Literary Essays

The compelling novel that began Shirley Jackson's legendary career Pepper Street is a really nice, safe California neighborhood. The houses are tidy and the lawns are neatly mowed. Of course, the country club is close by, and lots of pleasant folks live there. The only problem is they knocked...

The high-spirited correspondence between New York Times bestselling author Paul Auster and Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee Although Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee had been reading each other’s books for years, the two writers did not meet until February 2008. Not long after, Auster received a...

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...

Vir Sanghvi's has been an interesting life - one that took him to Oxford, movie and political journalism, television and magazines - and he depicts it with the silky polish his readers expect of him. In A Rude Life, he turns his dispassionate observer's gaze on himself, and in taut prose tells...

Joe Meno brings a novelist's eye to the true story of two young men from Ghana and their journey from the unjust political system of their homeland through the chaos of the United States' failing immigration system Long before their chance meeting at a Minneapolis bus station, Ghanaian asylum...

Writer (and sometime housecleaner) Jennifer is twenty-three when her beloved father, Wallace, is diagnosed with a brain tumor. This catastrophic discovery sets off Anne Lamott's unexpectedly sweet and funny first novel, which is made dramatic not so much by Wallace's illness as by the emotional...

The acclaimed author of Occupied City, Tokyo Year Zero, and The Red Riding Quartet now gives us a stunning work of fiction in twelve connected tales that take up the strange, brief life of the brilliant twentieth-century Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. Haunting and evocative, brutal and...

***A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK*** ***LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014*** ***PWs Best of the Year 2014*** The author of the best-selling and award-winning Netherland now gives us his eagerly awaited, stunningly different new novel: a tale of alienation and heartbreak in Dubai. ...

'A schoolteacher who killed multiple paramours with cyanide; a mother who trained her daughters to kill children; a thug from the 1800s who slaughtered more than 900 people, a manservant who killed girls and devoured their body parts. If you thought serial killers was a Western phenomenon, think...

For fans of Yellowface and American Fiction, A Hero of Our Time is a vicious takedown of superficial diversity initiatives and tech culture, with a beating heart of broken sincerity that the Toronto Star calls "a powerful, unexpected reading experience." Osman Shah is a pitstop on his white...

A bestselling and award-winning debut collection from one of South Korea's most prominent young writers. In crisp, unembellished prose, Eun-young Choi paints intimate portraits of the lives of young women in South Korea, balancing the personal with the political. In the title story, a fraught...

“Hopeful, funny, and full of wisdom. A meditation on fatherhood by one of our most perceptive writers.” —Tara Westover, author of Educated “With playfulness and sharp insight, [Zambra] turns everyday moments into something unforgettable, blending wit and heart in every page.” —Los...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018 'A dazzling obsessive entry in a burgeoning genre. Unusual and absorbing... the novel as a whole exudes a strange consoling power.' – The New Yorker 'Sight delves into a lot in under 200 pages: mothers and daughters, birth and death, loss...

Before writing his memoir of madness, Darkness Visible, William Styron was best known for his ambitious works of fiction–including The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie’s Choice. Styron also created personal but no less powerful tales based on his real-life experiences as a U.S. Marine...

Sparky Sweets, PhD, and Wisecrack proudly present this outrageously funny, ultra-sharp guide to literature based on the hit online series, Thug Notes. Inside, you'll find hilarious plot breakdowns and masterful analyses of sixteen of literature's most beloved classics, including: Things Fall...

Rain in the Mountains brings together some of Ruskin Bond’s most beautiful works from his years spent in the foothills of the Himalayas in the town of Mussoorie. Through vivid images and lucid writing, Bond evokes the everyday sights and sounds, and captures the essence of mountain life. The...

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...

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls One of the most valuable spaces for an artist is the inner life—the sacred place where, outside of the constraints of time and space, meaning is extracted from raw experience and fashioned into art. In this timely new essay, Pulitzer...

From one of Japan’s most acclaimed writers comes a lyrical and poignant meditation on marriage, and the ways in which the most romantic gestures are often the quietest ones. Before the hospital, we had often raised our hands towards one another as we’d gone through life together. A man sits...

A powerful, patriarchy-defying manifesto that will transform your relationship to saying “no”—from the award-winning writer, co-founder of Jezebel, and former New York Times "Work Friend" advice columnist When was the last time you said “no”? Not, I don’t think so, or maybe, or let...