Classic Essays

From one of the world's most beloved and respected public intellectuals comes a sweeping work of musical criticism, examining the distance between the performer and their audience "Not since Virgil Thomson have we had a music critic with as wide ranging a view as Edward Said."—Studs Terkel...

A full-frontal confrontation of the ways we perform desire and shame—from the downright bizarre to the frighteningly relatable—by the award-winning author of A Sharp Endless Need An employee at a hunting ground where people pay to act out hate crimes prepares to meet their girlfriend’s...

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice For decades, affirmative action reshaped not just American higher education but the broader society, opening doors that had been closed for centuries and transforming who entered the pathways to power. But the Supreme Court in 2023 killed...

Notable author Seth Pancoast, a theosophist and regular contributor to theosophical, esoteric, and occult journals and periodicals, writes on the topic of the cabalistic sciences. Here, we have collected two of his essays entitled "The Kabbalah" and "The Mystery of Numbers", written from a theosophical perspective. Please enjoy.

In 1956, Caedmon had the great fortune to record Eudora Welty reading some of her finest stories. In her sweetly vibrant Mississippi drawl, Ms. Welty deftly draws the listener in to the uproariously multilayered ""Why I Live at the P.O.,"" the spontaneous ""Powerhouse"" and the insightful voice...

A superb collection of fifteen stories by an American master, E. L. Doctorow—the author of Ragtime, The March, The Book of Daniel, and Billy Bathgate He has been called “a national treasure” by George Saunders. Doctorow’s great topic, said Don DeLillo, is “the reach of American...

On a chance visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz makes an unsettling discovery. A history buff since early childhood, expensively educated at university—a history major, no less!—he’s reached middle age with a third-grader’s grasp of early America. In fact, he’s mislaid more than a...

A young queer millennial physicist unveils some of the most mind-bending physics concepts in the universe—and uses them to illuminate their own fascinating life story “I see physics everywhere,” Karmela Padavic-Callaghan writes. “It offers itself to me when I try to make sense of all the...

John Updike reads six stories he has selected from the hundred-odd he has published. "A&P", recounting a moral crisis on the checkout counter, is his most anthologized story. "Pigeon Feathers," the longest story included, tells of a fourteen-year-old boy's fear of death and the answer he finds...

A cult classic, FIXER CHAO—which was named a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year—by New Yorker contributor Han Ong, delivers a sharp and insightful narrative about racial and social hierarchy, personal identity, and alienation. William Paulinha, a resourceful, gay Filipino sex worker, is...

An uncompromising and sensually charged collection from one of the great practitioners of the short story The debut story collection from Los Angeles writer Kate Braverman assembles a vivid patchwork of interconnected narratives set in Southern California. Through brief, often haunting snapshots...

From the incendiary voice behind Your Driver is Waiting, a fierce and unforgettable novel about a Tamil refugee family stealing from corporations to survive until their lives are up-ended by a day-trading scam, threatening what little security they have left. It’s hard to be a teenager at the...

“Ahmad’s compassion, her deep care for the psychological and emotional nuances of her characters, never wavers.” – The New York Times Book Review In a searing collection by the award-winning author of The Return of Faraz Ali, characters seek to make their futures their own in a Pakistan...

Lakshmi is the goddess of all that is good wealth (dhana), beauty (saundarya) and happiness (sukha). As Vishnu s consort and in her incarnations as Sita and Rukmini, she represents the ideal of femininity in Hinduism. She is also Shri, the goddess of fertility and grain, and Mahalakshmi, the...

“Vivid . . . These stories, in which class divisions form impassable rifts and submission to the status quo comes at great psychic cost, have much to say about our contemporary reality." —The New York Times Book Review “What a gift to have these stories translated, finally, into English...

Around 2500 years ago a thirty-five-year-old man named Siddhartha had a mystical insight under a peepul tree in north-eastern India, in a place now revered as Bodhgaya. Today, more than 300 million people across the globe consider themselves beneficiaries of Gautama Buddha’s insight, and...

Whenever the subject of Lincoln is brought up, it usually produces a mixed response ranging from adoration to excoriation. Back in 1931 when Lincoln the Man appeared, there were few willing to publicly judge Lincoln on the basis of anything less than hagiographic platitudes. That all changed when the famous poet and writer Edgar Lee Masters published Lincoln the Man. This book is less a biography and more of an analysis of Lincoln’s thinking process and political evolution from backwoods lawyer to president of the United States.

“Cantoras es audaz y desacomplejada, un reto a la noción de normalidad y un tributo al poder del amor, la amistad, y la resistencia política. Es una fábula revolucionaria, ideal para este momento, escrita con sabiduría y amor”. —Dina Nayeri, The New York Times Book Review En el Uruguay...

This majestic novel by the author of India Unbound is the extraordinary chronicle, rich in passion and incident, of a Punjabi family that is uprooted from its settled existence in Lyallpur by the violence of Partition and forced to flee to India. Everything is lost in the transition, but when a...

More than 60 stories, poems, and essays are included in this wide-ranging collection by the extravagantly versatile Raymond Carver. Two of the stories - later revised for What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - are particularly notable in that between the first and the final versions, we see clearly the astounding process of Carver's literary development.