How We Speak to One Another is some of the most engaging evidence we’ve got that the essay is going strong. Here, essayists talk back to each other, to the work they love and the work that disquiets them, and to the very basic building blocks of what we understand “essay” to be. What’s compiled in these pages testifies to the endless flexibility, generosity, curiosity, and audacity of essays. Even more than that, it provides the kind of pleasure any great essay collection does—upsetting our ideas and challenging the way we organize our sense of the world.


Ander Monson is the author, most recently, of Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries (Graywolf Press). He is also the author of Vanishing Point, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Neck Deep and Other Predicaments.

Craig Reinbold's writing has appeared in journals and magazines including the Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, New England Review, Guernica, Gulf Coast, and Brevity. He was the managing editor of Essay Daily from 2013 to 2016.

Contributors include: Ander Monson, Marcia Aldrich, Kristen Radtke, Robin Hemley, Robert Atwan, Matt Dube, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, T. Clutch Fleischmann, Rigoberto González, Kati Standefer, Julie Lauterbach-Colby, César Diaz, Emily Deprang, Lucas Mann, Danica Novgorodoff, Bonnie J. Rough, Peter Grandbois, Albert Goldbarth, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Steven Church, Bethany Maile, David Legault, Joni Tevis, John D'Agata, Meehan Crist,Thomas Mira Y Lopez, Danielle Deulen, John T. Price, Maya L. Kapoor, Chelsea Biondolillo, Megan Kimble, Brian Doyle, Nicole Walkder, Paul Lisicky, Brian Oliu, Pam Houston, Dave Mondy, Phillip Lopate, Amy Benson, Patrick Madden, Elena Passarello, Erin Zwiener, Patricia Vigderman, and Ryan Van Meter.