Showing titles in Essays

Brought to you by Penguin. ‘We were so happy and didn’t know it…’ A thirty-three-year-old writer lives in a quiet European suburb with his wife and his dog. His parents have bought an apartment nearby. On weekends they go out for brunch, cook and see friends. Life is good; it is normal...

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.

If you haven't already heard of Samantha Irby...where have you been? Samantha Irby is your sharp-tongued best friend who can't help but tell it like it is. In We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, Irby laughs her way through her ridiculous life of failed relationships, taco feasts, bouts with Crohn's disease and more. Written with scathing wit and poignant bluntness, these essays have earned Irby a dedicated fan base, have sold over 100,000 copies in the US and are the perfect introduction to this fresh, bold voice.

Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Justin Avoth and Laurence Dobiesz. This definitive recording includes an introduction by Christopher Rowe read by Justin Avoth. 'Consider just this, and give your minds to this alone: whether or not what I say is just' Plato's...

Sarah Polley's work as an actor, screenwriter and director is celebrated for its honesty, complexity and deep humanity. She brings all those qualities, along with her exquisite storytelling chops, to these six essays. Each one captures a piece of Polley's life as she remembers it, while at the same time examining the fallibility of memory, the mutability of reality in the mind, and the possibility of experiencing the past anew, as the person she is now but was not then. As Polley writes, the past and present are in a “reciprocal pressure dance”.

When Paul Auster was asked to join NPR's Weekend All Things Considered program to tell stories, he turned the proposition on its head: he would let the stories come to him. He invited listeners to submit brief, true-life anecdotes about events that touched their lives. And so the National Story...

In his essay about the life of Irish writer John McGahern, Tóibín reveals the tones of melancholy and amusement within both art and the artist. In his extraordinary essay on his cancer diagnosis, Tóibín unpicks the word 'battle', and illuminates the distress, horror and blankness of his experiences. From the shades of light and dark in a Venice without tourists, to the streets of Buenos Aires riddled with disappearances and tied up with dictators and politics, we find ourselves considering law and religion in Ireland as well as in Marilynne Robinson's fiction.

A brand-new collection of Caitlin's award-winning Times columns plus three major new pieces exclusive to this book - one of which is Caitlin's Moranifesto for a better world. As with Moranthology, Caitlin introduces every piece and weaves her writing together into a brilliant, seamless book. And, similarly to her last collection, Moranifesto is a characteristically fun and witty look at the news, celebrity culture and society.

Brought to you by Penguin. FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE INTERNATIONAL MEGASELLER QUIET: THE POWER OF INTROVERTS IN A WORLD THAT CAN'T STOP TALKING In this inspiring masterpiece, bestselling author Susan Cain shows the power of "bittersweetness" - a tendency toward sorrow and longing, an acute...

Hunter S. Thompson, celebrated author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, has been writing a weekly column for the San Francisco Examiner for the last two years. Those columns are collected here to offer a chronicle of the adventures of a Generation of Swine.

On 10th June 2020, the scholar James Nwoye Adichie died suddenly in Nigeria. In this tender and powerful essay, expanded from the original New Yorker text, his daughter, a self-confessed daddy's girl, remembers her beloved father. Notes on Grief is at once a tribute to a long life of grace and wisdom, the story of a daughter's fierce love for a parent and a revealing examination of the layers of loss and the nature of grief.

Moved to honour a form of relation often subordinated to romantic and familial ties, and to explore a part of her own history, Hélène Giannecchini pieces together an alternative genealogy of queer ancestors. In searching and sensitive prose, she sifts the past to bring existences deemed 'marginal' into communion with each other, traces of which may remain only in memory and archival fragments.

In Dumb Luck and the Kindness of Strangers, Gierach looks back to the long-ago day when he bought his first resident fishing license in Colorado, where the fishing season never ends, and just knew he was in the right place. And he succinctly sums up part of the appeal of his sport when he writes that it is "[A]n acquired taste that reintroduces the chaos of uncertainty back into our well-regulated lives". 

Gore Vidal’s reputation as America’s finest essayist is an enduring one. This collection, chosen by the author from 40 years of work, contains about two-thirds of what he published in various magazines and journals. He has divided the essays into three categories, or states. State of the art covers literature, including novelists and critics, bestsellers, pieces on Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Suetonius, Nabakov, and Montaigne (a previosly uncollected essay from 1992).

Leopold's essays on conservation will open the mind of any listener who gives them a chance. The first part uses essays for each of the 12 months to share the rhythm of life on his restored Wisconsin farmland, and uses the stories to branch into eye opening lessons on the history of man's use and abuse of it. The second part continues using stories from Leopold's experiences in wild places across North America to expand the lessons to a much wider view. The final part of the work seeks to lay out a better path for humanity, using solid logic and deep philosophical questioning.

This is a meditation on the power of creative connection. Drawing on 20 years' experience as a writer and performer, Kae Tempest explores how and why creativity - however we choose to practise it - can cultivate greater self-awareness and help us establish a deeper relationship to ourselves and the world. Honest, tender and written with piercing clarity, On Connection is a call to arms that speaks to a universal yet intimate truth.

Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a sick sense of humour? What is John Updike's deal anyway? And who won the Adult Video News' Female Performer of the Year Award the same year Gwyneth Paltrow won her Oscar? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in his new book of...

In this new anecdotal book, the unstoppable Dickie Bird takes one County Cricket Club at a time and revisits each with the aid of memorabilia, statistics, books and videos. A mass of new hilarious stories flow from Dickie as he flexes his memory: he describes the cricketers, the matches and the...

“Genius ... It is miraculous to read these pieces ... You must read The Best of Me.” —Andrew Sean Greer, New York Times Book Review For more than twenty-five years, David Sedaris has been carving out a unique literary space. A Sedaris story may seem confessional, but is also highly attuned...

Brought to you by Penguin. Warm, wise and full of practical tips, this book is the ideal companion to every writing life Write every day Show, don’t tell Write what you know Kill Your Darlings These are some of the most popular nuggets of advice given to writers, universally agreed to be true...