The best American essays. 2014 / edited and with an introduction by John Jeremiah Sullivan.

A matter of life and death / by Timothy Aubry -- Strage beads / by Wendy Brenner -- The final day in Rome / by John H. Culver -- Letter from Williamsburg / by Kristin Dombek -- The man at the river / by Dave Eggers -- At sixty-five / Emily Fox Gordon -- On enmity / by Mary Gordon -- Letter from Greenwich Village / by Vivian Gornick -- Slickheads / by Lawrence Jackson -- The devil's bait / by Leslie Jamison -- Thanksgiving in Mongolia / by Ariel Levy -- Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life / by Yiyun Li -- Silver of sky / by Barry Lopez -- Someone else / by Chris Offutt -- Joy / by Zadie Smith -- Little X / by Elizabeth Tallent -- The old man at Burning man / by Wells Tower -- How to make a slave / by Jerald Walker -- On being introduced / by Paul West -- Becoming them / by James Wood -- Legend : Willem de Kooning / by Baron Wormser.

Compiles the best literary essays of the year 2013 which were originally published in American periodicals.
In our age of “trigger warnings” and jeopardized free expression, The Best American Essays 2014 does not shy away from shocking extremes, ambiguities, or dualities. As guest editor John Jeremiah Sullivan notes, the essay “assumes many two-sided forms,” and these diverse pieces capture all the conceptions of what an essay can be: the loose and the strict, “the flourish and the finished, the try and the trial.” His choices embrace the high and the low, the memoirist’s confession and the journalist’s reportage, and all the gray area in between. From a hotel in Mongolia to a Clockwork Orange–like Baltimore, from a Rome emergency room to Burning Man, these diverse pieces surprise and entertain, inform and titillate.