LITERARY NONFICTION RANKING

This ranking is built from every Best American Essays volume from 2016 to 2025 — ten volumes, 218 essays. No editorial opinion, no reputation weighting. Each point represents one essay selected for the anthology.

The number reflects frequency of selection, not quality. A journal with a 1 may have published the best essay you’ll read this year. What the data shows is where BAE editors have consistently found work worth reprinting — which is a different, and more reliable, signal than prestige by reputation.

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Harper’s Magazine — 12

The New Yorker — 12

New York Times Magazine — 10

Granta — 8

Virginia Quarterly Review — 8

n+1 — 7

New England Review — 5

New York Review of Books — 5

Ploughshares — 5

Sewanee Review — 5

Threepenny Review — 5

Yale Review — 5

The Atlantic — 4

Kenyon Review — 4

Liberties — 4

Chicago Quarterly Review — 3

Colorado Review — 3

Georgia Review — 3

Gettysburg Review — 3

Iowa Review — 3

Massachusetts Review — 3

New Letters — 3

Oxford American — 3

Raritan — 3

The Believer — 3

The Point — 3

AGNI — 2

American Scholar — 2

The Baffler — 2

BuzzFeed — 2

Conjunctions — 2

Guernica — 2

Harvard Review — 2

Lapham’s Quarterly — 2

Michigan Quarterly Review — 2

North American Review — 2

Orion — 2

Prairie Schooner — 2

Prism — 2

Salmagundi — 2

Tin House — 2

Vanity Fair — 2

Wired — 2

Your Impossible Voice — 2

A Public Space — 1

Alaska Quarterly Review — 1

Another Chicago Magazine — 1

Astra — 1

BOMB Magazine — 1

Boston Review — 1

Boulevard — 1

Catamaran — 1

Catapult — 1

Cimarron Review — 1

Electric Literature — 1

Fiddlehead — 1

Five Points — 1

Florida Review — 1

Hobart — 1

Hotel Amerika — 1

Irish Pages — 1

Jewish Currents — 1

Literary Hub — 1

London Review of Books — 1

Longreads — 1

Los Angeles Times — 1

Missouri Review — 1

Narrative Magazine — 1

New York Times — 1

Paris Review — 1

Potomac Review — 1

Slate — 1

Solstice — 1

Southern Indiana Review — 1

Southwest Review — 1

Subtropics — 1

Terrain — 1

The Sun — 1

Transition — 1

Vice — 1

Water-Stone Review — 1

West Trade Review — 1