Art Essays

Researchers spend most of their time mired in the "messy middle" of science, the opposite of a Eureka moment. It is these hidden stories that science journalist Roberta Kwok uncovers in Lost in Curiosity. The word "science" often brings to mind the image of a lone genius struck with a brilliant...

Break out the TV dinners! From the author who gave us Cod, Salt, and other informative bestsellers, the first biography of Clarence Birdseye, the eccentric genius inventor whose fast-freezing process revolutionized the food industry and American agriculture...

A collection of essays, lectures, and observations on the art of writing fiction from Alice McDermott, winner of the National Book Award and unmatched "virtuoso of language and image" (Rebecca Steinitz, The Boston Globe) What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction gathers the...

The colorful, sentimental, funny, affectionate, cantankerous memoir by the most colorful, funniest, most cantankerous-- and probably the most revered-- sportswriter of the last fifty years. Dan Jenkins is accepted as one of the greatest (if not the greatest) golf writer of all time, wrote beloved bestselling novels and abused more corporate expense accounts than anyone who ever lived. It's a touching, laugh-out-loud tribute to the romanticism of old-time sportswriting-- and the glory days of sports.

Die kulturtheoretische Schrift "Das Unbehagen in der Kultur" gehört zum Alterswerk Sigmund Freuds. Dem allgemeinen naiven Fortschrittsglauben widersprechend und von einem tiefen Kulturpessimismus durchdrungen, formuliert Freud in diesem einflussreichen Text die These, dass der Einzelne im Umfeld der Kultur, in die er integriert ist, dazu gezwungen wird, seine Triebe, insbesondere seinen Sexualtrieb und seinen Aggressionstrieb, zu unterdrückt.

Fun, bright, and playful, Power Pop is a sometimes adored, sometimes maligned, often misunderstood genre of music. From its heyday in the '70s and '80s to its resurgence in the '90s and '00s, Power Pop has meant many things to many people. In Go Further, editors Paul Myers and S. W. Lauden have a whole new crop of writers going deep on what certain Power Pop bands and songs mean and have meant to them. Whether they love or hate it, Go Further is a dive into the Beatles-inspired pop rock of the last five decades.

Was ist Mode? Was erzählen wir über uns, wenn wir uns anziehen? Und woher kommt die Lust an Inszenierung und Selbstausdruck? In ihren persönlichen, hellsichtigen Essays schreibt Katja Eichinger über Handtaschen, Hermès und Habermas. Sie denkt über Fast Fashion und Nachhaltigkeit nach, über die Träume und Hoffnungen, die wir mit unserem Äußeren verbinden, über die Sehnsucht nach Selbstwert und Einzigartigkeit im digitalen Zeitalter und über Mode als politische Geste. Ein radikal vergnügliches Buch, geschrieben mit wachem Blick und großem Gespür für die Sprache der Mode heute.

From one of Africa’s most influential and eloquent essayists, a posthumous collection that highlights his biting satire and subversive wisdom on topics from travel to cultural identity to sexuality “A fierce literary talent . . . [Wainaina] shines a light on his continent without cliché...

A penetrating and moving novel about a crumbling marriage, set against the backdrop of a near-future America in the process of its own disintegration, from the New York Times bestselling author of Fantasyland and Evil Geniuses Natalie and Asher’s marriage has long been marked by fault lines...

For decades, Janet Malcolm's books and dispatches for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books poked and prodded at reportorial and biographical convention, gesturing toward the artifice that underpins both public and private selves. In Still Pictures, she turns her gimlet eye on her own life—a task demanding a writer just as peerlessly skillful as she was widely known to be. Still Pictures, then, is not the story of a life but an event on its own terms, an encounter with identity and family photographs as poignant and original as anything since Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida.

From the wild imagination of Tyler Gaca, also known as TikTok's Ghosthoney, comes a beautiful compendium of poems, personal stories, and vignettes that explore magic, queerness, Tyler’s unique story, and the enchantment and comfort to be found in the weird, the dark, and the different. In this...

In January 2014 I was informed that I had cancer. However, Quicksand is not a book about death and destruction, but about what it means to be human. I have undertaken a journey from my childhood to the man I am today, writing about the key events in my life, and about the people who have given...

"In the beginning we were happy. And we were always excessive. So in the beginning we were happy to excess." With these opening lines Sean Wilsey takes us on an exhilarating tour of life in the strangest, wealthiest, and most grandiose of families. Sean's blond-bombshell mother (one of the...

Put Off My Sackcloth is a mosaic of essays about one writer’s journey through a life fraught with crippling interior darkness in an uncertain world to the salve she finds in her “shored-up ruins” and new maternal life beneath the lambent glow of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range in South-Central Colorado. The daughter of a Jewish refuge from Nazi Germany and an American mother prone to suicidal depression, Annie Dawid, in these essays, traces the history of her life.

In partnership with Texas Monthly, the following articles highlighting Texas business and culture are now available in a bundle as an audio download: * "The Slow Life and Fast Death of DJ Screw" by Michael Hall, read by Matt Bull * "Dreaming of Her" by Pamela Colloff, read by Staci Snell * "He...

In I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes vividly recalls the most dramatic and intimate moments of his life in the turbulent 1930s. His wanderlust leads him to Cuba, Haiti, Russia, Soviet Central Asia, Japan, Spain (during its Civil War), through dictatorships, wars, revolutions. He meets and...

A marvelous new essay collection from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Somebody's Fool and The Destiny Thief Life and Art—these are the twin subjects considered in Richard Russo’s twelve masterful new essays—how they inform each other and how the stories we tell ourselves about both...

In 2020, Claire Luchette in O, The Oprah Magazine described the beloved Italian novelist Elena Ferrante as “an oracle among authors”. Here, in these four crisp essays, Ferrante offers a rare look at the origins of her literary powers.

“I can’t imagine reading this book without being challenged and instructed, amused, amazed and aroused, and ultimately delighted.” —John Simon, New York Times Book Review Milan Kundera’s brilliant collection of essays is a passionate defense of art in an era that, he argues, no longer...

The final installment in Lyndsay Faye’s Timothy Wilde series, which Lee Child called “solid-gold” and Gillian Flynn declared “spectacular.” No one in 1840s New York likes fires, copper star Timothy Wilde least of all. After a blaze killed his parents and another left him with a...