Essay Essays

In a future world under attack from the undead, the powerful Church of Real Truth, in charge since the government fell, has sworn to reimburse citizens being harassed by the deceased. Consequently, there are many false claims of hauntings from those hoping to profit. Enter Chess Putnam, a fully-tattooed witch and freewheeling ghost hunter. She’s got a real talent for nailing human liars and banishing the wicked dead.

In recognition of her long and lauded career as a master essayist, a landmark collection including her most beloved pieces and some rarely seen work, rigorously curated by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author herself. With a foreword by Geoff Dyer. “A writer who never seems tired, who has never...

The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick is a companion collection to The Collected Essays, a book that proved a revelation of what, for many, had been an open secret: that Elizabeth Hardwick was one of the great American literary critics, and an extraordinary stylist in her own right. The thirty-five pieces that Alex Andriesse has gathered here-none previously featured in volumes of Hardwick's work-make it clear that her powers extended far beyond literary criticism.

"Depuis que j'ai quitté le Liban pour m'installer en France, que de fois m'a-t-on demandé, avec les meilleures intentions du monde, si je me sentais plutôt français" ou "plutôt libanais". Je réponds invariablement : "L'un et l'autre !" Non par quelque souci d'équilibre ou d'équité, mais parce qu'en répondant différemment, je mentirais. Ce qui fait que je suis moi-même et pas un autre, c'est que je suis ainsi à la lisière de deux pays, de deux ou trois langues, de plusieurs traditions culturelles. C'est cela mon identité..."

After her plane crashes, a 17-year-old girl spends 11 days walking through the Peruvian jungle. Against all odds, with no food, shelter, or equipment, she gets out. A better equipped group of adult survivors of the same crash sits down and dies. What makes the difference?

Spanning an extraordinary range of subjects and locations, these ten gripping essays show why Jon Krakauer is considered a standard-bearer of modern journalism. His pieces take us from a horrifying avalanche on Mount Everest to a volcano poised to obliterate a big chunk of Seattle; from a...

From graffiti gangs and Grand Theft Auto to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, in these essays, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. She asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing. Starting with Hodson’s own work experience, which ranges from the mundane to the bizarre - including modeling and working on a NASA Mars mission - Hodson expands outward, looking at the ways in which the human will submits, whether in the marketplace or in a relationship.

"Narrator Brian Nishii perfectly conveys the author's joy and feelings of isolation at discovering science fiction as a child, the exhilaration of world-building as a science fiction writer, and the imaginative process of predicting our world in 50 years."—AudioFile "We’re mysterious aliens...

One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025 A Goodreads Readers' Most Anticipated Fall Book From the New York Times bestselling author of Stiff and Fuzz, a rollicking exploration of the quest to re-create the impossible complexities of human anatomy. The body is the most complex machine...

In Flight of the Wild Gander, renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell - in his first collection of essays, written between 1944 and 1968 - explores the individual and geographical origins of myth, outlining the full range of mythology from Grimm's fairy tales to American Indian legends. Originally published in 1969, this collection describes the symbolic content of stories: how they are linked to human experience and how they - along with our experiences - have changed over time.

Karl Kraus gilt als einer der bedeutendsten Aphoristiker deutscher Sprache. Ob berühmte Schriftsteller oder die Presse - nichts und niemand wurde von der Kritik seiner Feder verschont. Bekannte Künstler wie Stefan Zweig, Georg Trakl, Thomas Mann und andere zollten ihm Respekt, aber die Zahl seiner Feinde in Kunst und Gesellschaft war enorm. Als Vorleser hinterließ er aufgrund seiner Sprachgewalt und Persönlichkeit angeblich einen äußerst außergewöhnlichen Eindruck. „Der Biberpelz“ erzählt die auf den ersten akustischen Blick schlichte Geschichte eines Pelzdiebstahls.

This is a collection of 21 essays on a variety of occult-themed topics, covering the full spectrum of classic esoteric and related subjects, which include Hermeticism, alchemy, magic, the Kabbalah, ancient wisdom and philosophy, the Tarot, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, Theosophy, and spiritualism, by some of the most notable and prominent names in the history of those subjects.

The Charles Dickens Non-Fiction Collection contains all of Charles Dickens' major published works of non-fiction. Although lesser known than the novels for which he is remembered, Dickens' eye for detail and character observation is seen just as clearly in his travelogues, essays, and letters, giving us an insight into Dickens and 1800s London, America, and Europe.

This audiobook explores the dangers of a broken sensemaking and information ecology in a time between worlds and time between stories. We are faced with two bad alternatives: to blindly dismiss all conspiracy theories or to blindly buy into all their claims. Both are wrong choices.

In late 2014, Arundhati Roy, John Cusack, and Daniel Ellsberg traveled to Moscow to meet with Edward Snowden. The result is a series of essays and dialogues in which Roy and Cusack reflect on their conversations with Snowden. In these provocative and penetrating discussions, Roy and Cusack discuss the nature of the state, empire, and surveillance in an era of perpetual war, the meaning of flags and patriotism, the role of foundations and NGOs in limiting dissent, and the ways in which capital but not people can freely cross borders.

The Black Swan is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, Antifragile...

In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Abdurraqib's is a voice that matters. Whether he's attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown's grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy that resonates profoundly. In essays that have been published by the New York Times, MTV, and Pitchfork, among others—Abdurraqib uses music and culture as a lens through which to view our world so that we might better understand ourselves, and in so doing proves himself a bellwether for our times.

A seminal work of scientific and philosophical exploration. Ever since the Greeks coined the language we commonly use for scientific description, mythology and science have developed separately. But what if we could prove that all myths have one common origin in a celestial cosmology? What if the gods, the places they lived, and what they did are but ciphers for celestial activity, a language for the perpetuation of complex astronomical data?

A blazingly intelligent first book of essays from the award-winning author of Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time The Guardian Harper's Bazaar San Francisco Chronicle The Atlantic Financial Times Kirkus Finalist for...

America’s most trusted and best-known film critic Roger Ebert presents two hundred brilliant essays on some of the best movies ever made in this two-book collection containing THE GREAT MOVIES and THE GREAT MOVIES II. Roger Ebert, the famed film writer and critic, wrote biweekly essays for a...