The Best American Essays 2010: The Free Route

The Best Amer­i­can Essays, 2010, edit­ed by Christo­pher Hitchens, has now hit the stands. The 300-page col­lec­tion runs $10.47 online. How­ev­er, know this: You can read most of the essays online for free. These essays were orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished on web­sites of major Amer­i­can jour­nals & mag­a­zines, and there they still remain. Some notable men­tions include The Mur­der of Leo Tol­stoy: A Foren­sic Inves­ti­ga­tion by Elif Batu­man, How Ein­stein Divid­ed Amer­i­ca’s Jews by Wal­ter Isaac­son, On John Updike by Ian McE­wan, My Genome, My Self by Steven Pinker, and Guy Walks into a Bar by David Sedaris. Metafil­ter has pulled togeth­er a full list of avail­able texts. Kudos to them. And if you want to read these essays lat­er on (when you actu­al­ly have some time) give Instapa­per a try.  It’s a won­der­ful way to read texts in a clean for­mat on the iPad, iPhone, and Kin­dle. The trusty web brows­er is always an option too.