Classic Essays

From the internationally bestselling author of The Disappeared comes a profound meditation on the cultural impact of storytelling and testimony in five intimate and illuminating essays. In this moving collection, critically acclaimed novelist Kim Echlin examines how we turn to literature to...

Rooted in Indigenous wisdom and a four-element framework, this book invites readers to rediscover and re-embody the truth that caring for ourselves and caring for the living Earth are one and the same. Global knowledge, personal stories, and natural science for repairing environmental harm...

“In these soaring, open-hearted essays, Vanessa Zoltan writes with fierce brilliance about suffering, survival, and the kind of meaning in life that can withstand real scrutiny.”—John Green, bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars and The Anthropocene Reviewed A deeply felt...

The prescient feminist fable and international classic described as “The Handmaid’s Tale for our age” (The Economist), from the Booker-shortlisted author of Stone Yard Devotional When the women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in a broken-down property in the...

In sixteen wonderful stories, Pulitzer Prize–winning author James A. Michener burrows deep into the secret lives of animals and the hidden world of nature. Here he sheds light on nature’s most awesome and beguiling handiwork, from the sublime shaping and reshaping of earth’s lands and seas...

Emily Bronte’s world is one of dark romance and suspense, but it also has an underlying tone that can be found in her work about nature. Wuthering Heights is the famous, all-encompassing, passionate, but ultimately doomed love story between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, and how this...

Award-winning playwright, screenwriter, and director David Mamet shares his “smart, addictive, hilarious, and insightful” (Breitbart) tales from his four decades in Hollywood where he worked with some of the biggest names in movies. David Mamet went to Hollywood on top—a super successful...

Of Charles Dickens, Jane Smiley says that "his novels shaped his life as much as his life shaped his novels." Smiley's Charles Dickens is at once a sensitive profile of the great master and a fascinating meditation on the writing life. Smiley evokes Dickens as he might have seemed to his...

From a Washington Post critic and self-described meathead, a witty, incisive, poignant exploration of male body image, from the history of the gym to the politics of superheroes to the world of manfluencers Michael Andor Brodeur is a Gen-X gay writer with a passion for bodybuilding and an...

Few authors in America write with such sheer love of story, language, and imagination as T.C. Boyle, and nowhere is that passion more evident than in his inventive, wickedly funny, and widely praised short stories. In After the Plague, Boyle speaks of contemporary social issues in a range of...

Lost Discoveries, Dick Teresi's innovative history of science, explores the unheralded scientific breakthroughs from peoples of the ancient world -- Babylonians, Egyptians, Indians, Africans, New World and Oceanic tribes, among others -- and the non-European medieval world. They left an...

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...

Politicians have failed us. But democracy doesn’t have to. Bought by special interests, detached from real life, obsessed with reelection. Politicians make big promises, deliver little to nothing, and keep the game rigged in their favor. But what can we do? In Politics Without Politicians...

Jonathan Lethem's new collection of stories is a feast for his fans and the perfect introduction for new listeners-- a smorgasbord of fantastic, amusing, poignant tales written in a dizzying variety of styles. Lethem is a trailblazer fo a new kind of literary fiction, sampling high and low...

Taking his inspiration from biographical facts, novelist Colum McCann tells the erotically charged story of the Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev through the cast of those who knew him. There is Anna Vasileva, Rudi's first ballet teacher, who rescues her protégé from the stunted life of his...

“If Carpentier is ever to get a new reading in English, it should be now. . . . West’s translations . . . reintroduce English-language readers to this giant of Latin American fiction.” —Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of Books The best-known book by Cuba’s most important...

This inaugural-and all new-Tarcher Cornerstone Edition presents a stunningly relevant and reliable translation of the thoughts and aphorisms of the Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, properly placing the philosopher-king's writings within the vein of the world's great religious...

Now including a foreward by Bill Buford and photographs of Gellhorn with Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Gary Cooper, and others, this new edition rediscovers the voice of an extraordinary woman and brings back into print an irresistibly entertaining classic. "Martha Gellhorn...

In Simone Weil, du Plessix Gray vividly evokes the life of an equally complex and intriguing figure. A patriot and a mystic, an unruly activist plagued by self-doubt, a pampered intellectual with a credo of manual labor, an ascetic who craved sensuous beauty, Simone Weil died at the age of...

From Senator Reverend Raphael G. Warnock, a sermon in the public square on the issues that plague us most Senator Reverend Raphael G. Warnock is a transformational voice in Congress and the pastor of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, and for the semiquincentennial of America...