American Essays

Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the...

Few individuals have the chance to contribute so much of themselves to theAmerican story as General Tommy Franks. In American Soldier, he captures it all. The Commander in Chief of the United States Central Command from July 2000 through July 2003, General Tommy Franks made history leading...

A collection of the year’s best short stories, selected by celebrated bestselling author Lauren Groff, author of Matrix and The Vaster Wilds, and series editor Heidi Pitlor. “There have never been as many exquisitely built stories in existence than there are now,” proclaims guest editor...

The Charles Dickens Non-Fiction Collection contains all of Charles Dickens' major published works of non-fiction. Although lesser known than the novels for which he is remembered, Dickens' eye for detail and character observation is seen just as clearly in his travelogues, essays, and letters, giving us an insight into Dickens and 1800s London, America, and Europe.

This audiobook, read by Audie award-winning narrators, includes unabridged recordings of all Mark Twains's greatest works: 12 novels; over 120 of his beloved short stories; Chapters From My Autobiography; 5 pieces of short non-fiction; and 6 pieces of his groundbreaking, wide-ranging travel writing.

Read by the author, this bold, provocative collection of essays asks one of the most urgent questions of our time: What is authority when everyone has an opinion on everything? Since her canonical 2017 essay “On Liking Women,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu has...

Smart, edgy, hilarious, and unabashedly raunchy New York Times bestselling author Samantha Irby explodes off the printed page in her uproarious first collection of essays. Irby laughs her way through tragicomic mishaps, neuroses, and taboos as she struggles through adulthood: chin hairs...

The first of its kind, a unique volume of twenty-one unpublished gems from one of the twentieth century’s most popular and prolific writers Using his father’s handwritten notes, journal entries, and correspondences, Beau L’Amour uncovers how and why many never-before-seen manuscripts...

In this exuberantly praised book - a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner - David Foster Wallace...

An instant New York Times bestseller, I'll Show Myself Out is the eagerly anticipated second essay collection from Jessi Klein, author of the acclaimed debut You’ll Grow Out of It. Longlisted for the PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay “Sometimes I think about how much...

A 50th anniversary hardcover edition of Kerouac’s classic novel that defined a generation Few novels have had as profound an impact on American culture as On the Road. Pulsating with the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, illicit drugs, and the mystery and promise of the open...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In this hilarious instant classic, the creator of The Mindy Project and Never Have I Ever invites readers on a tour of her life and her unscientific observations on romance, friendship, and Hollywood. “[Kaling is] like Tina Fey’s cool little sister. Or...

From the New York Times bestselling author of Band of Brothers and D-Day, the definitive book on Lewis and Clark’s exploration of the Louisiana Purchase, the most momentous expedition in American history and one of the great adventure stories of all time. In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson...

The Fifties is a sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural history of the ten years that Halberstam regards as seminal in determining what our nation is today. Halberstam offers portraits of not only the titans of the age: Eisenhower Dulles, Oppenheimer, MacArthur, Hoover, and Nixon...

The Burden, edited by award-winning Detroit newspaper columnist Rochelle Riley, is a powerful collection of essays that create a chorus of evidence that the burden is real. The Burden expresses the voices of well-known Americans, such as actor/director Tim Reid who compares slavery to a cancer diagnosis, and former Detroit News columnist Betty DeRamus who recounts the discrimination she encountered as a young Black Detroiter in the south.

James Gleick's groundbreaking bestseller introduces to a whole new audience the story of one of the most significant waves of scientific knowledge in our time. By focusing on the key figures whose genius converged to chart an innovative direction for science, Gleick makes the story of chaos...

ケイ・ヘザリ（「ＮＨＫラジオ英会話」元レギュラー・ゲスト）のエッセイ単行本『American Pie』の中から厳選した17本を、著者自らが英語で朗読。

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists...

From New York Times bestselling author Ross Gay comes a "brilliant" intimate and electrifying collection of essays about the joy that comes from connection (Ada Limón, U.S. poet laureate). In these gorgeously written and timely pieces, prizewinning poet and author Gay considers the joy we...

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. Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay Nature.