Longreads Best of 2014: Essay Writing

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories.

我们要求一些作家和编辑在特定类别中选择一些他们今年最喜欢的故事。

Here, the best in essay writing.

在这里，最好的论文写作。

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Meaghan O’Connell

梅根·奥康奈尔

Freelance writer, “Birth Story” author, motherhood columnist at The Cut, who believes her best work is at The Billfold.

自由作家、《出生故事》作者、The Cut 的母亲专栏作家，她认为自己最好的作品是在 The Billfold。

## The Empathy Exams (Leslie Jamison, The Believer)

## 同理心测试（莱斯利·贾米森，《信徒》）

I did not know who Leslie Jamison was before I read her essay “Empathy Exams” late one night at the pie shop that I use as an office when the library is closed.

有一天深夜，我在图书馆关门时用作办公室的馅饼店里读到她的文章《同理心考试》之前，我并不知道莱斯利·贾米森是谁。

I was hungry, and it was dark out, and I was very pregnant and needed to get home.

我很饿，天也黑了，而且我怀孕了，需要回家。

But I stayed in that uncomfortable chair and read it the whole way through, bursting with excitement.

但我坐在那张不舒服的椅子上，从头到尾读了一遍，兴奋不已。

I G-chatted friends in all caps asking them if they’d read it.

我和全大写的朋友聊天，问他们是否读过这本书。

I Googled her, saw she had a book coming out, and floated home feeling like, “Yes, let’s do this.

我在谷歌上搜索了她，看到她出了一本书，然后飘回家，感觉是，“是的，我们就这么做吧。

Let’s write some fucking personal essays, people!” I think Jamison, especially here, convinced or re-convinced a lot of people of the possibilities and the value of writing in the first person.

伙计们，我们来写一些该死的个人文章吧！”我认为贾米森，尤其是在这里，说服或重新说服了很多人以第一人称写作的可能性和价值。

Of course I think it’s horse shit that it takes a white lady with a veneer of intellectualism to make it okay, but I’ll take it where I can get it.

当然，我认为这是马屎，需要一个披着理智主义外表的白人女士才能做到这一点，但我会把它带到我能得到的地方。

Jamison, for her part, rises to the occasion.

贾米森则挺身而出。

She certainly reminded me to hang onto the art of the thing, all the while going deeper, letting the problem of whatever you’re trying to do take up its own space.

她当然提醒我要坚持事物的艺术，同时不断深入，让你想做的任何事情占据自己的空间。

## How Much My Novel Cost Me (Emily Gould, Medium)

## 我的小说花了我多少钱（艾米丽·古尔德，Medium）

Emily Gould’s epic essay on Medium, “How Much My Novel Cost Me,” made me want her to write a book about the process of writing a book (or just write another book about anything—I’ll read it).

艾米丽·古尔德（Emily Gould）在 Medium 上发表的史诗般的文章《我的小说花了我多少钱》让我希望她写一本关于写书过程的书（或者只是再写一本关于任何事情的书——我会读它）。

No one tells the truth about money, about ambition and desire and the attendant disappointment like Gould does.

没有人能像古尔德那样说出关于金钱、野心和欲望以及随之而来的失望的真相。

Critics love to evoke her “gimlet eye,” which is too restrained a phrase for my taste—too abstract.

评论家喜欢唤起她的“尖眼”，这对我来说太内敛了——太抽象了。

Emily does not like flowery language.

艾米丽不喜欢华丽的语言。

Emily DGAF.

艾米丽·DGAF。

Her DGAF-ness challenges us all to be better, to look critically at what parts of us are operating just below the surface.

她的 DGAF 风格挑战我们所有人，让我们变得更好，批判性地审视我们内心的哪些部分在表面之下运作。

You have to really be ready to read stuff from her, because you know there will be a few lies you’ve been telling yourself that you’ll have to let go of after reading whatever it is she’s aimed her gimlet eye / razor tongue / raised brow / man-eating heart on this time.

你必须真正做好阅读她的东西的准备，因为你知道你会告诉自己一些谎言，在阅读完她这次瞄准的所有内容后，你必须放弃这些谎言。

Gird your delusions, various parts of Emily’s face are coming for you.

收起你的妄想吧，艾米丽脸上的各个部分都在向你袭来。

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Rachael Maddux

雷切尔·马杜克斯

Writer and editor living in Decatur, Georgia.

住在佐治亚州迪凯特的作家和编辑。

## Poor Teeth (Sarah Smarsh, Aeon)

## 牙齿不好（Sarah Smarsh，Aeon）

When it comes to narrowing down end-of-the-year favorites, increasingly the only criteria that makes sense to me is, “How profoundly did this change the way I thought about its subject?” And reading this essay on class and poverty and dental care felt like following Sarah Smarsh around as she flipped on light switch after light switch, illuminating not only dark rooms I’d never thought to enter before, but also spaces I thought I knew well but which turned out to be all shadowed corners.

当谈到缩小年终最爱的范围时，对我来说唯一有意义的标准越来越多是：“这对我思考这个主题的方式产生了多大的改变？”阅读这篇关于阶级、贫困和牙科保健的文章，感觉就像跟着莎拉·斯马什(Sarah Smarsh)，她一个接一个地打开电灯开关，不仅照亮了我以前从未想过要进入的黑暗房间，也照亮了我自以为很熟悉但结果却全是阴暗角落的空间。

It works so well, I think, because Smarsh seems to have sensed that this couldn’t just be a personal essay or a reported story or a piece of pop-culture criticism—to talk about Pennsatucky’s teeth is to talk about her grandmother’s teeth is to talk about her own teeth is to talk about America itself.

我认为，它效果很好，因为斯马什似乎意识到这不仅仅是一篇个人文章、一篇报道的故事或一篇流行文化批评——谈论彭萨塔基的牙齿就是谈论她祖母的牙齿，就是谈论她自己的牙齿就是谈论美国本身。

## ‘It’s Silly to Be Frightened of Being Dead’ (Diana Athill, The Guardian)

## “害怕死亡是愚蠢的”（戴安娜·阿西尔，《卫报》）

Diana Athill is 96 and has written so much in her life, but this was the first I’ve read of any of it—and while that now feels like a grave mistake, this essay does seem like an oddly ideal starting point.

戴安娜·阿西尔 (Diana Athill) 已经 96 岁了，一生写了很多文章，但这是我第一次读到这些文章——虽然现在感觉这是一个严重的错误，但这篇文章似乎确实是一个奇怪的理想起点。

It’s a miniature memoir of her mortality, from her childhood spent in the long shadow of the mourning-obsessed Victorians (“my mother never went to a funeral if she could help it …

这是一部关于她死亡的缩影回忆录，从她的童年开始，她就在痴迷于哀悼的维多利亚时代的阴影下度过（“我的母亲如果可以的话，从不参加葬礼......

and my father vanished from the room if death was mentioned”), through her own brushes with death as a young and less-young adult, and on into the present, when the fickle pendulum of death-acceptance seems to be swinging back towards some saner middle ground.

如果提到死亡，我的父亲就会从房间里消失”），通过她自己作为一个年轻和不太年轻的成年人与死亡的擦肩而过，一直到现在，当接受死亡的善变的钟摆似乎正在摆回一些更理智的中间立场时。

Grappling with death seems to have been a major project of Athill’s life—not one of those things that dawned on her in middle-age after however many decades of careless existence—which is what makes this such a gift for anyone who also first found themselves mucking around in the strangeness of human impermanence when they were very small.

与死亡作斗争似乎是阿西尔一生的一个重大项目——这并不是她在中年时突然意识到的事情，尽管她已经经历了几十年的无忧无虑的生活——这对于那些在很小的时候第一次发现自己在人类无常的奇怪现象中闲逛的人来说是一份礼物。

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Belle Boggs

贝尔·博格斯

Fiction writer and essayist and visiting writer at North Carolina State University.

北卡罗来纳州立大学小说作家、散文家和访问作家。

## The Art of Arrival (Rebecca Solnit, Orion)

## 到达的艺术（丽贝卡·索尔尼特，猎户座）

First published in Orion, this essay about friendship, environmental activism, and journeys has all the pleasures that make Rebecca Solnit a favorite: a landscape you want to inhabit; a demand you pay attention to what is disappearing and vulnerable; elegant, wise sentence progressions that reward rereading, like this one: “In a way, everything is traveling: the planet revolving daily, orbiting the sun annually, the blood traveling within our veins, the ideas traveling within our minds.

这篇关于友谊、环保行动主义和旅程的文章首次发表在《猎户座》杂志上，它具有让丽贝卡·索尔尼特成为最爱的所有乐趣：你想要居住的风景；要求您关注正在消失和脆弱的事物；优雅、明智的句子进展值得重读，就像这样：“在某种程度上，一切都在旅行：行星每天公转，每年绕太阳公转，血液在我们的血管里流动，思想在我们的脑海里流动。

Maybe being still is how you turn your attention from the logistics of your own trajectory to the passage of all the other beings and their shadows.

也许静止是你将注意力从自己轨迹的逻辑转移到所有其他存在及其影子的通道的方式。

To arrive, then, is not about immobility but something else, perhaps confidence, clarity, satisfaction, attention.” “The Art of Arrival” is also as tender a portrait as I read all year, both of Solnit’s tough, selfless, welcoming friend, Jo Anne Garrett, but also of Solnit herself, someone trying to find her way back to the best kind of journeys.

那么，到达目的地并不意味着一动不动，而是其他东西，也许是自信、清晰、满足、专注。” 《到达的艺术》也是我一年来读到的一幅温柔的肖像，既描绘了索尔尼特坚强、无私、热情的朋友乔·安妮·加勒特，也描绘了索尔尼特本人，一个试图找到回到最好旅程的人。

## 52 Blue (Leslie Jamison, Slate)

## 52 蓝色（莱斯利·贾米森、Slate）

Everyone who loves essays is talking about Leslie Jamison’s brilliant The Empathy Exams, published this year by Graywolf Press.

每个喜欢论文的人都在谈论莱斯利·贾米森 (Leslie Jamison) 的精彩著作《同理心考试》(The Empathy Exams)，该书今年由 Graywolf Press 出版。

I trust that someone else will choose the powerful title essay, also featured on Longreads this year, as a favorite.

我相信其他人会选择这篇有力的标题文章作为最爱，今年的长读文章也精选了它。

But I like teasers, too, and reading about the way we try to inhabit the minds of animals, so I’ll pick this Atavist single, excerpted in Slate, which introduces you to the human obsession with a blue whale singing at a frequency beyond communication with his species.

但我也喜欢预告片，喜欢阅读有关我们如何试图占据动物心灵的方式，所以我会选择《Slate》中摘录的返祖派单曲，它向您介绍了人类对蓝鲸的痴迷，蓝鲸的歌唱频率超出了其物种的交流范围。

Of course once you sample the excerpt you’ll need to read the whole essay—a nineteen-part story as riveting as a good novel.

当然，一旦你尝试了摘录，你就需要阅读整篇文章——一个像一本好小说一样引人入胜的十九部分故事。

## My Vassar College ID Makes Everything Okay (Kiese Laymon, Gawker)

## 我的瓦萨学院 ID 让一切顺利（Kiese Laymon，Gawker）

Everything is far from okay, as this devastating, intimate essay about the impact of white racial supremacy makes clear.

正如这篇关于白人种族至上的影响的毁灭性的、亲密的文章所表明的那样，一切都远非美好。

Had Laymon described only his own experience as a professor at an elite Northeastern college—of racial profiling by white cops, ignorant stereotyping by white students, open hostility from white professors—the essay would be gripping and infuriating.

如果雷蒙只描述他自己作为东北一所精英大学教授的经历——白人警察的种族定性、白人学生无知的刻板印象、白人教授的公开敌意——这篇文章将会扣人心弦、令人愤怒。

What makes the essay luminous is the way Laymon expands the scope of his critique to include a crescendo of moments experienced by his own minority students that will probably, terribly, never leave them: moments of fear, violence, and willful, consequential misunderstanding.

这篇文章的亮点在于，雷蒙扩大了他的批评范围，将他自己的少数族裔学生所经历的一些时刻纳入其中，而这些时刻很可能永远不会离开他们：恐惧、暴力和故意的、后果性误解的时刻。

“We are not OK.

“我们不好。

We are not OK,” Laymon writes, in a style that wavers between a lonely interior dialogue and incisive, withering commentary.

我们不好。”雷蒙写道，他的风格在孤独的内心对话和尖锐、尖锐的评论之间摇摆不定。

But, he suggests, “We are so much better than the sick part of our nation that murders an unarmed black boy like a rabid dog, before prosecuting him for being a nigger.” Better, too, he says, than the “innocent” racism practiced at places like Vassar.

但是，他表示，“我们比我们国家的病态部分要好得多，他们像疯狗一样谋杀了一个手无寸铁的黑人男孩，然后以黑鬼的罪名起诉他。”他说，这也比瓦萨等地实行的“无辜”种族主义要好。

This is essential reading.

这是必要的阅读。

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Longreads Editor’s Picks (Mark Armstrong)

长读编辑精选（马克·阿姆斯特朗）

## Dear Kate (Nancy Comiskey, Indianapolis Monthly)

## 亲爱的凯特（南希·科米斯基，印第安纳波利斯月刊）

This essay by Nancy Comiskey about losing her daughter ran in the November issue of Indianapolis Monthly, and it just gutted me.

南希·科米斯基（Nancy Comiskey）关于失去女儿的这篇文章刊登在《印第安纳波利斯月刊》十一月号上，这让我很伤心。

It’s not just because I’m a parent, but because I also saw myself in the awkward reactions from Comiskey’s friends when they struggled with how to react to her grief and anger and desire to talk about her daughter—to defiantly not just be “over it.” You lose good friends who don’t know how to react, you gain some friends you never expected.

这不仅因为我是一名家长，还因为我也在科米斯基朋友们的尴尬反应中看到了自己，当时他们在努力应对她的悲伤和愤怒，并渴望谈论她的女儿，而不仅仅是“克服它”。你失去了不知道如何反应的好朋友，你却得到了一些你意想不到的朋友。

You yearn.

你渴望。

She describes this moment with her husband:

她描述了与丈夫的这一刻：

On his third birthday without Kate, Steve and I were standing in our kitchen, crying, when he choked out these words: “It’s not that I want her back.

在他没有凯特的三岁生日那天，史蒂夫和我站在厨房里哭泣，当时他哽咽着说：“我并不是想要她回来。

It’s not that I need her back.

并不是我需要她回来。

It’s that I have to have her back.”

我必须让她回来。”

Comiskey bravely and honestly walks us through these emotions, and we get to know Kate along the way.

科米斯基勇敢而诚实地引导我们度过这些情感，我们一路上了解了凯特。

It is certainly the most moving piece of writing I read all year, and I am thankful to her for sharing this story.

这无疑是我一年中读过的最感人的作品，我感谢她分享这个故事。

## The Case for Reparations (Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic)

## 赔偿案（Ta-Nehisi Coates，《大西洋月刊》）

This is where Ta-Nehisi Coates puts all the pieces together.

这就是塔内西斯·科茨 (Ta-Nehisi Coates) 将所有部分整合在一起的地方。

An incredible history of slavery in America, in all its forms, and a stirring call for “a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal”:

美国各种形式的奴隶制的令人难以置信的历史，以及对“导致精神复兴的全国清算”的激动人心的呼吁：

We must imagine a new country.

我们必须想象一个新的国家。

Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely.

赔偿——我的意思是完全接受我们的集体传记及其后果——是我们为了正确看待自己而必须付出的代价。

The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life.

正在康复的酗酒者很可能不得不与疾病共度余生。

But at least he is not living a drunken lie.

但至少他没有生活在醉酒的谎言中。

Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.

赔偿召唤我们拒绝狂妄自大的陶醉，并看到美国的本来面目——是容易犯错的人类的杰作。

After 2014, it is hard to not see how overdue we are for such a spiritual renewal.

2014 年之后，我们很难不看出我们早该进行这样的精神更新了。