Showing titles in Essays

From the Thurber Prize-winning author of What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker comes a pioneering collection of Black humor from some of the most acclaimed writers and performers at work today “Crackling, hilarious. . . . You won’t want to miss it.” —People “Completely absorbing...

Basta un año de meditación perseverante, o incluso medio, para percatarse de que se puede vivir de otra forma. La meditación nos concentra, nos devuelve a casa, nos enseña a convivir con nuestro ser, nos agrieta la estructura de nuestra personalidad hasta que, de...

I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. The award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multigenre writing, fuses the lyric and the essay in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America.

A deeply insightful take on how hate and insecurity can be intertwined, and an endearing love letter to the natural world, ‘On the Purpose of Hating’ is one of the most renowned essays from the brilliant mind of William Hazlitt. In ‘On the Purpose of Hating’, Hazlitt explores the complexities of hatred. He compellingly argues that hatred can have a self-destructive edge, and can do just as much harm to the person who harbours it as the subject of it. At its heart, hatred is merely a coping mechanism to manage our own shortcomings.

A collection of short fiction from Terry Pratchett, spanning the whole of his writing career from schooldays to Discworld and the present day. In the four decades since his first book appeared in print, Terry Pratchett has become one of the world's best-selling and best-loved authors. Here for...

This program is read by the author. Timely and unsettling essays from an important and beloved writer and conservationist In Erosion, Terry Tempest Williams's fierce, spirited, and magnificent essays are a howl in the desert. She sizes up the continuing assaults on America's public lands and the...

Kurt Vonnegut presents in Fates Worse than Death a veritable cornucopia of his thoughts on what could perhaps best be summed up as "anti-theology", a manifesto for atheism that details Vonnegut's drift from conventional religion, even a tract evidencing belief in the divine held within each individual self--the deity within each individual person present in a universe that otherwise lacks any real order.

Nate come testi per un ciclo di conferenze da tenere ad Harvard queste lezioni costituiscono l'ultimo insegnamento di un grande maestro: una severa disciplina della mente, temperata dall'ironia e dalla consapevolezza di non poter giungere ad una conoscenza assoluta. Presentazione di Esther Calvino e postfazione di Giorgio Manganelli.

This is Virginia Woolf’s first collection of essays, published in 1925. In them, she attempts to see literature from the point of view of the ‘common reader’ - someone whom she, with Dr Johnson, distinguished from the critic and the scholar. She read, and wrote, as an outsider: a woman set to school in her father’s library, denied the educational privileges of her male siblings - and with no fixed view of what constitutes ‘English literature’. What she produced is an eccentric and unofficial literary and social history from the 14th to the 20th centuries. 

E. L. Doctorow is acclaimed internationally for such novels as Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, and The March. Here now are his rich, revelatory essays on the nature of imaginative thought. In Creationists, Doctorow considers creativity in its many forms, from the literary to the comic to the cosmic. As...

Join Leslie Means, founder of the popular website Her View From Home, as she weaves together a powerful, emotional collection of essays from women of all ages and stages. These real-life, straight-to-the-heart stories will make you laugh, cry, and nod along. No two mothers are alike. No two experiences in motherhood mirror each other. But something powerful happens when our stories come together: they speak love, worth, value, and beauty. They take the undefinable experience of motherhood and give it shape and substance and strength. They speak to us all.

From Pulitzer Prize - winning book critic Michael Dirda comes a collection of his most personal and engaging essays on the literary life - the perfect companion for any lover of books. Dirda's latest volume collects fifty of his witty and wide-ranging reflections on literary journalism, book collecting, and the writers he loves. Reaching from the classics to the postmoderns, his allusions dance from Samuel Johnson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and M. F. K. Fisher to Marilynne Robinson, Hunter S. Thompson, and David Foster Wallace.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) has influenced philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Oswald Spengler, George Grant, Emil Cioran, Albert Camus, Ayn Rand, Jacques Derrida, Leo Strauss, Max Scheler, Michel Foucault and Bernard Williams. His writings on aesthetics, language, truth, morality, cultural theory, history, nihilism, power, and the meaning of existence have exerted a vast influence on Western philosophy and intellectual history.

Newly revised and updated, this landmark anthology offers gripping portraits of American life as seen through the eyes of young women of color It has been decades since women of color first turned feminism upside down, exposing the feminist movement as exclusive, white, and unaware of the...

Sebastian Barry's writing career has been as long and varied as it has extraordinary. Intimate, revealing and generous of heart, these three lectures—written and delivered as part of his three-year tenure as the laureate for Irish fiction—reflect on his life and career so far, and some of the formative moments and people he's met along the way.

When it was released to the public in 2022, ChatGPT awakened the world to a secretive project: teaching A.I.-powered machines to write and talk like human beings. Its creators had a sweeping ambition—to get machines to communicate for us. But if this came to pass, would it be liberation or subjugation?

Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance" is a seminal essay that explores the importance of individualism and personal integrity. Emerson challenges listeners to avoid conformity and follow their own instincts and ideas. This work has inspired countless listeners to trust in their inner voice and embrace a life of self-determination. Essential for anyone interested in philosophy, personal growth, and the foundations of American transcendentalism.

Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus - The Minimalists - left their six-figure careers, jettisoned many of their material possessions, and started focusing on life's most important aspects. And they never looked back.

Simplicity: Essays is The Minimalists' fifth book and second essay collection, a follow-up to their bestselling Minimalism: Essential Essays. In the two years since the authors quit their six-figure corporate jobs and embraced simpler lives, they have written more than 200 essays on the subject of simple living.

In a series of penetrating and alarming essays, whose centerpiece is a commentary on the events of September 11, 2001 (deemed then too controversial to publish), Gore Vidal challenges the comforting consensus following September 11th and goes back and draws connections to Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. He asks were these simply the acts of “evil-doers?”

A wonderful and whimsical collection of short essays on everything from sketching on brown paper and building toy theatres to the nature of Englishness and faith.