Essay Essays

“A witty, learned, authoritative survey of philosophical thought.” —The New York Times Book Review The first authoritative and accessible single-volume history of philosophy to cover both Western and Eastern traditions, from one of the world’s most eminent thinkers The story of...

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...

"I loved it." —Ann Patchett The bestselling author of American Housewife ("Dark, deadpan and truly inventive." --The New York Times Book Review) is back with a fiercely funny collection of essays on marriage and manners, thank-you notes and three-ways, ghosts, gunshots, gynecology, and the...

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.

The holly-jolly holidays aren’t for everyone, least of all when you look back on that one Christmas when there were two definitely haunted dolls waiting for you and your sister under the tree. You have to assume that’s where it all started. And so it was for Jenny Lawson. Now, she lives in the land of eternal Halloween, as evidenced by her interior decor and general state of darkness. (Although, if you ask her, her taxidermy zoo is less dark, more delightful. But not everyone has taste, so what are you going to do?)

Early in life, Walter Rodney became a major revolutionary figure in a dizzying range of locales that traversed the breadth of the Black diaspora. He was not only a witness of a Pan-African and socialist internationalism, but a prime actor in mass organization, catalyzing rebellious ferment, and theorizing an anti-colonial path to self-emancipation. This volume demonstrates the unbending consistency that unites his life and work: the ongoing reinvention of living conception of Marxism, and a respect for the still untapped potential of mass self-rule.

Culture and Anarchy is a series of periodical essays by Matthew Arnold, first published in Cornhill Magazine 1867-68 and collected as a book in 1869. Arnold's famous piece of writing on culture established his High Victorian cultural agenda which remained dominant in debate from the 1860s until the 1950s. According to his view advanced in the book, ‘Culture [...] is a study of perfection’.

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.

From junior high football games to the Sugar Bowl with a national championship up for grabs, Mike Liner has seen it all in football. President and CEO of a bank by day, Liner has been a Texas football official on Fridays and Saturdays for the past 35 years. It’s Not All Black and White offers a view of college football seen through a different set of eyes, the eyes of an official. Liner takes listeners through the story of his ascension up the officiating hierarchy and describes the bumps in the road he encountered along the way.

Join Ursula K. Le Guin as she explores a broad array of subjects, ranging from Tolstoy, Twain, and Tolkien to women's shoes, beauty, and family life. With her customary wit, intelligence, and literary craftsmanship, she offers a diverse and highly engaging set of stories. The Wave in the Mind includes some of Le Guin's finest literary criticism, rare autobiographical writings, performance-art pieces, and most centrally, her reflections on the arts of writing and reading.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER Here is the Nobel Prize winner in her own words: a rich gathering of her most important essays and speeches, spanning four decades that "speaks to today’s social and political moment as directly as this morning’s headlines” (NPR). These pages give us her searing...

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was the leading French philosopher of the first half of the 20th century. Near the end of his life when he was forced to register with the police in Nazi occupied France he wrote: ‘Academic. Philosopher. Nobel prize winner. Jew.’ Time and Free Will, his doctoral thesis, was published as a book in 1889 and attacks and rejects the mechanistic view of causality described in Kant’s version of space and time and proceeds to attempt to define free-will and consciousness by separating space and time.

An inspiring and revealing essay about motherhood, self-acceptance, and overcoming the fears that hold you back by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Open Book.

Originally published in 1979, the first volume of the best-selling "Gonzo Papers" is now back in print. The Great Shark Hunt is Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's largest and, arguably, most important work, covering Nixon to napalm, Las Vegas to Watergate, Carter to cocaine. These essays offer brilliant commentary and outrageous humor, in signature Thompson style. Thompson's razor-sharp insight and crystal clarity capture the crazy, hypocritical, degenerate, and redeeming aspects of the explosive and colorful '60s and '70s.

Flailing in jobs, failing at love, getting addicted and un-addicted to people, food, and drugs - I'll Tell You in Person is a disarmingly frank account of attempts at adulthood and all the less than perfect ways we get there. Chloe Caldwell has an unsparing knack for looking within and reporting back what's really there, rather than what she'd like you to see.

What is nature? What is humanity's place in nature? And what is the relationship of society to the natural world? In an era of ecological breakdown, answering these questions has become of momentous importance for our everyday lives and for the future that we and other life-forms face. In the essays of The Philosophy of Social Ecology, Murray Bookchin confronts these questions head on, invoking the ideas of mutualism, self-organization, and unity in diversity, in the service of ever-expanding freedom.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER From one of our most iconic and influential writers, the award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking: a timeless collection of mostly early pieces that reveal what would become Joan Didion's subjects...

Step onto the gridiron with the greatest legends from Miami Dolphins football - newly updated! This unique and humorous look at life with the Dolphins brings fans onto the field and into the locker room through the eyes of Garo Yepremian, one of Miami’s most recognizable figures. From kicking in his first professional football game to being named “Kicker of the Decade”, Yepremian relives the Dolphins epic 1972 season and so much more.

From acclaimed poet and creator of the popular twitter account @SoSadToday comes the darkly funny and brutally honest collection of essays that Roxane Gay called "sad and uncomfortable and their own kind of gorgeous." Melissa Broder always struggled with anxiety. In the fall of 2012, she went...

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Change Your Mind, a panoptic exploration of consciousness—what it is, who has it, and why—and a meditation on the essence of our humanity When it comes to the phenomenon that is consciousness, there is one point on which scientists...