**A collection of the year’s best essays, selected by award-winning journalist and *New Yorker* staff writer Kathryn Schulz** “The world is abundant even in bad times,” guest editor Kathryn Schulz writes in her introduction, “it is lush with interestingness, and always, somewhere, offering up consolation or beauty or humor or happiness, or at least the hope of future happiness.” The essays Schulz selected are a powerful time capsule of 2020, showcasing that even if our lives as we knew them stopped, the beauty to be found in them flourished. From an intimate account of nursing a loved one in the early days of the pandemic, to a masterful portrait of grieving the loss of a husband as the country grieved the loss of George Floyd, this collection brilliantly shapes the grief, hardship, and hope of a singular year. The Trayvon generation / Elizabeth Alexander, from The New Yorker — Homecoming / Hilton Als, from The New Yorker — The broken country / Molly McCully Brown, from Virginia Quarterly Review — Acceptance parenting / Agnes Callard, from The Point — The kitchen is closed / Gabrielle Hamilton, from The New York Times Magazine — Bent arrows: on anticipation of my approaching disappearance / Tony Hoagland, from Ploughshares — Vicious cycles / Greg Jackson, from Harper’s Magazine — Clarity / Ruchir Joshi, from Granta — Oh Latitudo / Amy Leach, from Granta — Insane after coronavirus? / Patricia Lockwood, from London Review of Books — Love in a time of terror / Barry Lopez. from Literary Hub — What I learned when my husband got sick with coronavirus / Jessica Lustig, from The New York Times Magazine — What money can’t buy / Dawn Lundy Martin, from Ploughshares — Two women / Claire Messud, from A Public Space — My mustache / Wesley Morris, from The New Yorker Magazine — Apparent / Beth Nguyen, from The Paris Review — The designated mourner, from The New York Review of Books — Going postal / Max Read, from Bookforusm — In orbit / Dariel Suarez, from The Threepenny Review — Witness and respair, from The Vanity Fair