English Essay

In Tales from the New Jersey Devils Locker Room, former New Jersey goalie Chico Resch and coauthor Mike Kerwick bring listeners along for a wild ride from the lean early seasons to the three Stanley Cup championships of this beloved team.

In his highly anticipated debut essay collection, Impossible Owls, Brian Phillips demonstrates why he's one of the most iconoclastic journalists of the digital age, beloved for his ambitious, off-kilter, meticulously reported essays. The eight essays assembled here go beyond simply chronicling some of the modern world's most uncanny, unbelievable, and spectacular oddities. Researched for months and even years on end, they explore the interconnectedness of the globalized world, the consequences of history, the power of myth, and the ways people attempt to find meaning.

Here in one volume are both the Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series from one of the most influential philosophers in American history. Although Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps America’s most famous philosopher, did not wish to be referred to as a transcendentalist, he is nevertheless considered the founder of this major movement of nineteenth-century American thought. Emerson was influenced by a liberal religious training; theological study; personal contact with the Romanticists Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth; and a strong indigenous sense of individualism and self-reliance.

Is our democracy corroding? In this original, eloquent essay, Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens explore the ethics and politics of public debate—and the threat it now faces. In a healthy society we need the capacity to disagree. Yet Aly and Stephens note a growing tendency to disdain and dismiss opponents, to treat them with contempt. This toxic partisanship has been imported from the United States, where it has been a temptation for both left and right.

Ohio coaching legend Paul Brown said he wanted to create "the New York Yankees of pro football" when he assembled the Cleveland Browns from scratch in 1946. Despite his ambition, not even the future Hall of Fame coach could have foreseen ten league championship appearances and seven titles in the team's first ten years.

In this collection of original stories, highly acclaimed novelist and outdoor writer William Tapply shares his finest stories of bird hunting in the Northeast country. Every season for over 30 years, Tapply has hunted the fields and backcountry of New England. Tapply’s warmth and knack for evoking the subtle, telling details of the places and hunts that he loves will stir a new appreciation and excitement in every listener. With his dog Burt, Tapply takes the listener out to his best spots.

The inimitably witty David Rakoff, New York Times bestselling author of Don’t Get Too Comfortable, defends the commonsensical notion that you should always assume the worst, because you’ll never be disappointed. In this deeply funny (and, no kidding, wise and poignant) book, Rakoff examines...

Legendary sportswriter Red Smith characterized Ben Hogan’s comeback from a near-fatal automobile crash in February 1949 as “the most remarkable feat in the history of sports.” Now, more than 60 years later, that statement still rings true. The crowning moment of Hogan’s comeback was his astonishing victory in the 1950 U.S. Open at Merion Golf Club near Philadelphia, where his battered legs could barely carry him on the 36-hole final day.

“I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.” So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which revered poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of the natural world and the world of literature. Emphasizing the significance of her childhood “friend” Walt Whitman, who inspired her to vanish into the world of her own writing, Oliver meditates on the forces that allowed her to create a life for herself out of work and love.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), 1st Viscount St Albans, Attorney General and then Lord Chancellor of England, was an immensely learned, clever and ambitious man, with considerable political influence. However, he was also a philosopher with a wide interest in science, medicine and the classification of knowledge. Throughout his life he wrote a series of essays - following the manner set particularly by Montaigne, though extending back to Aristotle and others - the first 10 of which appeared in 1597.

Acclaimed journalist Julia Ioffe tells the story of modern Russia through the history of its women, from revolution to utopia to autocracy. In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow—only to discover just how...

A TIME Best Book of 2025 A Washington Post Notable Book “Searing… rigorously researched but never stuffy… Gilbert has compiled perhaps the first comprehensive examination of turn-of-the-millennium mainstream, cool-kid trends and ephemera, and how they were largely molded by those in...

The first of its kind, a unique volume of twenty-one unpublished gems from one of the twentieth century’s most popular and prolific writers Using his father’s handwritten notes, journal entries, and correspondences, Beau L’Amour uncovers how and why many never-before-seen manuscripts...

Fifteen years ago, Robert Fulghum published a simple credo that became the phenomenal #1 New York Times bestseller All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Now, seven million copies later, Fulghum returns to the book that was embraced around the world.

With essays on "cosmic consciousness" (including Alan Watts' account of his own ventures into this inward realm); the paradoxes of self-consciousness; LSD and consciousness; and the false opposition of spirit and matter, This Is It: And Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience is a truly mind-opening audiobook collection.

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The renowned author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell—and the ones we don’t—shape our realities. “Ta-Nehisi Coates always writes with a purpose. . . . These...

In 1572, Montaigne - nobleman, humanist, and thoroughly Renaissance man - retired to the seclusion of his estate in the Dordogne and started to write. From his pen poured a stream of "essays" - attempts to capture the observations that came to him on an idiosyncratic range of subjects, from ancient customs, cannibals, and books to thumbs, war-horses, and the wearing of clothes. He made the study of himself the starting point for investigations into how to live, and wrote with a startlingly modern candor about love, grief, friendship, sex, and death.

In Furiously Happy, #1 New York Times bestselling author Jenny Lawson explores her lifelong battle with mental illness. A hysterical, ridiculous book about crippling depression and anxiety? That sounds like a terrible idea. But terrible ideas are what Jenny does best. As Jenny says: "Some people...

Marina Keegan's star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash. Even though she was just 22 when she died, Marina left behind a rich, expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An extraordinary work from the author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights In November 1999, Joan Didion began seeing a psychiatrist because, as she wrote to a friend, her family had had “a rough few years.” She described the sessions in a...