Essay Essays

Robert Barron is one of the Catholic Church's premier theologians and author of the influential The Priority of Christ. In this volume, Barron sets forth a thoroughgoing vision for an evangelical catholic theology that is steeped in the tradition and engaged with the contemporary world. Striking a balance between academic rigor and accessibility, the book covers issues of perennial interest in the twenty-first-century church: who God is, how to rightly worship him, and how his followers engage contemporary culture.

#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...

A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book Named one of the Best Books of the Year by TIME, NPR, Elle, and The Boston Globe “Searing… rigorously researched but never stuffy… Gilbert has compiled perhaps the first comprehensive examination of turn-of-the-millennium mainstream...

En los ensayos de Ralph Waldo Emerson, se pueden observar los orígenes de varias corrientes de pensamiento, religión y arte que singularizan el mundo contemporáneo hasta nuestros días. El trascendentalismo de R. W. Emerson, su investigación de la unidad que subyace tras toda diversidad, su comprensión íntima de la ley de la interconexión y de la causalidad que teje los lazos entre todo lo existente, es sin duda alguna una pedagogía optimista y revolucionaria que muestra al lector sus posibilidades latentes para llegar a ser aquello para lo que ha venido a este mundo.

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?

An Audie Award Winner David Sedaris, the “champion storyteller,” (Los Angeles Times) returns with his first new collection of personal essays since the bestselling Calypso. Back when restaurant menus were still printed on paper, and wearing a mask—or not—was a decision made mostly on...

In this important work, Georges Bataille uses his novel economic theory as the basis for an incisive inquiry into the very nature of civilization. He introduces here his concept of the accursed share, the surplus energy that any system, natural or cultural, must expend; it is this expenditure, according to Bataille, that most clearly defines a society. His examples include sacrifice among the Aztecs, potlatch among the Northwest Coast Indians, military conquest in Islam, and Buddhist monasticism in Tibet.

Gore Vidal’s reputation as America’s finest essayist is an enduring one. This collection, chosen by the author from 40 years of work, contains about two-thirds of what he published in various magazines and journals. He has divided the essays into three categories, or states. State of the art covers literature, including novelists and critics, bestsellers, pieces on Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Suetonius, Nabakov, and Montaigne (a previosly uncollected essay from 1992).

David Sedaris's beloved holiday collection is new again with six more pieces, including a never before published story. Along with such favoritesas the diaries of a Macy's elf and the annals of two very competitive families, are Sedaris's tales of tardy trick-or-treaters ("Us and Them"); the...

The autobiographical essays in The Girls in My Town create an unforgettable portrait of a family in Los Angeles. Reaching back to her grandmother's childhood and navigating through her own girlhood and on to the present, Angela Morales contemplates moments of loss and longing, truth and beauty, motherhood and daughterhood.

A hard-hitting and powerful look at hockey's moment of reckoning in Canada, and the ways in which a game that is so universally loved has been rocked in recent years by court cases involving sexual assault and startling incidents of hazing and abuse throughout junior hockey. The allegations read...

Gare Joyce, a sportswriter with the soul of poet and a penchant for trouble, has penned a tell-all memoir that is laugh-out-loud hilarious, savage—and tender at the quick. The media has their stock narratives, but Joyce tells the undiluted, unfiltered truth about the stars and also about his fellow messengers up in the press box.

In On the Firmness of the Wise Man Seneca argues that Stoicism is not as harsh as it first appears. Recalling the figure of Cato the Younger, Seneca argues that Cato as a wise person suffered neither injury nor insult. Although Serenus objects to this paradox, Seneca provides further analogies to emphasize the impervious nature of the wise person. In chapter 5 Seneca distinguishes between contumelia (insults) and iniuria (injuries).

“A beautifully written and well-researched cultural criticism as well as an honest memoir” (Los Angeles Review of Books) from the author of the popular New York Times essay, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This,” explores the romantic myths we create and explains how they limit our...

Nature is a book-length essay written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and published by James Munroe and Company in 1836. In the essay, Emerson put forth the foundation of transcendentalism, a belief system that espouses a non-traditional appreciation of nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.

Nearly every major city in the world has them: hidden underground seduction lairs where men gather to trade the most devastatingly effective techniques ever invented to seduce women. This is not fiction. For two years, bestselling author Neil Strauss lived among these men. Using the pseudonym...

One part memoir, one part comedy special, one part crazy first date. Just you and Matt between the covers. What could be better? Matt Rife is well aware that he’s both the most loved and the most controversial comic in America today. And honestly, he thinks that’s your problem. Matt reveals...

USA TODAY BESTSELLER The Vanderpump Rules breakout star and provocateur brings her signature sharp wit to the page with this collection of humorous and brutally honest essays exploring her rocky road to fame, sobriety, and beyond. What does “Give them Lala” mean? It means giving the truest...

For most of her youth and early adulthood, Tara Couture had a deep fear of death. When her mother left the house, Tara would beg her to stay, certain that death was right around the corner. As the threat loomed in her mind, distraction in its many forms became her only relief. In her twenties, determined to manifest her long-time dream of owning a farm, Tara worked alongside a cattleman, Richard, whose perspectives on life and death would come to transform her own.

C. S. Lewis was a profound thinker with the rare ability to communicate the philosophical and theological rationale of Christianity in simple yet amazingly effective ways. God in the Dock contains 48 essays and 12 letters written by Lewis between 1940 and 1963 for a wide variety of publications.