Showing titles in Essays

Indiana champions shining examples of literary and artistic merit regardless of whether the individual artist or writer is famous; asserts a standard of care and tradition that has nothing to do with the ivory tower establishment; is unafraid to deliver the coup de grâce when someone needs to say the emperor has no clothes; speaks in the same breath—in the same discerning, insolent, eloquent way—about high art and pop culture. Few writers could get away with saying the things Gary Indiana does. And when the writing is this good, it's also political, plus it's a riot of fun.

Annie Jones always assumed adulthood would mean adventure: a high-powered career; life in a big, bustling city; and travels to far-flung places she’d longed to see. But her reality turned out differently. As the years passed, Annie was still in the same small town running an independent bookstore—the kind of life Nora Ephron dreamed.

When was the last time you heard a Muslim woman speak for herself without a filter? Shortlisted for Foyles Non-Fiction Book of the Year 'Engrossing . . . fascinating . . . courageous' – Observer In 2016, Mariam Khan read that David Cameron had linked the radicalization of Muslim men to the...

What happened was this: Jenny Slate was a human mammal who sniffed the air every morning hoping to find another person to love who would love her, and in that period there was a deep dark loneliness that she had to face and befriend, and then we are pleased to report that she did fall in love, and in that period she was like chimes, or a flock of clean breaths, and her spine lying flat was the many-colored planks on the xylophone, but also she was rabid with fear of losing this love, because of past injury.

Le génie de Pascal s'est étendu à tous les domaines : mathématiques, physique, ingénierie, philosophie, littérature... Mais ce prodige, d'une grande précocité pour l'intelligence de la tête, avait tout à apprendre pour l'intelligence du cœur. Avec sa petite sœur Jacqueline, une enfant aussi géniale que lui, Pascal témoigne de ce qui fait sens dans l'existence humaine : non le pouvoir des rois, non la raison des savants, mais l'amour et la volonté qui grandissent dans une quête de sagesse.

A remarkable compilation of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s reflections on love and its transformative power—a stellar addition to Dr. King’s archives published exclusively by HarperCollins.

この地球の大きさを体感したい――人を旅へと駆り立て続ける不朽の名作!

大王製紙社長の長男として、幼少時代は1200坪の屋敷で過ごし、東大法学部に現役合格。27歳で赤字子会社を立て直し、42歳で本社社長就任。順調な経営、華麗なる交遊……すべてを手にしていたはずの

Sir Francis Bacon, sometimes known as the father of empiricism, was one of the major political figures of his day, his career culminating as Lord Chancellor under King James I in 1617. Bacon wrote widely, but it is the Essays (published in its third edition in 1625, the year before his death) for which he is best known. Deftly written and often displaying a cutting wit, they cover a wide range of subjects including death, love, marriage, ambition and atheism.

A world in perfect balance—so claims Emerson in Compensation, an essay that pulses with quiet defiance and deep assurance. No gain without loss, no misstep without lesson, no fortune without its hidden tax. It is neither fate nor blind justice but a living rhythm, an invisible hand that rights every scale, even when human eyes fail to see. Emerson does not preach; he unfolds. The idea seeps in, settles, challenges. His words are not doctrine but a lens—through which prosperity and misfortune reveal themselves as two faces of the same coin.

Michel de Montaigne embodies the humanist ideal—curious, measured, contemplative yet not unworldly, witty, free of prejudice, and urbane. But what does this French Renaissance philosopher have to tell us about how to think and live today? In forty short, erudite, and lively chapters written over a single summer, Antoine Compagnon seeks answers to that question. In A Summer with Montaigne, Compagnon invites his listeners to join him as he strolls through Montaigne’s key contributions to our understanding of what is good and worthwhile in life.

Our homes are more than an assemblage of bricks and glass, wood and nails. They are the keepers of our childhood memories, our milestones, and heartaches. They evolve as we do. As a family grows and eventually retracts, a home can change hands and begin again. We are the chapters in the book of a house. From Erin Napier, coauthor with her husband, Ben, of their memoir Make Something Good Today, comes a collection of essays walking us through every room in her home, telling the story of a family’s life, of the days that made their home the place she longs for when she’s away.

In 2024, exactly one hundred years after his death at the age of 40, readers and listeners all over the world will reach for the works of Franz Kafka. Many of them will want to learn more about the enigmatic man behind the classic books filled with mysterious courts and monstrous insects. Who, exactly, was Franz Kafka? Karolina Watroba, the first Germanist ever elected as a Fellow of Oxford's All Souls College, will tell Kafka's story beyond the boundaries of language, time and space, travelling from the Prague of Kafka's birth through the work of contemporary writers in East Asia.

In San Francisco, 1960, James Baldwin spoke to John Cheever about what he saw as a 'failure of the masculine sensibility'. Strange Relations examines how Baldwin came to this assessment and what may be amiss in our understanding of masculinity. Building on Walt Whitman's philosophy of the love between men, the book considers the work and lives of Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, Cheever and Baldwin. All four writers wrestled in their art, as well as in their sexual and platonic relationships, with the expectations of masculinity, the pull of queer life and the tensions between the two.

When was the last time you cried? Was it because you were sad? Or happy? Overwhelmed, or frustrated? Maybe from relief or from pride? Was it in public or in private? Did you feel better afterwards, or worse? The reasons that we cry—and the circumstances in which we shed a tear—are often surprising and beautiful. Sad Happens is a collective, multi-faceted archive of tears that captures the complexity and variety of these circumstances.

Here is Virginia Woolf at her most entertaining and informative, relishing the portraits and insights she presents as she surveys a varied collection of individuals in English society and English literature. In The Common Reader Volume 2, (published in 1932), the essay lives on and even more so in this sensitive and engaging book by Georgina Sutton.

You Don’t Know Us Negroes is the quintessential gathering of provocative essays from one of the world’s most celebrated writers, Zora Neale Hurston. Spanning more than three decades and penned during the backdrop of the birth of the Harlem Renaissance, Montgomery bus boycott, desegregation of the military, and school integration, Hurston’s writing articulates the beauty and authenticity of Black life as only she could.

THE EARLY 2000s conjures images of inflatable furniture, flip phones, and low-rise jeans. It was a new millennium and the future looked bright, promising prosperity for all. The internet had arrived, and technology was shiny and fun. For many, it felt like the end of history: no more wars, racism, or sexism. But then history kept happening. Twenty-five years after the ball dropped on December 31st, 1999, we are still living in the shadows of the Y2K Era.

In this pyrotechnic memoir-in-essays, Mak ranges widely over our landscape of paranoia, crisis, and frenetic, clickable consumption. He grants listeners an inside pass to the spaces where culture was made and unmade over the past decade, from the antiseptic glare of white-walled galleries to the darkest corners of Berlin techno clubs. As the gay son of an evangelical minister, Mak fled to those spaces, hoping to join a global, influential elite. But when calamity struck, it forced Mak to confront the costs of mistaking status for belonging.

Thirty-five years after her first collection, the classic Against Interpretation, America's most important essayist chose more than 40 longer and shorter pieces from the previous 20 years. "Reading", the first of three sections, includes ardent pieces on writers from Sontag's own private canon - Machado de Assis, Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Borges, Tsvetaeva, and Elizabeth Hardwick.