Essays Anthology

Through a collection of intimate reflections (on art, punctuation, eyeglasses, color, dreams, celebrity, corpses, porn, and translation) and assignments that encourage pleasure, attentiveness, and acts of playful making, poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts 26 ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world. Figure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize From the legendary literary master, winner of the National Book Award and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates, a collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories that maps the eerie darkness within us all. Insightful, disturbing, imaginative, and...

Central Park is perhaps the most well-trod and familiar green space in the country. It is both a refuge from the city and Manhattan's very heart; a respite from the urban grind and a hive of activity all its own. Eight hundred forty-three carefully planned acres allow some 37 million visitors each year to come and get lost in a sense of nature. Unsurprisingly, the park also inspires a wealth of great writing, and here Andrew Blauner collects some of the finest fiction and nonfiction - 20 pieces in all.

A powerful, timely, dazzling new collection of poems from Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award–winning author of Lighthead—to be published simultaneously with his latest work of literary criticism, Watch Your Language The three sections of Terrance Hayes’ seventh collection explore how...

From Senator Reverend Raphael G. Warnock, a sermon in the public square on the issues that plague us most Senator Reverend Raphael G. Warnock is a transformational voice in Congress and the pastor of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, and for the semiquincentennial of America...

Blistering and deeply personal, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son records Russell's quest to understand, through his journalistic subjects, his own appetites and urges, his persistent alienation, and, above all, his knotty, volatile, vital relationship with his father.

Rising literary star and Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award finalist Sarah Gerard uses her experiences growing up along Florida’s gulf coast to illuminate the struggles of modern human survival—physical, emotional, environmental—through a collection of essays exploring intimacy...

This collection of short essays examines the place of women in the history of psychedelics. While some of the subjects are pioneers in their own right, the authors in this collection go beyond merely adding women to the past in psychedelic history, exploring some of the significant ways that women have contributed to psychedelic knowledge.

Birth control. Body hair removal cream. Boobs. It’s all weird, but also pretty normal. Navigating racial identity, gender roles, workplace dynamics, and beauty standards, Mia Mercado's hilarious essay collection explores the contradictions of being a millennial woman, which usually means being...

When Paul Auster was asked to join NPR's Weekend All Things Considered program to tell stories, he turned the proposition on its head: he would let the stories come to him. He invited listeners to submit brief, true-life anecdotes about events that touched their lives. And so the National Story...

A superb collection of fifteen stories by an American master, E. L. Doctorow—the author of Ragtime, The March, The Book of Daniel, and Billy Bathgate He has been called “a national treasure” by George Saunders. Doctorow’s great topic, said Don DeLillo, is “the reach of American...

A moving and insightful anthology of personal essays by Irish autistic adults. Wired Our Own Way: An Anthology of Irish Autistic Voices is the first collection of personal essays written by autistic Irish adults.

A curated collection of the best Advice King columns, with a new introduction by the Advice King and a foreword by Tracy Moore.

From leading critic and essayist Emily Eakin, a stylish personal history of French theory and its unlikely domination of American culture When Emily Eakin arrived at Harvard in the late 1980s, she fell under the spell of an eclectic body of philosophical texts by a handful of French authors...

A witty, razor-sharp cultural critique of white women’s hair—and the politics it quietly carries In Tangled, acclaimed cultural critic Sarah Mesle unpacks the surprising power of white women’s hair in shaping American identity, politics, and pop culture. From rom-coms to TikToks, blowouts...

A plucky yet innocent wallflower writing a dictionary of bawdy slang arranges her own marriage to the ultimate instructor: the town rake. As sexy as it is witty and as charming as it is irreverent, The Very Definition of Love is Emily Henry for the regency era. 1816– Harriet Barrington may be...

Four electrifying and hopeful accounts of feminist uprising that have swept through Latin America and Spain in the wake of #MeToo—and what we can learn from these protest cultures in a fraught moment for democracy in the US As women’s rights have faced alarming rollbacks in the United States...

Most Anticipated Book of 2026: People "Take What You Can is so brilliantly, unbelievably good I have a burning in my heart.... Love is utterly bewildering, and nobody writes about it better than Naima Coster."—Catherine Newman, New York Times bestselling author of Sandwich From the New York...

A full-frontal confrontation of the ways we perform desire and shame—from the downright bizarre to the frighteningly relatable—by the award-winning author of A Sharp Endless Need An employee at a hunting ground where people pay to act out hate crimes prepares to meet their girlfriend’s...

A collection of reported stories that explore the relationship between mothers and daughters, by the award-winning author of Strangers to Ourselves. You Won't Get Free of It tells the stories of mothers and daughters searching for each other (and for themselves). With uncanny depth of perception...