American Essays

With the success of the critically-acclaimed, Academy Award-winning film “The Fighter,” the world stood up and cheered for the inspiring true story of Micky Ward—a heart-and-soul warrior who overcame the odds to make history in the ring. But that was only part of the tale… Now, in his...

Created and compiled by Charles Krauthammer before his death, The Point of It All is a powerful collection of the influential columnist's most important works. Spanning the personal, the political and the philosophical, it includes never-before-published speeches and a major new essay about the...

An incisive, intersectional essay anthology that celebrates and examines romance and romantic media through the lens of Black readers, writers, and cultural commentators, edited by Book Riot columnist and librarian Jessica Pryde. Romantic love has been one of the most essential elements of...

A fresh history of the West grounded in the lives of mixed-descent Native families who first bridged and then collided with racial boundaries. Often overlooked, there is mixed blood at the heart of America. And at the heart of Native life for centuries there were complex households using...

Unlike every other nation in the history of the world, America was not founded simply upon the bases of communal physical considerations such as geography, tribe, caste, race, or religion. Rather, it was founded upon the shared, evolving, and occasionally conflicting ideals of liberty and equality of opportunity and with the hope that the fulfillment of these ideals would enable its citizens to realize significant individual and collective achievements.

What would the world look like if America were to reduce its role as a global leader in order to focus all its energies on solving its problems at home? And is America really in decline? Robert Kagan, New York Times best-selling author and one of the country’s most influential strategic...

Chuck Palahniuk's world has always been, well, different from yours and mine. The pieces that comprise Stranger than Fiction, his first nonfiction collection, prove just how different, in ways both highly entertaining and deeply unsettling. Included are encounters with alternative culture heroes...

A young girl forced to work in a Queens sweatshop calls child services on her mother in this powerful debut memoir about labor and self-worth that traces a Chinese immigrant’s journey to an American future. As a teen, Anna Qu is sent by her mother to work in her family’s garment factory in...

I det berømte titelessay Elefanten og i det efterfølgende essay En henrettelse leverer Orwell en svidende kritik af det britiske koloniale styre. Baseret på egne oplevelser som officer i det koloniale politi i Burma kaster han et undersøgende blik på magt, magtudøvelse og underkastelse. Herefter følger klassikeren Sådan dør de fattige samt en række af de mesterlige indlæg, Orwell skrev til sin ugentlige klumme i Tribune i årene 1943-47 under overskriften As I please.

Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books - selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude - have been described as ‘virtuoso performances’ and ‘small masterpieces'. Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? is a collective interrogation of the universal experience from a very particular psyche.

From one of the world's most beloved and respected public intellectuals comes a sweeping work of musical criticism, examining the distance between the performer and their audience "Not since Virgil Thomson have we had a music critic with as wide ranging a view as Edward Said."—Studs Terkel...

Howard Fineman, one of our most trusted political journalists, shows that every debate, from our nation’s founding to the present day, is rooted in one of thirteen arguments that–thankfully–defy resolution. It is the very process of never-ending argument, Fineman explains, that defines us...

An inclusive and landmark history, emphasizing how essential Asian American experiences are to any understanding of US history Original and expansive, Asian American Histories of the United States is a nearly 200-year history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the US...

Birth control. Body hair removal cream. Boobs. It’s all weird, but also pretty normal. Navigating racial identity, gender roles, workplace dynamics, and beauty standards, Mia Mercado's hilarious essay collection explores the contradictions of being a millennial woman, which usually means being...

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...

A superb collection of fifteen stories by an American master, E. L. Doctorow—the author of Ragtime, The March, The Book of Daniel, and Billy Bathgate He has been called “a national treasure” by George Saunders. Doctorow’s great topic, said Don DeLillo, is “the reach of American...

On a chance visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz makes an unsettling discovery. A history buff since early childhood, expensively educated at university—a history major, no less!—he’s reached middle age with a third-grader’s grasp of early America. In fact, he’s mislaid more than a...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A collection of the best Miami Herald columns from the New York Times bestselling author of Squeeze Me on burning issues like animal welfare, polluted rivers, and the broken criminal justice system. If you think the wildest, wackiest stories that Carl Hiaasen can...

A seminal work in the history of sociology and a cornerstone of African American literature. Du Bois drew from his own experiences as an African American in American society. Outside of its notable relevance in African American history, The Souls of Black Folk also holds an important place in social science as one of the early works in the field of sociology.

A young queer millennial physicist unveils some of the most mind-bending physics concepts in the universe—and uses them to illuminate their own fascinating life story “I see physics everywhere,” Karmela Padavic-Callaghan writes. “It offers itself to me when I try to make sense of all the...