Essays Social

Marion Winik is esteemed for bringing humor and wit to that most unavoidable of subjects: death. At last, Winik's critically acclaimed, cult favorites Glen Rock and Baltimore Book of the Dead have been carefully combined in their proper order, revealing more clearly than ever before the character hidden throughout these stories: Winik herself.

Anchored by an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham, this concise collection of essays, letters, and poems from one of this country’s most eminent literary voices offers much-needed historical context for our current state of the nation - and hope for the future of our society.

In his debut essay collection, Nicholas Belardes uses today’s pop culture and self-deprecating humor as a filter for discussing personal stories of family, writing, gender, art, and race. He dives into the Harry Potter play and discusses his cursed childhood home. He tells coming-of-age tales of Dungeons & Dragons and blames Stranger Things for jogging those hilarious memories.

Rescue offers riveting stories about what happens when things go terribly wrong in some of the world's most perilous places: Himalayan peaks, African plains, vast oceans, remote Arctic wilderness. The result is a collection of first-rate prose read by masterful narrators that makes for compulsive listening.

Als die Achtziger ausbrechen, ist Frank Goosen dreizehn, und als sie enden, vierundzwanzig: Dazwischen werden Zechen und Hochöfen stillgelegt, Schimanski erobert die Fernsehbildschirme und Starlight Express die Rollschuhbahnen. Beste Voraussetzungen also, um erwachsen zu werden! In seinen neuen Stories und Glossen nimmt Frank Goosen uns mit in diese legendäre Zeit des kulturellen Wandels und in seine eigene Jugend.

Intimate and honest essays on motherhood, marriage, love, and acceptance. Brown White Black is a portrait of Nishta J. Mehra's family: her wife, who is White; her adopted child, Shiv, who is Black; and their experiences dealing with America's rigid ideas of race, gender, and sexuality. Her clear-eyed and incisive writing on her family's daily struggle to make space for themselves amid racial intolerance and stereotypes personalizes some of America's most fraught issues.

In this galloping collection of twenty pointed essays, G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) nimbly punctures the philosophical pretensions of modern non-Christian thinkers and artists—heretics, as he calls them. Chesterton good-naturedly takes on contemporaries Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, James McNeill Whistler, and even his good friend George Bernard Shaw, exposing the muddled logic of their popular ideas with his characteristic wisdom and razor-sharp wit. He also begins to lay the groundwork for Orthodoxy, his subsequent account of a rational and coherent Christian faith.

A true renaissance man, Richard Claxton “Dick” Gregory was one of the pioneering satirists of his generation, a reformer and brilliant spokesperson for the downtrodden and forgotten who dedicated his life to speaking unadulterated truth—and to improving ordinary lives. A revered human rights and environmental activist, fearsome and uncompromising social critic, lauded bestselling author, and beloved nutrition guru, Gregory aimed not only to educate souls, but to liberate them.

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is a timeless and thought-provoking exploration of the relationship between women and creativity. Based on a series of lectures delivered at Cambridge University in 1928, this seminal work blends sharp wit, eloquence, and intellectual rigor to examine the systemic barriers that have historically denied women the opportunity to achieve their artistic potential.

Kiss Tomorrow Hello brings together the experiences and reflections of women as they embark on a new stage of life. The 25 stellar writers gathered here explore a wide range of concerns, including keeping love and sex alive, discovering family secrets, negotiating the demands of illness and infertility, letting children go, making peace with parents, and contemplating plastic surgery. The tales are true, the confessions candid, and the humor infectious.

What defines Boston? Its history? Its landmarks? Its sports teams and shrines? Perhaps the question should be, who defines Boston? From Henry David Thoreau to Dennis Lehane, Boston has been beloved by many of America's greatest writers, and there is no better group of men and women to capture the heart and soul of the Hub. In Our Boston, editor Andrew Blauner has collected both original and reprinted essays from Boston-area writers past and present, all celebrating the city they love.

With her trademark insight and her special ability to convey the impact public events have on ordinary lives, Anna Quindlen here combines commentary on American society and the world at large with reflections on being a woman, a writer, and a mother. Grounding the public in the private, connecting people to each other and to the greater world, Quindlen encourages us to develop authentic lives, even as she serves as a catalyst for political and social change.

Die liebliche Bestie Mensch verliert jedesmal, wie es scheint, die gute Laune, wenn sie gut denkt...

Long known for his range and supple prose (he is the only writer elected to membership in both the Baseball Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Letters), Angell won the 2015 American Society of Magazine Editors’ Best Essay award for “This Old Man,” which forms a centerpiece for this book. This deeply personal account is a survey of the limitations and discoveries of great age, with abundant life, poignant loss, jokes, retrieved moments, and fresh love, set down in an informal and moving fashion.

A new, expanded collection of both new and previously published essays and articles from one of the mainstays of the Washington, DC underground rock-and-roll scene, The Psychic Soviet is the most complete collection of writings by Ian Svenonius. The selections are written in a scholarly yet engaging style, filled with parody and biting humor that subvert capitalist culture, and cover such topics as the ascent of the DJ as a star, the “cosmic depression” that followed the defeat of the USSR, and the status of rock and roll as a religion.

It is on the knife’s edge between fury and farce that the essays in this exquisite collection balance. Whether confronting the medical profession’s racial biases, considering the complicated legacy of Michael Jackson, paying homage to his writing mentor James Alan McPherson, or attempting to break free of personal and societal stereotypes, Walker elegantly blends personal revelation and cultural critique. The result is a bracing and often humorous examination by one of America’s most acclaimed essayists of what it is to grow, parent, write, and exist as a Black American male.

"Ideas are the greatest and most crucially practical power on earth," wrote Ayn Rand. In the title essay of this collection, Leonard Peikoff applies this principle to the world of business. He shows that certain philosophic ideas, such as reason, egoism, and individualism, are needed to defend and protect the freedom of businessmen, while the opposite ideas, such as mysticism, altruism, and collectivism (which dominate our universities), destroy that freedom.

Author Joni B. Cole worries that Vlad the Impaler may be a distant cousin. She feuds with a dead medium. She thinks (or overthinks) about insulting birthday cards, power trips, and the real reason writers hate Amazon. And she wishes, really wishes, all those well-meaning people would stop talking about Guatemala. At once irreverent and thought provoking, Cole's collection is a joy ride through eclectic essays that arrive smack on that sweet spot between soul searching and social commentary, between humor and heft.

When Nina Sharma meets Quincy while hitching a ride to a friend’s Fourth of July barbecue, she spots a favorite book, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, in the back seat of his cramped car, and senses a sadness from him that’s all too familiar to her. She is immediately intrigued—who is this man? In The Way You Make Me Feel, Sharma chronicles her and Quincy’s love story, and in doing so, examines how their Black and Asian relationship becomes the lens through which she moves through and understands the world.

Original and expansive, Asian American Histories of the United States is a nearly 200-year history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the US. Reckoning with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the surge in anti-Asian hate and violence, award-winning historian Catherine Ceniza Choy presents an urgent social history of the fastest growing group of Americans. The book features the lived experiences and diverse voices of immigrants, refugees, US-born Asian Americans, multiracial Americans, and workers from industries spanning agriculture to healthcare.