History Essays

Anthony Bourdain chases the fumigation truck in Bergen County, New Jersey. Dave Eggers tells it straight: Illinois is Number 1. Louise Erdrich loses her bikini top in North Dakota. Jonathan Franzen gets waylaid by New York's publicist...and personal attorney...and historian...and geologist. John Hodgman explains why there is no such thing as a "Massachusettsean."

El trabajo de Wright Thompson incluye varios de los artículos deportivos más leídos en la historia de ESPN y sus artículos han sido incluidos en diez ocasiones en la serie Best American Sports Writing. Cuenta con John Grisham y Richard Ford como algunos de sus más reconocidos admiradores. Pero decir que sus artículos solo están relacionados con el deporte es quedarse muy corto. Thompson logra conectar por completo en lo más profundo de la gente sobre la que escribe, haciendo un gran análisis sobre el combustible que enciende sus ambiciones.

Critical Mass is a treasure trove of sparkling, spiky prose and a fascinating portrait of our lives and cultural times over the past decades. In an age where a great deal of back scratching and softball pitching pass for criticism, James Wolcott’s fearless essays and reviews offer a bracing taste of the real critical thing.

Hätte Shakespeare eine Schwester gehabt, ebenso begabt wie er, wie wäre es ihr ergangen? Welche Widerstände mussten Jane Austen oder die Brontë-Schwestern überwinden? Im Oktober 1928 hielt Virginia Woolf zwei Vorträge am ersten Frauencollege Großbritanniens an der Universität Cambridge. Ob ihnen bewusst sei, fragte Woolf ihre Zuhörerinnen, dass sie vielleicht "das am häufigsten abgehandelte Tier des Universums" seien? Schließlich wurde Literatur über Frauen fast ausschließlich von Männern verfasst. Aus Woolfs Vorträgen entstand der Essay Ein Zimmer für sich allein, den sie ein Jahr später veröffentlichte.

A groundbreaking collection of essays by celebrated international writers bears witness to the human cost of 50 years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. In Kingdom of Olives and Ash, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, two of today's most renowned novelists and essayists, have teamed up with the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence and a host of illustrious writers to tell the stories of the people on the ground in the contested territories.

Netting the Sun offers a carefully crafted diversity of natural and human stories from a landscape seemingly empty and forlorn to passing casual travelers. This surprising interpretation of south central Oregon's botany, geology, wildlife, ethnography, and history reveals what a truly special place the high desert is.

In What Wars Leave Behind, J. Malcolm Garcia reveals the people and pain behind the statistics. He writes about impoverished families scraping by in Cairo’s city of the dead, ordinary Syrians pretending all is well as shells explode around them, and others caught in conflicts that rage long after the cameramen have packed up and gone away.

A partir de siete preguntas que funcionan como disparadores, ¿A qué llamamos literatura? intenta responder cuestiones centrales en los estudios literarios: cómo se clasifican las obras, por qué las valoramos, qué valoramos en ellas, cómo representan mundos posibles, cómo las leemos, cómo circulan en la vida social, cómo se insertan en los conflictos que atraviesan nuestra cultura. Dirigido por José Luis de Diego, el presente volumen es el resultado de convertir -obligado por las restricciones sanitarias de 2020- las clases orales en clases escritas.

Robert Stone was a singular American writer, a visionary whose award-winning novels - including Dog Soldiers, Outerbridge Reach, and Damascus Gate - earned him comparisons to literary lions ranging from Samuel Beckett to Ernest Hemingway to Graham Greene. Stone had an almost prophetic grasp of the spirit of his age, which he captured with crystalline clarity in each of his novels. Of course, he was also a sharp and brilliant observer of American life, and his nonfiction writing is revelatory.

In this brilliant collection, the follow-up to her New York Times best seller Reading Like a Writer, the distinguished novelist, literary critic, and essayist celebrates the pleasures of reading and pays homage to the works and writers she admires above all others. In an age defined by hyper-connectivity and constant stimulation, Francine Prose makes a compelling case for the solitary act of reading and the great enjoyment it brings. Inspiring and illuminating, What to Read and Why includes selections culled from Prose’s previous essays, reviews, and introductions.

An exhilarating manifesto for the future, this audiobook convinces listeners to make the shift from reactive leapfrogging to proactive pole-vaulting through radical transformation. The unique "3-4-7 framework" demonstrates how a paralyzing mass of problems can be brought down to a formidable formula, thus making every problem solvable, no matter how big and complex.

El itinerario de Sergio Rodríguez Blanco nos recuerda a las mejores páginas de sus dos modelos del viajero intelectual: José Vasconcelos y Sergio Pitol. El autor nació en España, pero desde hace años habita en México en un mundo fluido: sale a caminar por el centro de la Ciudad de México y de pronto lo acompañamos a una lección de arte contemporáneo en la bienal de Venecia. Desentraña el misterio de una película que Federico Fellini jamás rodó y páginas después, Sergio comprende que volver a México es una forma más de reiniciar el viaje.

The Amputee’s Guide to Jules Verne is a listener's guide to every novel Jules Verne wrote; in that respect alone, there is no other book like it on the market. But it’s more than that. Nick DiMartino has included several essays evaluating Verne’s overall approach as a writer and the values embodied in his work. He has included as well a number of deeply personal essays about his struggles with the loneliness, pain, and lack of mobility that came with being an amputee.

In The Story of America, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore investigates American origin stories - from John Smith's account of the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural address - to show how American democracy is bound up with the history of print. Over the centuries, Americans have read and written their way into a political culture of ink and type. Part civics primer, part cultural history, The Story of America excavates the origins of everything from the paper ballot and the Constitution to the I.O.U. and the dictionary.

This essay comes from the NPR series This I Believe, which features brief personal reflections from both famous and unknown Americans. The pieces that make up the series compel listeners to rethink not only what and how they have arrived at their beliefs, but also the extent to which they share them with others.

In the half-century since its birth, as Sports Illustrated grew from a struggling start-up to America's preeminent sports magazine, one thing has remained constant: the commitment to great storytelling. That part of the magazine's mission has always been easy to define: Identify the most compelling sports stories of our time and get the best writers in the business to tell them. This book brings together a lineup of writing talent worthy of the Hall of Fame and the classic stories they produced for Sports Illustrated over the past 50 years. Many of the writers whose work is collected here are longtime favorites of SI readers (Frank Deford, Rick Reilly, Steve Rushin, Gary Smith).

In 2014, Sonya Bilocerkowycz is a tourist at a deadly revolution. At first she is enamored with the Ukrainians' idealism, which reminds her of her own patriotic family. But when the romantic revolution melts into a war with Russia, she becomes disillusioned, prompting a return home to the US and the diaspora community that raised her. As the daughter of a man who studies Ukrainian dissidents for a living, the granddaughter of war refugees, and the great-granddaughter of a gulag victim, Bilocerkowycz has inherited a legacy of political oppression.

Originally published in 1976, James A. Michener's explosive, spectacular Sports in America is a prescient examination of the crisis in American sports that is still unfolding to this day. With his lifelong enthusiasm for sports in evidence, the incomparable Michener tackles this subject thoroughly and leaves us amazed and appalled by what we've learned yet still loving the games we grew up on.

Peggy Noonan is one of the most brilliant and influential political thinkers and writers of our time. The author of five best-selling books ( What I Saw at the Revolution is now a classic), her column in The Wall Street Journal is a must-read for millions of Americans. Witty, incisive, and always original, Peggy Noonan is a conservative intellectual with wide-reaching appeal across the political spectrum. Now, for the first time, the best of Noonan's writing will be collected in one indispensable volume.

What was the real significance of William James's breakdown? Of the anti-Semitism in T.S. Eliot's writing? At each step in his latest journey through American cultural history, Menand has an original point to make.