With Jamaica Kincaid as guest editor, this volume leans toward essays that treat the form as a way of thinking under a sort of ticking time bomb rather than offloading opinion.

The range is wide without feeling scattered. Joseph Brodsky on history and interior life, Cynthia Ozick on fracture and memory, Grace Paley on voice and politics, Tobias Wolff on witness, Henry Louis Gates Jr. on race and representation. You also get William H. Gass doing what he does best, turning the essay into a kind of marble sculpture to stare at. It’s a line-up that still reads like a live wire.

What holds it together is Kincaid’s sensibility: a bias toward essays that don’t resolve cleanly, that sit in contradiction, that understand language as something that can both expose and conceal. If you’re interested in the essay as a form that actually does something—cuts, rearranges, resists—this is one of the stronger entries in the series.

1995 Houghton Mifflin hardback. Light general wear to covers with mild edge rubbing. Clean internally, tight binding. A solid, readable copy with no markings.