Art Essays

From the world-famous survival expert, learn how to make every day an unforgettable adventure Life in the outdoors teaches us invaluable lessons. Encountering the wild forces us to plan and execute goals, face danger, push our "limits," and sharpen our instincts. But our most important...

According to Thomas Moore, people today have lost the deep, direct, and vivid sense of what it means to live with passion and originality. Moore believes that beneath the many thick layers of indoctrination about who we are and who we should be lies an original self, a person who came into...

A deliciously compulsive first novel from New York Times Editor's Choice author of Lights On, Rats Out, Cree LeFavour's Private Means captures the very essence of summer in a sharply observed, moving meditation on marriage, money, and loss. It's Memorial Day weekend and Alice's beloved dog...

A collection of writing by Simon Reynolds, centered on music that seemed, in its moment, to prefigure the Future Simon Reynolds's first book in eight years is a celebration of music that feels like a taste of tomorrow. Sounds that prefigure pop music's future—the vanguard genres and heroic...

Placing the West's failure to acknowledge the most successful slave revolt in history alongside denials of the Holocaust and the debate over the Alamo, Michel-Rolph Trouillot offers a stunning meditation on how power operates in the making and recording of history...

Dionne Brand, author of the Griffin Poetry Prize-winning collection Ossuaries, returns with a startlingly original work about the act of writing itself. On a lonely wharf a clerk in an ink blue coat inspects bales and bales of paper that hold a poet's accumulated left-hand pages—the unwritten...

Frances Mayes, whose enchanting #1 New York Times bestseller Under the Tuscan Sun made the world fall in love with Tuscany, invites readers back for a delightful new season of friendship, festivity, and food, there and throughout Italy. Having spent her summers in Tuscany for the past...

Every novelist dreams of it--writing the book that rockets to the top of the bestseller lists. Now, they can see how it's done, up close, in an audiobook by an agent who has sold manuscripts that turned into hits. Here Albert Zuckerman covers the essential elements of the blockbuster novel and...

A collection of satirical, crass, comedic essays from famed Internet personality and New York Times bestselling author Maddox, of the infamous website The Best Page in the Universe. In this third book from Maddox, the reigning king of Internet satire delivers a collection of humorous...

Wendy Cope has long been one of the nation's best-loved poets, with her sharp eye for human foibles and wry sense of humour. For the first time, Life, Love, and the Archers brings together the best of her prose - recollections, reviews, and essays from the light-hearted to the serious, taken from a lifetime of published and unpublished work, and all with Cope's lightness of touch.

Parents obsess over their children's playdates, kindergarten curriculum, and every bump and bruise, but their toys, classrooms, and playgrounds are just as important. These objects and spaces encode decades—even centuries—of ideas about good child-rearing versus bad. What is the Good Toy? Is it wooden, plastic, or even digital? What do youngsters lose when seesaws are deemed too dangerous and slides are designed primarily for safety? How can our built environment help children cultivate self-reliance? In these debates, parents, educators, and kids themselves are often caught in the middle.

A pithy and brilliant introduction to Susan Sontag’s writing on women, gathering early essays on aging, equality, beauty, sexuality, and fascism Susan Sontag was one of the most formidable, original, and influential thinkers of the last century. “The most interesting ideas are heresies,”...

Fifty vignettes of remarkable people whose lives have been transformed by their obsessive passion for trees—written by the New York Times bestselling author of The Drunken Botanist “I love everything Amy Stewart has ever created, but this book is my favorite yet. I’m giving this book to...

A no-holds-barred look into the remarkable life and career of the prolific musician, songwriter, and producer behind Eurythmics and dozens of pop hits. Dave Stewart’s life has been a wild ride—one filled with music, constant reinvention, and the never-ending drive to create. Growing up in...

Collected for the first time, the New York stories of John O'Hara, "among the greatest short story writers in English, or in any other language" (Brendan Gill, Here at The New Yorker) Collected for the first time, here are the New York stories of one of the twentieth century’s definitive...

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi one of the greatest men to walk this earth, begins the story of his life with descriptions of his childhood in Porbandar and Rajkot in Gujarat, his schooldays, his early marriage, the lessons he learnt when he tried stealing, told lies and smoked cigrattes, and his...

Irresistible and authoritative, The Movie Musical! is an in-depth look at the singing, dancing, happy-making world of Hollywood musicals--an essential audiobook for anyone who's ever laughed, cried, or sung along at the movies. Leading film historian Jeanine Basinger reveals, with her...

Bringing up Baby. The Philadelphia Story. North by Northwest. An Affair to Remember. When Cary Grant passed away at age 82, fans from every generation mourned. Nearly 20 years later his star shines just as brightly from television and revival-house screens; his name remains synonymous with...

Acquired Tastes is a celebration of life's extravagances. It explores an aspect of human nature that, although dormant in hard economic times, is capable of erupting with the hint of good fortune and the drop of a credit card. It samples the luxuries of Havana cigars, Parisian hotels, bespoke London tailoring, and handmade shoes; discusses the proper color for a stretch limousine; and weighs the cost versus the pleasure of keeping a mistress.

Christian Wiman explores the relationships between art and faith, death and fame, heaven and oblivion. Above all, He Held Radical Light is a love letter to poetry, filled with moving, surprising, and sometimes funny encounters with the poets Wiman has known.