Showing titles in Essays

From adventure to indenture, martyrs to merchants, Partition to plantation, from Kashmir to Kerala, Japan to Jamaica and beyond, the many facets of the great migrations of India and the world are mapped in India Moving, the first book of its kind. To understand how millions of people have moved - from, to and within India - the book embarks on a journey laced with evidence, argument, and wit.

A genre-bending work of nonfiction, Samantha Hunt’s The Unwritten Book explores the broadest sense of ghosts, ghost stories, and haunting. What is it to be haunted, to be a ghost, to die, to live, to read? Books are ghosts; reading is communion with the dead. Alcohol is a way of communing, too, as well as a way of dying. Each chapter gathers subjects that haunt: dead people, the forest, the towering library of all those books we’ll never have time to read or write. Hunt, like a mad crossword puzzler, looks for patterns and clues.

When Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker’s art critic and the leading art writer of his generation, published his eye-opening autobiographical essay, “The Art of Dying,” in December 2019, he reported that he had lung cancer and had been given six months of life. Fortunately, his treatment was showing some improvement, and so, he wrote, “These extra months are a luxury that I hope to have put to good use.”

In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic observations of the world around them.

What was the real significance of William James's breakdown? Of the anti-Semitism in T.S. Eliot's writing? At each step in his latest journey through American cultural history, Menand has an original point to make.

These are just a few of the people who tell their stories in Modern Love, Revised and Updated, featuring dozens of the most memorable essays to run in The New York Times “Modern Love” column since its debut in 2004. Some of the stories are unconventional, while others hit close to home. Some reveal the way technology has changed dating forever; others explore the timeless struggles experienced by anyone who has ever searched for love.

In this brilliant collection, the follow-up to her New York Times best seller Reading Like a Writer, the distinguished novelist, literary critic, and essayist celebrates the pleasures of reading and pays homage to the works and writers she admires above all others. In an age defined by hyper-connectivity and constant stimulation, Francine Prose makes a compelling case for the solitary act of reading and the great enjoyment it brings. Inspiring and illuminating, What to Read and Why includes selections culled from Prose’s previous essays, reviews, and introductions.

Brilliant and uncompromising, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America is essential listening. This new edition of award-winning author Kiese Laymon’s first work of nonfiction looks inward, drawing heavily on the author and his family’s experiences, while simultaneously examining the world—Mississippi, the South, the United States—that has shaped their lives. With subjects that range from an interview with his mother to reflections on Ole Miss football, Outkast, and the labor of Black women, these thirteen insightful essays highlight Laymon’s profound love of language.

Wonderbook has become the definitive guide to writing science fiction and fantasy by offering an accessible, example-rich approach that emphasizes the importance of playfulness as well as pragmatism. The book features sidebars and essays from some of the biggest names working in the field today, including George R. R. Martin, Lev Grossman, Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock, and Karen Joy Fowler. For the fifth anniversary of the original publication, Jeff VanderMeer has added writing exercises, creating the ultimate volume of inspiring advice.

Shocked and distressed by a male writer's vilification of women, Christine de Pizan has a powerful dreamlike vision in which she is visited by three personified Virtues: Reason, Rectitude and Justice. They tell her she has been chosen to write a book which will be like a city, housing virtuous women and protecting them from feminist attack. Partly myth, partly fact, The Book of the City of Ladies is an extraordinary, pioneering and impassioned defense of women that set out to shatter misogynist cliches and serve to instill self-worth in its female listeners of the time.

Celebrated author and newspaper columnist Rick Bragg brings us an ode to the stories and history of the Deep South, filled with “eclectic nuggets about places and people he knows well” (USA Today) and written with honesty, wit, and deep affection. A collection of wide-ranging and endearingly personal columns — from Bragg’s love of Tupperware (his mother preferred margarine tubs and thought Tupperware was “just showing off”) to the decline of country music, from the legacy of Harper Lee to the metamorphosis of the pickup truck.

In his long career, eminent psychotherapist and author Irvin Yalom has pressed his patients and readers to grapple with life's two greatest challenges: that we all must die, and that each of us is responsible for leading a life worth living. In Creatures of a Day, he and his patients confront the difficulty of these challenges. Although these people have come to Yalom seeking relief, recognition, or meaning, they discover that such things are rarely found in the places where we think to look.

In Praise of Shadows is an eloquent tribute to the austere beauty of traditional Japanese aesthetics. Through architecture, ceramics, theatre, food, women, and even toilets, Tanizaki explains the essence of shadows and darkness, and how they are able to augment beauty. He laments the heavy electric lighting of the West and its introduction to Japan, and shows how the artificial, bright, and polished aesthetic of the West contrasts unfavorably with the moody and natural light of the East.

La vista desde las estrellas recopila una gran variedad de textos cortos escritos en las últimas tres décadas por Cixin Liu, el mayor maestro de la ciencia ficción desde Isaac Asimov, gracias a su obra cumbre la Trilogía de los Tres Cuerpos. Los ensayos y entrevistas que en él se incluyen explican algunas de sus experiencias como lector, escritor y amante de la ciencia ficción a lo largo de toda su vida. Asimismo, en sus magistrales relatos de ficción, asistimos a la evolución de su voz imaginativa a través de los años.

"An excellent book by a genius”, said Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., of this now-classic exploration of the 1960s from the founder of New Journalism and author of such influential works as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Bonfire of the Vanities. Tom Wolfe explores the style and culture of the 1960s in this dynamic collection of essays - originally stand-alone pieces, many of which were published in Esquire magazine - written in his unique, free-flowing style.

The Fable of the Bees—a satirical poem, prose discussion, three essays and six dialogues completed in 1729—exposes human vices but defends them as a necessity within a wealthy society. Mandeville’s bees thrive until they start living by honesty and virtue… then they are impoverished. Mandeville did not play by the rules: he satirized the sins of society but also ridiculed the widespread hypocrisy of deploring these sins whilst reaping their benefits. He and his work were attacked for the rest of the century.

Anchored by an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham, this concise collection of essays, letters, and poems from one of this country’s most eminent literary voices offers much-needed historical context for our current state of the nation - and hope for the future of our society.

Have you ever read a suspense novel so good you had to stop and think to yourself, "How did the author come up with this idea? Their characters? Is some of this story real?" For more than five years, Mark Rubinstein, physician, psychiatrist, and mystery and thriller writer, had the chance to ask the most well-known authors in the field just these kinds of questions in interviews for the Huffington Post. Collected here are interviews with 47 accomplished authors, including Michael Connelly, Ken Follett, Meg Gardiner, Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman, and Don Winslow.

An instant New York Times bestseller, I'll Show Myself Out is the eagerly anticipated second essay collection from Jessi Klein, author of the acclaimed debut You’ll Grow Out of It.

Barnes’ appreciation extends from France’s vanishing peasantry to its hyperliterate pop singers, from the gleeful iconoclasm of nouvelle vague cinema to the orgy of drugs and suffering that is the Tour de France. Above all, Barnes is an unparalleled connoisseur of French writing and writers. Lively yet discriminating in its enthusiasm, seemingly infinite in its range of reference, and written in prose as stylish as haute couture, Something to Declare is an unadulterated joy.