In this volume Korean-American writer and poet Park Hong presents Asian stereotypes as she sees them with a directness that lands like a sucker punch to the gut: “Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don’t even have enough presence to be considered real minorities.”

As a reader you feel totally panicked by the words – how can she write this? – but this is Park Hong’s shame as she sees herself as white America sees her.

Park Hong believes a sense of obedience is at the heart of white manipulation and oppression of Asians. But Park Hong is not obedient. She is candid, opinionated and emotional – all qualities she believes are not part of the Asian stereotype.

Park Hong manages to be very funny when talking about something so personally heart-breaking and systemically appalling. She describes her voice as “a kazoo” and speaks of audiences rushing for the door when her poetry reading is over. She recalls how she begged a Korean therapist to take her on as a patient (“‘Eunice!’ I shouted into the phone.”) because she felt she would be better understood – and doesn’t scrimp on the details of the pain of that rejection.

But although Park Hong’s experiences are naturally at the heart of the essays, she details the racism served up to Chinese workers in America the 1900s – including the example of a 15-year-old girl who was raped until her “body was hollowed out with syphilis” and she was “dumped out on the streets to die alone”. She also explains how Asians were essentially used as pawns by white supremacists during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

Park Hong also discusses how often Asians are lumped into one stereotype when the differences, prejudices and conflicts between the nations are complex and very real: “Most Americans… think Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is for tissues. They don’t understand that we’re this tenuous alliance of many nationalities.”

A standout moment is where Park Hong explains that racism towards Asians is different than racism towards black people, especially as she does so without making any value judgements or suggestions about which is worse.

We learned so much from Minor Things, not least what a dazzling writer Cathy Park Hong is.

The first of Cusk's essays in this collection, Driving As Metaphor, focuses on the road – its users and their vehicles. It covers speeding, morality, road rage and even death. Only Cusk could make a piece about driving – not competitive or even risky driving, just bog standard quotidian driving – remotely interesting.

Later, On Rudeness beautifully examines manners, society and language while Making Home discusses women and nesting – what makes a home and how we live. Towards the end of the collection Cusk concentrates on specific writers and books. Notable is the essay on Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love which Cusk describes rather brilliantly as employing “best friend language”, where secrets, embarrassments and disappointments are relayed in a humourous, knowing tone.

Towards the end of the essay Cusk rejects the idea that this sort of self-discovery memoir is anything but “a competition, at whose heart is a need to win.” Cusk points out that Gilbert is a “relentless cataloguer” of personal successes and questions how that makes her audiences feel given that they are cast as the admirers and not the admired.

But it is in the essay from which the volume takes its name that is the standout. Coventry dissects what it means to be given the silent treatment – with Cusk revealing that her own parents have periodically subjected her to this wordless purgatory. The authour's interest in and visiting of Coventry Cathedral, once grand and proud, decimated to nothing but shattered ruins in 1940 before being rebuilt, serves as the perfect motif here – and is further proof of her cleverness.

We loved the introduction, which explains where the volume’s title comes from – Robert Silvers, former editor of The New York Review of Books used to write the phrase at the bottom of his commissions to Moore – but it also allows us to understand more about how Moore goes about her criticism. It is somehow comforting to know that she doesn’t have any training in it and that she subscribes to no formula. She does however have a few self-imposed rules – seemingly minor things – that are likely to make you nod along in recognition or think oops – that’s me, such as avoiding internetese (informal internet speak), or “any form of the word ‘enjoy’”.

And we also love how this doesn’t need to be read in linear fashion. Instead you can dip in and out depending on your wont. That said, the opening essay is a banger if you’re a fan of Nora Ephron’s novel Heartburn. Moore’s 1983 review sums up the enduringly popular novel perfectly by discussing it as both a piece of art and a symbol of revenge.

As well as critical pieces with TV, film and literature as the focal point, the authour tackles huge topics such as memoir and writing itself, giving insight into Moore herself and her trajectory as a writer – “I preferred hearing about parties to actually going to them. I liked to phone the next day and get the news from a friend. I wanted gossip, third-handedness, narrative.”

Moore’s writing is accessible, clever and soothingly unpretentious.

The subtitle of this volume is Essays On Self-Delusion and it’s this idea of how we see ourselves that is at the heart of Tolentino’s writing here. The backdrops and players change – churches, scammers, frat boys, white weddings – but the lies we tell ourselves and the façade we offer others are Tolentino’s priority.

One of the best parts of this volume is in the second essay which is about when Tolentino found herself starring in a reality TV show. She describes how she was cajoled into auditioning for the show by her parents, that her arm had to be twisted, that she was not the kind of person to covet that sort of attention.

What she writes is entirely plausible. But then she doubles back to admit that the initial narrative of how her reality TV career kicked off was false – the truth casts her in a less appealing, less passive role. That she can admit to wanting this sort of opportunity is a rare thing in a world where people manipulate the truth in order to be perceived as cool and more palatable. People are afraid of looking like they want to be famous or noticed or popular. There is something distasteful about admitting that you strived for something like fame – that you personally pushed to be picked and weren’t just minding your own business when by chance someone saw something in you. Tolentino knows this, which makes it all the more admirable that she admitted that it wasn’t chance that got her on TV. This honesty is woven through the entire collection.

Her essay on the fraternity system is brilliant, not least because she herself lived it, and she hits the nail on the head repeatedly when discussing commodity feminism. Read it with relish and then be jealous you didn’t write it yourself.

If you are coming to New York Times bestselling Samantha Irby for the first time, the first couple of essays in this latest collection are indicative of her humour and voice but don’t do justice to her skill as a writer.

The introduction to the first section – Brunch – is a frittata recipe which doubles as a commentary on how we perfect our lives for the internet. At Thirty is where Irby declares all of her shortcomings in one long list. Another essay, Awkward First Date is simply a series of questions Irby has set and answered for herself; these are amusing and abrasive but are also self-indulgent to the point of narcissism.

However, essays like My Mother, My Daughter is where the real meat – excuse the pun – can be found. Here Irby is just as raw, voluble and honest with lots of block capital sentences and “motherfucking” – but there’s much more depth here, probably because she is talking about being her adult mother’s carer. Statements describing the aftermath of her mother’s accident (when their roles switched) such as “I brought my baby home from the hospital… swaddled at the wrong end, head and neck wrapped in thick white gauze” are utterly devastating.

Although she had a shaky start and a patchy education, Pine is now a successful academic – but there is no humblebragging to be had here in this collection of essays which doubles as a memoir. She is not afraid of making herself look unappealing, and ponders on her own “narcissism” and “selfishness”. She recalls being pointed at in disgust by a group of children because of her unshaven legs.

This sort of detail is small fry. Pine opens Notes to Self by telling of the stress and horror of caring for her alcoholic father after his liver fails – pulling no punches when dissecting his self-absorption. Later she writes of her sister’s stillbirth and her own miscarriage.

But the most brutal of these devastating essays is surely Something About Me. The essay goes back to the early Nineties where an adolescent Pine is careering off the rails. A fairly standard teenage trope, you might think. But Pine’s narrative has at its heart a loneliness, a longing and a sadness that is about much more than neat vodka, speed and bum-skimming skirts. Her experiences of underage sex with men double her age, of hailing taxis at dawn on empty central London streets hours before she is due at school assembly, of internalising that sexual violence against her, convinced it happened because of “a vibe you give off” are quite simply shattering. The desolation in this essay is complete – you feel exhausted for Pine but also amazed that this life once belonged to someone now so accomplished, professional and literary. Pine writes with a no-nonsense directness lacking in many essay collections where the florid and pretentious can reign.

This collection of essays include long form reportage, as in the case of Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream where Didion lays bare the case of Lucille Miller – a woman jailed for the murder of her own husband against a backdrop of marital disappointment, intense religion and upward mobility in small town California.

These pieces are gripping stories of specific people in extraordinary circumstances, brilliantly told.

In other essays Didion is more introspective, using herself as subject matter and writing in the first person. In an essay on note taking, her sense of narrative is acute as she points out that “how it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about keeping a notebook”. Being able to see how this literary titan took notes is, without wishing to sound too hammy, a total privilege.

Although all of this writing is from before 1968, Didion’s prose feels relevant, sharp and timeless. There is little to nothing that feels dated about it. In fact, some of her sentences are nothing short of a joy – made to be read and reread repeatedly with an effortlessness that speaks to Didion’s talent.

This is an uncomfortable read for white women – and it’s meant to be. It needs to be. But it is also an essential read. Mikki Kendall lays bare concisely and clearly what has been ignored or erased from mainstream feminism: the survival of many women in favour of elevating the privilege of the few.

Her words explain how intersectional feminism is still a pipedream. She writes “it isn’t about saying the right words at the right time” and that is kind of the backbone of her message throughout the book. She is calling for action not theory. She is calling for women to live their feminism. She is highlighting how often white feminists do not engage with issues that do not affect them because while white women might still be an oppressed group, they have the power to oppress black women.

Kendall gets to the heart of what it means to “work hard” – and that it means different things to different people. She rejects pity and its sinister sibling white saviourism and she reminds readers that even words used to describe black women that appear to be positive – sassy, fierce, for example – are problematic because they are dehumanising.

Prepare to feel ignorant, schooled and ultimately enlightened.

Solnit’s essays have won plenty of praise in the past for their insight and relatability – and how cleverly she crystallises complex, messy or multifaceted ideas. This latest collection is no different.

It’s essentially a polemic on narrative control – and will likely have you performing the both-hands-raised-in-celebration emoji as finally someone says it, and says it well.

For example, Solnit is brilliant and incising on the difference between wokeness and goodness: “If you’re woke it’s because someone woke you up… It’s easy now to assume that one’s perspectives on race, gender, orientation and the rest are signs of inherent virtue but a lot of ideas currently in circulation are gifts that arrived recently through the labours of others.”

She takes no prisoners in her commentary on Weinstein and #MeToo, setting out a context in which “all the world is not a stage: backstage and beyond are important territories too”. It is horrifying when she describes male witnesses as somebodies, while women are nobodies – but it is horrifying because it is true. Women’s opinions don’t count. Their narratives are meaningless. Or were.

She gets right to the heart of who matters. She takes narrative and picks it up, examining it from all angles to decipher who gets to be heard, and who gets muted, erased.

The entire volume is relentlessly quotable – but it is harsh and brutal and sad too, like how she describes a hotel chain which has panic buttons for the female domestic staff who are assaulted by the rich male guests: “Supply and demand”.

Solnit is hopeful and addresses those who are afraid of a new world where white men won’t be the default controllers: “Some people are being left behind, not because the future is intolerant of them but because they are intolerant of this future”.

One of the best things about this collection is that it introduces you to lesser-known writers – you’ll find yourself noting down people and titles you might not be in familiar with, excited to expand your reading list on the recommendation of one of America’s greatest writers.

Some of the essays are little more than lists – such as Small But Perfectly Formed: Five Favourite Short Stories – while others are critiques on modern painters or Madame Bovary.

We especially enjoyed Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits which, although a list, was one of the lengthier essays in the book. These include advice about how to achieve originality (don’t set out to be original) and how to be alone, completely alone smartphone included.

One of the most interesting things we took home from this tome is Davis’s advice about what we should be reading. She recommends reading books from a variety of time periods: “…you do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time.”

At times it’s overwhelming: Davis is so accomplished, so disciplined and so well-read and that’s on top of her intellect and this can feel intimidating, especially for writers who are time poor. One of her pieces of advice is to learn of foreign language which made us want to keel over with exhaustion!