Essay Essays

Part of John Muir's appeal to modern audiences is that he not only explored the American West and wrote about its beauties but also fought for their preservation. His successes dot the landscape and are evident in all the natural features that bear his name: forests, lakes, trails, and glaciers. Here collected are some of Muir's finest wilderness essays, ranging in subject matter from Alaska to Yellowstone, from Oregon to the High Sierra.

This audiobook, read by Audie award-winning narrators, includes unabridged recordings of all Fyodor Dostoyevky's greatest works: 15 novels and novellas, 18 short stories, a short study of Dostoyevsky by Virginia Woolf, and two books of non-fiction - his Letters and European travel journal.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a leader in the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He is best known for his political philosophy and ideological thoughts on the moral worth of the individual and his work greatly influenced many of the great thinkers of his time, including Henry David Thoreau.

Baldwin's personal reflections on movies gathered here in a book-length essay are also a probing appraisal of American racial politics. Offering an incisive look at racism in American movies and a vision of America's self-delusions and deceptions, Baldwin challenges the underlying assumptions in such films as In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and The Exorcist.

Lars Horn's Voice of the Fish, the latest Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize winner, is an interwoven essay collection that explores the trans experience through themes of water, fish, and mythology, set against the backdrop of travels in Russia and a back injury that left Horn temporarily unable to speak. In Horn's adept hands, the collection takes shape as a unified book: short vignettes about fish, reliquaries, and antiquities serve as interludes between longer essays, knitting together a sinuous, wave-like form that flows across the book.

“Masterful. The Anthropocene Reviewed is a beautiful, timely book about the human condition—and a timeless reminder to pay attention to your attention.” —Adam Grant, #1 bestselling author of Think Again and host of the podcast Re:Thinking The instant #1 bestseller from John Green, author...

Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first and then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), represent the core of his thinking. They include the well-known essays "Self-Reliance" and "The Over-Soul". Together with "Nature", these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period.

"Searingly honest, brilliant and disturbing. Brad Phillips peels back the skin and bone and stares right into the human soul." (Anthony Bourdain) Brad Phillips' collection of short stories adeptly walks a very thin line between taboo and propriety, with rigorous self-awareness and generosity. By confusing ideas around fiction and autobiography, Phillips writes with painful sincerity about shame, addiction, trauma, and the more troubling outreaches of sexual desire, with wit that is at odds with the subject matter. Brad Phillips is a well-known Canadian artist.

Lydia Davis is a writer whose originality, influence, and wit are beyond compare. Jonathan Franzen has called her "a magician of self-consciousness," while Rick Moody hails her as "the best prose stylist in America." And for Claire Messud, "Davis's signal gift is to make us feel alive." Best known for her masterful short stories and translations, Davis's gifts extend equally to her nonfiction. In Essays One, Davis has, for the first time, gathered a selection of essays, commentaries, and lectures composed over the past five decades.

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.

Mental illness is the great isolator - and the great unifier. Almost half of us will suffer from it at some point in our lives; it affects everybody in one way or another. Yet today, Australia’s mental health system is under stress and not fit for purpose, and the pandemic is only making things worse. What is to be done? In this brilliant mix of portraiture and analysis, Sarah Krasnostein tells the stories of three women and their treatment by the state while at their most unwell.

Legendary author and essayist E. B. White writes, "The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest." Covering a large number of subjects, this classic collection features 31 of White's most memorable essays.

Geboren in der ehemaligen britischen Kolonie Indien verlief das Leben von George Orwell alles andere als geradlinig. Womöglich durch die brutale Fremdherrschaft des Empires über Indien und durch Stalins organisierten Staatsterror und Massenmord angewidert, entwickelte er sich zu einem überzeugten sozialistischen Demokraten, der alle Machtorgane von möglichst vielen Menschen organisiert und Machtumsetzung immer auf möglichst vielen Schultern verteilt sehen wollte. Einen großen Teil seiner prosaischen Werke bilden seine Essays ab, hier Teil 21.

These Precious Days has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher...

Einen großen Teil seiner prosaischen Werke bilden seine Essays ab, hier Teil 13. Dabei stehen Comics und deren Humor im Vordergrund, wobei ein großer Bogen vom Postkartenwitz, gekennzeichnet durch Brüller und Kalauer, welche die Monotonie der staatlich geförderten Lebensart in Form einer anscheinend anständigen Fassade durch den Kakao ziehen, zum etwas tiefsinnigeren Humor von Literaturklassikern geschlagen wird. Gewissermaßen vom Witz des Pöbels zu dem des Bildungsbürgertums, aber nun ja, über Humor lässt sich bekanntlich nicht streiten – oder doch?

Geboren in der ehemaligen britischen Kolonie Indien verlief das Leben von George Orwell alles andere als geradlinig. Womöglich durch die brutale Fremdherrschaft des Empires über Indien und durch Stalins organisierten Staatsterror und Massenmord angewidert, entwickelte er sich zu einem überzeugten sozialistischen Demokraten, der alle Machtorgane von möglichst vielen Menschen organisiert und Machtumsetzung immer auf möglichst vielen Schultern verteilt sehen wollte. Einen großen Teil seiner prosaischen Werke bilden seine Essays ab, hier Teil 15.

Darin versucht Orwell ein Gesellschaftsmodell zu skizzieren, das es selbst als „demokratischen Sozialismus" bezeichnet, in welchem Schablonendenken innerhalb der überholten Links-Rechts-Symbolik keine Rolle mehr spielt und jeder Bürger unabhängig von Begleitumständen seiner Geburt die gleichen Chancen und Bildungsmöglichkeiten erhält. Dieser wünschenswerte Zustand soll laut Orwell durch eine teilweise Verstaatlichung gewisser Wirtschaftsbereiche und eine Begrenzung der Menge an privatem Besitzeigentum umgesetzt werden.

Darin vergleicht Orwell die Wirtschaftsstruktur von Sozialismus mit der Gewinn maximierenden Eigenart der freien Marktwirtschaft – dem Kapitalismus und die daraus resultierenden Gefahren für die Gesellschaft. Er erklärt, warum extrem reiche Leute eher mit dem Faschismus sympathisieren und warum im Allgemeinen die oberen 10.000 von politisch extremen Regierungen entlastet und gefördert werden. Ein kritischer Punkt für freie Gesellschaften ist laut Orwell dann erreicht, wenn „Langeweile auf Stagnation" trifft.

In Raffles und Miss Blandish untersucht Orwell das gerade in der Bücher- und Filmwelt aufkommende Phänomen des sympathischen Gentleman-Verbrechertyps, der Romantisierung von Kriminalität und die Glorifizierung des Prinzips „Die Macht des Stärkeren". Dabei spielt es keine Rolle, wer die Verbrechen verübt, da der Staat genauso korrupt und kriminell agiert wie das organisierte Verbrechen, also im Prinzip der Erfolg alle Mittel rechtfertigt.

This philosophical essay is the development of a lecture on probabilities which I delivered in 1795 to the normal schools whither I had been called, by a decree of the national convention, as professor of mathematics with Lagrange. I have recently published upon the same subject a work entitled The Analytical Theory of Probabilities. I present here without the aid of analysis the principles and general results of this theory, applying them to the most important questions of life, which are indeed for the most part only problems of probability.