Essays

Before Adam Farrer’s family relocated to Withernsea in 1992, he’d never heard of the Holderness coast. The move represented one thing to Adam: a chance to leave the insecurities of early adolescence behind. And he could do that anywhere. What he didn’t know was how much he’d grow to love the quirks and people of this faded Yorkshire resort, in spite of its dilapidated attractions and retreating clifftops. While Adam documents the minutiae of small-town life, he lays bare experiences that are universal. 

Between October 2018 and March 2021, Will Ashon collected voices—people talking about their lives, needs, dreams, loves, hopes and fears—all of them with some connection to the British Isles. He used a range of methods including letters sent to random addresses, hitchhiking, referrals from strangers and so on. He conducted the interviews in person, on the phone, over the internet or asked people to record themselves. Interview techniques ranged from asking people to tell him a secret to choosing an arbitrary question from a list.

At once a deeply personal and searching history of one woman’s reading life, and a wide-ranging and urgent intervention into our globalized conversations about why reading matters today, How to Read Now empowers us to embrace a more complicated, embodied form of reading, inviting us to acknowledge complicated truths, ignite surprising connections, imagine a more daring solidarity, and create space for a riskier intimacy—within ourselves, and with each other. 

This classic collection of essays, edited by Booker T. Washington and with contributions from many of post-Civil War America's other prominent African-American thinkers, sought to redefine the role of Black persons in the new Jim Crow era and beat back white supremacy through racial uplift. Seven essays include Charles Chesnutt's "The Disfranchisement of the Negro", W. E. B. DuBois "The Talented Tenth", and Wilford Horace Smith's "The Negro and the Law" .

This second collection of essays from actor and author Tim Dalgleish is packed full of diverse literary and historical essays including pieces on George Orwell, his poetry, being taught by Aldous Huxley, living in Paris and his ability to quietly read, on family outings in the car, whilst in the company of two guinea pigs, a cat, a baby, rugs, holiday paraphernalia, and a poorly goat.

When Colleen Kinder put out a call for authors to write a letter to a stranger about an unforgettable encounter, she opened the floodgates. The responses—intimate and addictive, all written in the second person—began pouring in. These short, insightful essays by a remarkable cast of writers guide us both across the globe and through the mysteries of human connection. Moving and unforgettable, Letter to a Stranger is an irresistible listen for the literary traveler and the perfect gift for anyone who is haunted by a person they met once and will remember forever. 

The Tashkent-born Russian-American literary critic, editor, essayist, and journalist Vladislav Davidzon has been covering post-Soviet Ukraine for the past ten years, a tumultuous time for that country and the surrounding world. In late 2015, a year and a half after the 2014 Revolution swept away the Moscow-leaning kleptocratic President Viktor Yanukovich, Davidzon and his wife founded a literary journal, The Odessa Review. This eagerly anticipated debut tells the real story of what happened in Ukraine from the keen and resilient perspective of an observer at its center.

In One Heart with Courage: Essays and Stories, Teri Rizvi brings a powerful, original voice to a collection of essays that shows why our dreams matter. Woven throughout her writings is a deep faith in what's possible when we open our hearts. A journalist and storyteller who has traveled widely, Rizvi writes with grace and eloquence about her marriage, which spans two cultures and two religions in a world that's too often divided. 

Ten days after calling off her wedding, CJ Hauser went on an expedition to Texas to study the whooping crane. After a week wading through the gulf, she realized she'd almost signed up to live someone else's life. Hauser releases herself from traditional narratives of happiness and goes looking for ways of living that leave room for the unexpected, making plenty of mistakes along the way. She kisses Internet strangers and officiates at a wedding. 

Growing up as the daughter of Mexican immigrants in Chicago in the nineties, Erika Sánchez was a self-described pariah, misfit, and disappointment—a foul-mouthed, melancholic rabble-rouser who painted her nails black but also loved comedy, often laughing so hard with her friends that she had to leave her school classroom. Twenty-five years later, she’s now an award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist, but she’s still got an irrepressible laugh, an acerbic wit, and singular powers of perception about the world around her.

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.

Between 1821 and 1826, the prolific writer and journalist William Cobbett travelled the countryside of the South of England on foot and horseback. Rural Rides is a fascinating account of his journeys, and depicts a way of life in transition, juxtaposing lyrical descriptions of the countryside with criticism of the poverty of agricultural workers. A man of radical politics who encouraged the rural rising of 1830, Cobbett went on to become MP for Oldham and sought to represent the interests of both industrial and agricultural workers. Above all, Rural Rides celebrates agrarian England.

Cohen's subjects in A Place to Read can be as commonplace as golfing with close friends, amateur astronomy, birding, or learning to fly at the age of sixty. But he asks difficult questions about how we are grounded in space and time, how we are affected by our names, how a healthy person can turn into a hypochondriac, and how we might commune with the dead. And throughout he measures, compares and interprets his experiences through the lens of six decades of reading.

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. 

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.