Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Essays

In these widely praised essays, Calvino reflects on literature as process, the great narrative game in the course of which writer and reader are challenged to understand the world. Calvino himself made the selection of pieces to be included in this volume...

The Nobel Prize winner’s most influential and enduring lectures and speeches, newly translated by Quintin Hoare, in what is the first English-language publication of this complete collection. Albert Camus (1913–1960) is unsurpassed among writers for a body of work that animates the wonder...

The first English-language translation of the great Italian author’s final collection of essays. Collection of Sand is the last of Italo Calvino's works to appear during the author's lifetime. This eye-opening collection embraces both the world and the word, and the themes of stone and sand...

The Nobel Prize winner’s most influential and enduring political writings Albert Camus (1913–1960) is unsurpassed among writers for a body of work that animates the wonder and absurdity of existence. Committed Writings brings together, for the first time, thematically linked essays from...

Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a genre-defying collection of essays that record the small joys that occurred in one year, from birthday to birthday, and that we often overlook in our busy lives. His is a meditation on delight that takes a clear-eyed view of the complexities, even the terrors, in his life, including living in America as a Black man; the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture; the loss of those he loves. 

Ursula K. Le Guin witnessed and contributed to many of the twentieth century’s rebellions and upheavals, including women’s liberation, the Civil Rights movement and US anti-war and environmental activism. Spanning fifty years of her life and work, Space Crone brings together Le Guin’s writings on feminism and gender for the first time, offering new insights into her imaginative, multispecies feminist consciousness: from its roots in deep ecology and philosophies of non-violence to her self-education about racism and her writing on motherhood and ageing.

From acclaimed author Ursula K. Le Guin, and with an introduction by Karen Joy Fowler, a collection of thoughts - always adroit, often acerbic - on aging, belief, the state of literature, and the state of the nation. Ursula K. Le Guin has taken listeners to imaginary worlds for decades. Now she's in the last great frontier of life, old age, and exploring new literary territory: the blog, a forum where her voice - sharp, witty, as compassionate as it is critical - shines. No Time to Spare collects the best of Ursula's blog, presenting perfectly crystallized dispatches on what matters.

Join Ursula K. Le Guin as she explores a broad array of subjects, ranging from Tolstoy, Twain, and Tolkien to women's shoes, beauty, and family life. With her customary wit, intelligence, and literary craftsmanship, she offers a diverse and highly engaging set of stories. The Wave in the Mind includes some of Le Guin's finest literary criticism, rare autobiographical writings, performance-art pieces, and most centrally, her reflections on the arts of writing and reading. 

Spring is a deeply moving novel about family, our everyday lives, our joys and our struggles. Spring follows a father and his newborn daughter through one day in April, from sunrise to sunset. A day filled with everyday routine, the beginnings of life and its light, but also its deep struggles and its darkness.

The second volume in his autobiographical quartet based on the seasons, Winter is an achingly beautiful collection of daily meditations and letters addressed directly to Knaugsaard's unborn daughter.

Amy Tan has touched millions of people with haunting and sympathetic novels of cultural complexity and profound empathy. With the same spirit and humor that characterize her acclaimed novels, she now shares her insight into her own life and how she escaped the curses of her past to make a future of her own. She takes us on a journey from her childhood of tragedy and comedy to the present day and her arrival as one of the world's best-loved novelists.

From a young age Kerouac was a spiritual thinker and questioner, and he always considered himself a spiritual writer. Buddhism gave more meaning to Jack’s work as a writer: he was working not for personal accomplishment and glory but for human betterment. And Buddhism justified his lifestyle: with its vision of the material world as empty and illusory, he was free to do what he wanted.

Featuring a new introduction by Ken Liu, this revised edition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s first full-length collection of essays covers her background as a writer and educator, her thoughts on writing, and her commentary on literary science fiction and fantasy and their future. “We like to think...

The sport of surfing has a mystique and allure that has transformed many of these icons into mythical figures. Surfer Stories brings them together in one definitive collection that will appeal to those who surf and those who don’t!

A treasure chest of never-before-collected essays from Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize–winning memoirist, and his boisterous brother Malachy, publishing on the 30th anniversary of Angela's Ashes, with a foreword by Colum McCann In 1996, a retired New York City high school English teacher...

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...

“As for my books, I regret not having published each one under a different nom de plume: that way I would feel freer to start again from scratch each time, just as I always try to do anyway.”—from Hermit in Paris This posthumously published collection offers a unique, puzzle-like portrait...

“An enjoyable, irascible collection” of smart and sometimes-scathing film criticism from a famously candid author (Library Journal). Everyone’s a critic, especially in the digital age—but no one takes on the movies like multiple award-winning author Harlan Ellison. Renowned both for...

A collection of sexual fantasies from women around the world, Want is a revelatory, sensational, and game-changing exploration of women’s sexuality that asks, and answers: How do women feel about sex when they have the freedom to be totally anonymous? “The book you hold in your hands started...

The conclusion to one of the most extraordinary and original literary projects in recent years, Summer once again intersperses short, vividly descriptive essays with emotionally raw diary entries addressed directly to Knausgaard's newborn daughter. Writing more expansively and, if it is possible, even more intimately and unguardedly than in the previous three volumes, he mines with new depth his difficult memories of his childhood and fraught relationship with his own father.