Showing titles in Essays

Styles of Radical Will, Susan Sontag's second collection of essays, extends the investigations she undertook in Against Interpretation with essays on film, literature, politics, and a groundbreaking study of pornography.

In the early years of its existence, the Times Literary Supplement published some of the finest writers in English: T. S. Eliot, Henry James and E. M. Forster among them. But one of the paper’s defining voices was Virginia Woolf, who produced a string of superb essays between the two World Wars. The weirdness of Elizabethan plays, the pleasure of revisiting favourite novels, the supreme examples of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Henry James, Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad.

According to the Washington Post, no one who cares about contemporary African-American cultures can ignore Bell Hooks's electrifying feminist explorations. Targeting cultural icons as diverse as Madonna and Spike Lee, Outlaw Culture presents a collection of essays that pulls no punches. As Hooks herself notes, interrogations of popular culture can be a "powerful site for intervention, challenge and change." And intervene, challenge, and change is what hooks does best.

These passages from the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson on religion and spiritual philosophy reveal a metaphysical thought that is quintessentially American and universally relevant to the spiritual needs of today's world. It is seldom that an American philosopher is found among the gurus, mystics, and masters present in the spiritual milieu. Emerson combined the spiritual intuition of the East with the philosophical acumen of the West.

Consisting of over 20 years of letters, essays, reflections, and interviews, Frantumaglia is a unique depiction of an author who embodies a consummate passion for writing. Ferrante answers many of her listeners’ questions. She addresses her choice to stand aside and let her books live autonomous lives.

The Fragile Earth tells the story of climate change - its past, present and future - taking listeners from Greenland to the Great Plains and into both laboratories and rain forests. It features some of the best writing on global warming from the last three decades, including Bill McKibben’s seminal essay ‘The End of Nature’, the first piece to popularise both the science and politics of climate change for a general audience.

A literary treasure of over 100 unpublished letters from National Book Award-winning author Flannery O'Connor and her circle of extraordinary friends. Flannery O’Connor is a master of 20th-century American fiction, joining, since her untimely death in 1964, the likes of Hawthorne, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Those familiar with her work know that her powerful ethical vision was rooted in a quiet, devout faith and informed all she wrote and did.

Gentle and Fierce focuses on the world that humans share with animals. Having spent her life in cities, Vanessa Berry’s experiences with animals have largely been through encounters in urban settings, representations in art and the media, and as decorative ornaments or kitsch—encounters that provide meaningful connections at a time when our world is threatened by environmental destruction. Berry responds with attentiveness and empathy to her subjects, which include a stuffed Kodiak bear, a Japanese island overrun by rabbits, a porcelain otter, and Georges Perec’s cat.

Ross Gay’s essays have been called “exquisite” (Tracy K. Smith), “imperative” (the New York Times Book Review), and “brilliant” (Ada Limón). Now, in this new collection of genre-defying pieces, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight.

Floor Games is a book published in 1911 by H. G. Wells. This light-hearted volume argues in a humorously dictatorial tone that "The jolliest indoor games for boys and girls demand a floor." Illustrated with photographs and drawings, it briefly describes a number of games that can be played on "well lit and airy" floors with "four main groups" of toys: soldiers about two inches high (Wells regrets the "curse of militarism" that makes civilians hard to find), largish wooden bricks, boards and planks, and electric railway rolling stock and rails.

Patrick Freyne has tried a lot of stupid ideas in his life. Now, in his scintillating debut, he is here to tell you about them: like the time (aged five) he opened a gate and let a horse out of its field, just to see what would happen; or the time (aged 19) he jumped out of a plane for charity, even though he didn't much care about the charity and was sure he'd end up dead; or the time (aged old enough to know better) he used a magazine as a funnel for fuel when the petrol cap on his band's van broke.

Born and raised in idyllic Sullivan's Island, Susan Hayes navigated through her turbulent childhood with humor, spunk, and characteristic Southern sass. But years later, she is a conflicted woman with an unfaithful husband, a sometimes resentful teenage daughter, and a heart that aches with painful, poignant memories. And as Susan faces her uncertain future, she realizes that she must go back to her past. To the beachfront house where her sister welcomes her with open arms.

Including pieces from The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, this collection is Bowden at his best. The titular article, "The Three Battles of Wanat", tells the story of one of the bloodiest days in the war in Afghanistan and the extraordinary years-long fallout it generated within the United States military. In "The Killing Machines", Bowden examines the strategic, legal, and moral issues surrounding armed drones.

A Handbook of Disappointed Fate highlights a decade of Anne Boyer's interrogative writing on poetry, death, love, lambs, and other impossible questions. The audiobook includes narration of 33 essays, covering a wide range of topics.

Sheila Heti collected half a million words from a decade’s worth of journals, put them in a spreadsheet, and sorted them alphabetically. She spent the next ten years cutting and refining, and was left with 60,000 words of brilliance and mayhem, joy and sorrow. These are her alphabetical diaries.

From her mooring in Macclesfield in the north-west of England to the storied Bristol Channel, Jo invites listeners to join her on a 30-day odyssey, beginning with the end of a tempestuous relationship and echoing a journey previously taken by LTC Rolt, a legendary engineer and advocate of the waterways.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and his ideology was disseminated through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures. Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay Nature.

'Essays and Lectures' is a collection of essays and lectures by Oscar Wilde. 'Essays and Lectures' contains "The Rise of Historical Criticism", "The English Renaissance of Art", "House Decoration", "Art and the Handicraftsman", "Lecture to Art Students", "London Models" and "Poems in Prose".

Novelist, cultural observer and social satirist Lionel Shriver is among the sharpest talents of our age. A writer who embraces ‘under-expressed, unpopular or downright dangerous’ points of view, she regularly deplores the conformity of thought and attitude that has overtaken society. Bringing together thirty-five works curated from her many columns, features, essays and op-eds for the likes of the Spectator and Guardian, speeches and reviews, and some unpublished pieces, Abominations reveals Shriver at her most iconoclastic and personal.

Katherine Rundell - Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and prize-winning author of five novels for children - explores how children’s books ignite and can reignite the imagination - how children's fiction, with its unabashed emotion and playfulness, can awaken old hungers and create new perspectives on the world. This delightful and persuasive essay is for adult listeners.