Literary Essays

If you eat while lying down, you will turn into a snake. If you don’t polish off all the rice on your plate you will marry a man full of pimples and pockmarks.Looking After the Ashes is a semi-biographical fiction of Kopi Soh’s childhood stories. Growing up in a large extended Taoist...

In this part-memoir, part-manifesto, an acclaimed poet interprets Black radical literary traditions to reimagine freedom through refusal. “An incisive and rigorous assessment of how people arrive within a moment and what they can make out of it—or how they can take it apart.”—Hanif...

This collection opens with an essay about how writing has helped Andrea Levy to explore and understand her heritage. She explains the context of each piece within the chronology of her career and finishes with a new story, written to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. As with her novels, these stories are at once moving and honest, deft and humane, filled with insight, anger at injustice, and her trademark lightness of touch.

By his longtime friend and a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, the definitive biography of Larry McMurtry, the legendary author and screenwriter of Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show, and Brokeback Mountain, who transformed our vision of the West. Before Larry McMurtry became one of the...

He spent his earliest years in post WWII–refugee camps. He came to America and grew up in Cleveland—stealing cars, rolling drunks, battling priests, nearly going to jail. He became the screenwriter of the worldwide hits Basic Instinct, Jagged Edge, and Flashdance. He also wrote the legendary...

This program is read by Earphones Award–winning narrator Edoardo Ballerini. "Edoardo Ballerini reads my books exceptionally well. He gets my pacing, the inflections of muted irony, the anxiety of loss, the search for meaning that my prose on paper isn’t always able to convey—he gets it all...

A collection of short stories from the National Book Award-winning author of Mating "Powerful and original...always convincingly authentic. The ironies keep cutting in new directions." —The New York Times Whether they are Americans, Brits, or a stubborn and suicidally moral Dutchman...

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.

Established early in the last century as a memorial to O. Henry, this annual collection has consistently offered a remarkable sampling of contemporary short stories. Each year stories are chosen from large and small literary magazines and a panel of distinguished writers is enlisted to award the...

The "utterly compelling, uncommonly beautiful" collection of personal essays (Newsweek) that established Jo Ann Beard as one of the leading writers of her generation. Cousins, mothers, sisters, dolls, dogs, best friends: these are the fixed points in Jo Ann Beard's universe, the constants that...

Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in the north of England to Sri Lankan Tamils, and moved to the United States five years ago. Considering identity in both its political and psychological senses, he leaps adventurously between memoir and criticism, understanding his life through poetry, and vice versa. This electric, compelling hybrid memoir discovers a new way of writing about the self and also literature.

“Ahmad’s compassion, her deep care for the psychological and emotional nuances of her characters, never wavers.” – The New York Times Book Review In a searing collection by the award-winning author of The Return of Faraz Ali, characters seek to make their futures their own in a Pakistan...

The essential Khushwant Singh collection. In an essay in this anthology, Khushwant Singh claims that he is not a nice man to know. Whatever the truth of that assertion, there is little question about his skill as a witty, eloquent and entertaining writer. This book collects the best of over...

Innocence is lost to unforgettable experience in these brilliant stories by E. L. Doctorow, as full of mystery and meaning as any of the longer works by this American master. In “The Writer in the Family,” a young man learns the difference between lying and literature after he is induced...

“Vivid . . . These stories, in which class divisions form impassable rifts and submission to the status quo comes at great psychic cost, have much to say about our contemporary reality." —The New York Times Book Review “What a gift to have these stories translated, finally, into English...

As any fan of Jo Walton's Among Others might guess, Walton is both an inveterate reader of SF and fantasy, and a chronic rereader of books. In 2008, then-new science fiction mega-site Tor.com asked Walton to blog regularly about her rereading—about all kinds of older fantasy and SF, ranging from acknowledged classics, to guilty pleasures, to forgotten oddities and gems. These posts have consistently been among the most popular features of Tor. Now this volume presents a selection of the best of them, ranging from short essays to long reassessments of some of the field's most ambitious series.

Richly drawn stories about the lives of ordinary families in contemporary Botswana as they navigate relationships, tradition and caretaking in a rapidly changing world. A young widow adheres to the expectations of wearing mourning clothes for nearly a year, though she's unsure what the...

This entertaining guide to some of the best short novels of all time, from a bestselling historian, is the “perfect gift for busy bibliophiles” (BookPage). Experience the joys of literature with this this “exciting guide to all that the world of fiction has to offer” (The New York Times...

Longlisted for the National Book Award Winner of the Reading the West Book Award in Fiction Winner of the Writers' League of Texas Book Award in Fiction An extraordinary short story collection about community, home, betrayal, and forgiveness—from a writer whose “spellbinding, buoyant”*...

Chickpeas to Cook is the story of the woman of the tribe, women from some of the smallest of communities, often no more than a few hundred families in Singapore. How do these women live, think, breathe? What does the Dawoodi Bohra woman answer, for instance, when she’s asked if her daughter...