American Essays

"This book feels like a real conversation. When we enter Retta's world we are at the best party and in the hands of a gracious, self-perceptive, and deeply hilarious host." — Amy Poehler This program is read by the author. In this hilarious audiobook essay collection, Parks and Recreation star...

Originally published in 1973, the groundbreaking, uninhibited story of Isadora Wing and her desire to fly free caused a national sensation. In The New York Times, Henry Miller compared it to his own classic, Tropic of Cancer and predicted that ""this book will make literary history..."" It has...

“One of the year’s must-reads.” –ELLE “[A] provocative, heart-breaking, and frequently hilarious collection.” –GLAMOUR “Essential, vital, and urgent.” –HARPER’S BAZAAR In the vein of Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist and Issa Rae’s The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, but...

From Susan Orlean—acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Orchid Thief and The Library Book—Rin Tin Tin is “an unforgettable book about the mutual devotion between one man and one dog” (The Wall Street Journal). He believed the dog was immortal. So begins Susan Orlean’s...

India’s Five-Year Plans were one of the developing world’s most ambitious experiments. After nearly two centuries of colonial rule, planning the economy was meant to be independent India’s route from poverty to prosperity. Planning Democracy explores how India married liberal democracy to...

The year 1971 exists everywhere in Bangladesh-on its roads, in sculptures, in its museums and oral history projects, in its curriculum, in people's homes and their stories, and in political discourse. It marks the birth of the nation, it's liberation. More than 1000 miles away, in Pakistan too...

From the collaborators behind the modern business classic All the Devils are Here comes a damning indictment of American capitalism—and the leaders that left us brutally unprepared for a global pandemic In 2020, the novel coronavirus pandemic made it painfully clear that the U.S. could not...

ONE OF LIT HUB'S MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2026 A radically vulnerable and virtuosic inquiry into the pursuit of freedom and the interminable nature of struggle, from the award-winning author of What We Lose Weaving personal reflections with piercing insight and expansive vision across nine...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER What would actually make America great: more people. If the most challenging crisis in living memory has shown us anything, it’s that America has lost the will and the means to lead. We can’t compete with the huge population clusters of the global marketplace by...

“Nothing I’ve read has cut to the heart of the ’00s like Y2K.” — Bustle Perfect for fans of Jia Tolentino and Chuck Klosterman, Y2K is a delightfully nostalgic and bitingly told exploration about how the early 2000s forever changed us and the world we live in. THE EARLY...

A provocative and lively exploration of the increasingly important world of macroeconomics, by the author of the bestselling The Undercover Economist. Thanks to the worldwide financial upheaval, economics is no longer a topic we can ignore. From politicians to hedge-fund managers to middle-class...

This definitive collection of beloved Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's finest speeches covers topics as varied as the law, faith, virtue, pastimes, and his heroes and friends. Featuring a foreword written and narrated by longtime friend Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and an intimate...

In 2010, the Army created Cultural Support Teams, a secret pilot program to insert women alongside Special Operations soldiers battling in Afghanistan. The Army reasoned that women could play a unique role on Special Ops teams: accompanying their male colleagues on raids and, while those...

The remarkable life and times of the man who popularized American folk music and created the science of songFolklorist, archivist, anthropologist, singer, political activist, talent scout, ethnomusicologist, filmmaker, concert and record producer, Alan Lomax is best remembered as the man who...

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 Penguin Classic First published in 1938, this volume of stories collected with the encouragement of his longtime editor Pascal Covici serves as a wonderful introduction to the work of Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. Set in the beautiful Salinas Valley of California, where simple people farm...

In its fight for global dominance, Communist China has thrown out the old rules of war. China expert General Robert Spalding walks us through their new playbook. Many Americans are finally waking up to the alarming reality of China's stealth war on the United States and puzzling over how to...

The Great Republic is Sir Winston Churchill's personal vision of American history, from the arrival of the first European settlers to the dawn of the Cold War, edited by his grandson, the historian and journalist Winston S. Churchill. The book is a magnificent retelling of the American story...

The National Book Award winning author returns to his original fictional territory--the lives of the dispossessed in San Francisco--with a parable about the limitations of desire and life at the margins of society In such earlier works of fiction as The Rainbow Stories and The Royal Family...

A TIME Must-Read of 2025 A debut essay collection by the inimitable cultural critic Maris Kreizman—an introspective, searing account of the life experiences that have pushed this former “good Democrat” even further to the political left At the heart of this funny, acerbic, and bravely...