Classic Essays

In 1834, Ralph Waldo Emerson, formerly a Unitarian minister, began a new career as a public lecturer. Nature (1836), his first published work, contained the essence of his transcendental philosophy. This collection contains 11 of his most celebrated and memorable essays....

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE NATIONAL BESTSELLER NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PEOPLE AND USA TODAY A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK Nobody blows smoke like Nick Naylor. He’s a spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies–in other words, a flack for cigarette companies...

"The Greatest Story Ever ToldDispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war between cousins-the Pandavas and the Kouravas-but the Mahabharata is about conflicts of dharma. These conflicts are immense and various, singular and commonplace. Throughout the epic, characters...

"A gripping guide to the modern taming of the infinite." —New York Times Part history, part philosophy, part love letter to the study of mathematics, Everything and More is an illuminating tour of infinity. With his infectious curiosity and trademark verbal pyrotechnics, David Foster Wallace...

An enlightening and entertaining collection of the most esteemed love poems in the English canon, retold in contemporary language everyone can understand James Anthony has long enjoyed poetry with a strict adherence to beat, rhythm, and rhyming patterns, which he likens to the very best pop...

From the best-selling and always-prescient author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? and Listen, Liberal comes a bold indictment of America’s chronic obsession with creativity and innovation, showing how these beloved ideas came to dominate our political and economic conversation, all while...

It is the evolution of Kali, from her origins as a Tantric Goddess to her metamorphosis into a divinity in mainstream religions, that the author captures brilliantly in this book...

The journey will be long and difficult, one thousand miles. Try not to be too obvious. Stick to the backroads. You’ ll know you’ ve arrived when you get there. Stephen Bolin leaves a bizarre note by his deathbed, asking his sisters to take his body back to his birthplace in Far North...

Chanakya's Arthashastra is an unrivalled political treatise that has been used by scholars, academics and leaders across the world. In Chanakya and the Art of Getting Rich, Radhakrishnan Pillai brings out the inherent lessons from Arthashastra to present a strategic and practical way of...

An entertaining and insightful history of martial arts and the role of the warrior, drawing on pop culture, philosophy, mythology, religion, and spirituality The urge to forge one’s character by fighting, in daily life as well as on the mat, appeals to something deep within us. More than a...

Is it sexist to say that “men are trash”? Can white people be victims of racism? Do we bear any individual responsibility for climate change? We’ve all wrestled with questions like these, whether we’re shouting at a relative across the dinner table, quarreling with old classmates on...

A fresh cultural analysis of female monsters from Greek mythology, and an invitation for all women to reclaim these stories as inspiration for a more wild, more “monstrous” version of feminism The folklore that has shaped our dominant culture teems with frightening female creatures. In our...

In 1831, Charles Darwin embarked on an expedition that, in his own words, determined my whole career. The Voyage of the Beagle chronicles his five-year journey around the world and especially the coastal waters of South America as a naturalist on the H.M.S. Beagle. While traveling through these...

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...

A bestselling and award-winning debut collection from one of South Korea's most prominent young writers. In crisp, unembellished prose, Eun-young Choi paints intimate portraits of the lives of young women in South Korea, balancing the personal with the political. In the title story, a fraught...

En "Conversaciones con Billy Wilder" el legendario director, ya nonagenario, accedió por primera vez a hablar extensamente sobre su vida y obra. Entrevistado por Cameron Crowe, en sus páginas habla de su experiencia en el mismo corazón de Hollywood, así como sobre guiones, fotografía y...

The candid, poignant, unforgettable writing of the young girl whose own life story has become an everlasting source of courage and inspiration. Hiding from the Nazis in the “Secret Annex” of an old office building in Amsterdam, a thirteen-year-old girl named Anne Frank became a writer. The...

Biographer Michael Shelden called Orwell’s Politics and the English Language “his most important essay on style”. First published in 1946, the essay exploded the language trends of the time and served as an inflection point in the debate about communication in the 20th century. This collection of essays published 1946-48 provides a comprehensive critique of the status of politics and speech in the mid-century.

***A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK*** ***LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014*** ***PWs Best of the Year 2014*** The author of the best-selling and award-winning Netherland now gives us his eagerly awaited, stunningly different new novel: a tale of alienation and heartbreak in Dubai...

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...