection of 52 Anton Chekhov short stories, one per Sunday afternoon. I thought I might recreate that experience for 25 weeks by reading a weekly Joseph Epstein essay from a 2024 collection, Familiarity Breeds Content. But I’m having a problem. Most Sundays, I struggle to stop at just one.
Epstein’s “familiar” essays are conversational, personal, witty, and full of his love for language. One recent Sunday, I read “Balls-Up” about his hobby, juggling, but also about chaos, order, and life. Then I read “But I Generalize,” an insightful, intermittently irreverent musing on the generalizations we make about people. I laughed aloud in amusement but also in delight at what he can do with words.
Ann Patchett is a celebrated American novelist but also a brilliant essayist. Her essays are personal too and tend toward memoir. The first collection I read was This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (2014), but that’s just the title of one essay, not the whole book’s topic. Some of my favorite things I’ve ever read about being a writer are in a long essay called “The Getaway Car,” and I still remember my delight in reading “My Road to Hell Was Paved,” about renting an RV for a long trip, so she could write about it.
Marilynne Robinson is that other novelist whose essays I prefer. She often writes at the intersection of faith, science, and modern life. In the title essay of When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012), she begins with her Idaho childhood and explores individualism and the American West. Two essays with Moses in the titles, on compassion and caring for the poor, showed me things I’d seen but never noticed in the Old Testament.
The late Paul Greenberg won a Pulitzer as a political columnist when I was a child; as an adult I read his columns faithfully for years. My favorites were personal. I managed to acquire a copy of Entirely Personal (1992), an intimate collection of his columns about family life, small towns, faith, human nature, and more. In the book’s second essay, “Growing Up in Shreveport,” I read, “There seemed two worlds back then, the Jewish and the outside world.” He writes of his grandmother tending him; “she could have arrived not from another continent but from another time.”
An attorney named Ivana, a.k.a. Lady Liberty, writes on Substack of politics and government during the week, and that’s fine, but her Sunday Essays about life are superb. She calls them “a small Sunday recess from the apocalypse.” They are fresh, artful, personal, and have a New York City flavor I enjoy. One recent Sunday Essay was “My Husband Runs Marathons. I Travel with a Cat.” The title barely hints at the delightful reading journey that awaits.
Like short fiction, the essay is a wildly versatile form. It offers a complete reading experience in a single sitting. And if this one doesn’t thrill you, the next one might.
Our tastes in essays may differ. But if you don’t enjoy fiction, or if you do, treat yourself regularly to a fine essay or two by someone you enjoy. We’ll have that in common, and we’ll become more interesting humans in the bargain.
This, ahem, essay originally appeared in The American Fork Citizen in October 2026. Reprinted with permission.
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