Literary Essays

The short fiction of Colum McCann documents a dizzying cast of characters in exile, loss, love, and displacement. There is the worn boxing champion who steals clothes from a New Orleans laundromat, the rumored survivor of Hiroshima who emigrates to the tranquil coast of Western Ireland, the...

A new collection of electric, searing stories from award-winning, bestselling author Juan Gabriel Vásquez. The characters in Songs for the Flames are men and women touched by violence—sometimes directly, sometimes only in passing—but whose lives are changed forever, consumed by fire and by...

In a crumbling neighbourhood in New Delhi, a child waits for a mother to return home from work. And, in parallel, in a snow-swept town in Germany on the Baltic Sea coast a woman, her memory fading, shows up at a deserted hotel. Worlds apart, both embark, in the course of that night, on...

"Good people can be crashing bores. Evil men who combine evil-doing with drunkenness, debauchery and making illicit money make more interesting characters because they pack their lives with action. They do what most of us would like to do but do not have the guts to.'-Khushwant SinghMalice. The...

Duryodhana was a man of strong character and integrity.Duhsshasana was respectful, generous and kind towards women.Shakuni was a simple man who loved his subjects unconditionally.Dhana Nanda, Aurangzeb and Hitler possessed admirable leadership traits.'Duryodhanization' refers to the birth and...

“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...

Born on the West Coast, the son of Bronx-born parents, Steve Wasserman is a generalist and public intellectual but is perhaps less well known as a cultural essayist and social critic of the first rank. In thirty splendid essays, originally published in such diverse publications as The New Republic and The Nation, The American Conservative and The Progressive, The Village Voice and The Economist, Wasserman delivers a riveting account of the awakening of an empathetic sensibility and a lively mind.

A collection of personal essays from America’s most revered essay writer, Joseph Epstein. America’s greatest living essayist writes about life and aging and being all too nicely out of it. In these personal pieces, he takes on topics as varied as grieving for a dead son, learning Latin late...

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.

This first book by Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Steinbach is an intimate, personal collection of essays, remembrances, and columns that follows in the creative non-fiction tradition of Anna Quindelen and Mary Sarton.

Leslie Jamison erkundet die Tiefe von Verlangen, Intimität und Obsession und testet dabei auch die Grenzen ihrer eigenen Offenheit und ihres Mitgefühls für andere aus. Wie kann man empathisch über menschliche Erfahrung schreiben, ohne die kritische Distanz zu verlieren? Wie das Beteiligtsein verarbeiten, ohne der Selbstbezogenheit zu erliegen?

In his fictional Falls, North Carolina–a watchful zone of stifling mores–Allan Gurganus’s fond and comical characters risk everything to protect their improbable hopes from prejudice, poverty, betrayal. Seeking warmth and true connection, they shield themselves and loved ones while...

T.C. Boyle was first feted as a master of the short story for his critically acclaimed Greasy Lake. With these stories applauded by People magazine as "wickedly comical," he displays once again a virtuosity and versatility rare in literary America today. Without a Hero zooms in on American...

The first story collection from the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Memory Keeper's Daughter With The Memory Keeper's Daughter, Kim Edwards touched hearts across the nation. In this, her first collection of stories-now with three new stories added-she explores the lives of those...

The vibrant, funny, and heartwarming story of an outcast who becomes an odd man in If you have ever felt like a misfit in school or been paralyzed by your family’s imposing expectations, if you have ever obsessed about your appearance or panicked about choosing a career path, if you have...

"Poets live the lives all of us live," says Bill Moyers, "with one big difference. They have the power--the power of the word--to create a world of thoughts and emotions other can share. We only have to learn to listen." In a series of fascinating conversations with thirty-four American poets...

Part muckraker, part adventurer, and part raconteur, Frazier beholds, captures, and occasionally reimagines the spirit of the American experience. He travels down South to examine feral hogs and learns that their presence in any county is a strong indicator that it votes Republican. He introduces us to a man who, when his house is hit by a supposed meteorite, hopes to "leverage" the space object into opportunity for his family, and a New York City police detective who is fascinated with rap-music-related crimes.

“[Terry Castle is] the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today.” —Susan Sontag From one of America’s most brilliant critics and cultural commentators, Terry Castle, comes The Professor and Other Writings: a collection of startling, gorgeously-written...

Following his runaway best seller, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie gives us a delightful new tale of East meets West: an adventure both wry and uplifting about a love of dreams and the dream of love, and the power of reading to sustain and inspire the spirit. After years of...

The best in short fiction from around the world, from celebrated anthologist and author John Freeman and award-winning novelist Rabih Alameddine In The Penguin Book of the International Short Story, writers from different nations, languages, and sensibilities come together in a globe-spanning...