Personal Essay

What would you get if the Seinfeld, Reiner, Crystal, and Kagan families got together for dinner? You’d get fatter, guiltier, and hoarser from trying to get a word in edgewise and suffer muscle cramps from laughing. When you get into My Shorts, you get all that and more. An uproarious collection of true stories featuring a chubby Cheetos-loving Jewish middle child with overactive sweat glands and an abundant imagination.

Author, critic, and traveler, Marina Vaizey reflects on her experiences of the international art world, in a career spanning six decades, including eighteen years as the chief art critic at the Sunday Times. I can offer a lecture, very short, on the art world post war until now. Here it is. More. More artists, more money, more collectors, more collections, more scholarship, more publications, more museums, more galleries, more countries involved publicly world wide: Just - for good and ill - more.

How to Die is both an absorbing excursion through some of Western literature’s most compelling works on the subject of death as well as an anecdote-driven argument for cultivating a better understanding of death in the belief that, if we do, we’ll know more about what it means to live a meaningful life.

Sports radio legend Stugotz rewrites the record books, taking rings away from undeserving champions and giving them to the rightful winners. “I’ve been accused of rooting against every team in America, but I am rooting FOR Stugotz’s Personal Record Book.”—Joe Buck Without Tom Brady...

This program is read by the author If you’re looking for a parenting audiobook, this is not it. This is not a treatise on how to be a mother. This is an audiobook about a young girl who moves to a new town every couple of years; a misfit teenager who finds solace in a local music scene; an...

Acres of Diamonds - essay, written by Russell Herman Conwell (February 15, 1843 – December 6, 1925) was an American Baptist minister, orator, philanthropist, lawyer, and writer. The original inspiration for Acres of Diamonds, his most famous essay, occurred in 1869 when Conwell was traveling in the Middle East. The work began as a speech, "at first given," wrote Conwell in 1913, "before a reunion of my old comrades of the Forty-sixth Massachusetts Regiment, which served in the Civil War and in which I was captain."

This collection of narrative essays by sex workers presents a crystal-clear rejoinder: There's never been a better time to fight for justice. Responding to the resurgence of the #MeToo movement in 2017, sex workers from across the industry - hookers and prostitutes, strippers and dancers, porn stars, cam models, Dommes and subs alike - complicate narratives of sexual harassment and violence, and expand conversations often limited to normative workplaces.

How do we add to archives of ecological memory? How can we notice and document what’s missing in the landscapes closest to us? In her debut essay collection, Laura Marris reframes environmental loss by setting aside the catastrophic framework of the Anthropocene in favor of that of the Eremocene, the age of loneliness, which is marked by the dramatic thinning of wildlife populations and by isolation between and among species.

Based on the NPR series of the same name, This I Believe features 80 Americans—from the famous to the unknown—completing the thought that begins with the book's title. The pieces that make up the program compel listeners to re-think not only what and how they have arrived at their own personal beliefs, but also the extent to which they share them with others.

Courageous, intimate and raw, Wrestling with Freedom deftly expresses the struggles of living consciously in dark times and tunes us to that elusive inner voice promising us a more hopeful tomorrow. It’s a book that will touch deeply, resonating with all who have felt their own dreams shipwrecked upon the jagged realities of our present world.

In Inner Flight, Malek Hanna - award-winning actor, singer, filmmaker, and spiritual seeker - invites you into a deeply personal and universally relatable journey of awakening. Blending storytelling, ancient wisdom, and raw reflection, this spiritual memoir explores healing, identity, purpose, and the sacred power of presence. Raised between cultures, caught between expectations, and drawn to the mystery of life, Malek spent years people-pleasing and performing - until life cracked him open. What followed was a metamorphosis of heart, soul, and truth.

This audiobook is a collection of essays on topics concerning the existence of humankind on Earth to aid listeners in personal reflection and transformation. Essay authors have been chosen to write personal essays on areas of their expertise or interest. It is broken into four sections: Self, humankind, religion, and Earth. It is very personal and subjective, and it challenges listeners to do their own deep dive to come up with their own conclusions on the various topics. It is not a political audiobook, nor should it reviewed from a political lens.

In The Selfishness of Others, the essayist Kristin Dombek provides a clear-sighted account of how a rare clinical diagnosis became a fluid cultural phenomenon, a repository for our deepest fears about love, friendship, and family. She cuts through hysteria in search of the razor-thin line between pathology and common selfishness, writing with robust skepticism toward the prophets of NPD and genuine empathy for those who see themselves as its victims. And finally, she shares her own story in a candid effort to find a path away from the cycle of fear and blame.

A growing number of intrepid Arab and Middle Eastern sahafiyat - female journalists - are working tirelessly to shape nuanced narratives about their changing homelands, often risking their lives on the front lines of war. From sexual harassment on the streets of Cairo to the difficulty of traveling without a male relative in Yemen, their challenges are unique - as are their advantages, such as being able to speak candidly with other women at a Syrian medical clinic or with men on Whatsapp who will go on to become ISIS fighters, rebels, or pro-regime soldiers.

From Homer to Helen Keller, from Dune to Stevie Wonder, from the invention of braille to the science of echolocation, M. Leona Godin explores the fascinating history of blindness, interweaving it with her own story of gradually losing her sight. There Plant Eyes probes the ways in which...

Why I Scored Lower Than 60 in Bar Exam Essays? by Hellas Leung is a hands-on mentor who breaks down why law students struggle and how they can transform their writing to pass with confidence. This book utilizes a unique course, treating essay writing as a skill to be conquered rather than a test to be feared. It dismantles common misinterpretations, such as the thought that memorizing legal definitions or typing faster will automatically boost your score. Instead, it provides a structured method for analyzing fact patterns, systematizing ideas, and using the IRAC method precisely.

The gripping account of the U.S. men’s national soccer team’s winding saga from obscurity to the global stage as they stand on the brink of a seminal World Cup in 2026. For almost half a century, the U.S. men’s national team existed on the fringes of world soccer—out of sight, out of...

Go deeper than superficial self-care with the religious secret sauce you didn’t know you were missing In the chaos of today’s world, we’re all searching for meaning. The wellness industry has sold us a promise that we can find it if we just buy the right products, attend the right retreats...

"El hombre sufre tan terriblemente en el mundo que se ha visto obligado a inventar la risa". Friedrich Nietzsche. Pero... ¿es esto cierto? Dondequiera que miremos, parece haber una crisis, ya sea económica, climática, política o bélica. Muchas veces, al mismo tiempo. En este escenario, ¿hay espacio para el humor? SÍ, aunque no sea obvio, los tiempos de crisis son los más propicios para la risa. Es cuando se vuelve más necesaria y útil, porque, como dice Sergio de la Calle, "en medio del caos, el humor es la brújula para orientarse; en los accidentes emocionales, un airbag; y, en la oscuridad, un faro".

"Ernst ist das Leben, heiter ist die Kunst", schrieb Friedrich Schiller. Doch was ist Heiterkeit eigentlich? Und wie bekommen wir sie in unser ernstes Leben zurück? In Zeiten, in denen uns im Angesicht globaler Krisen intuitiv erst einmal anders zumute ist, macht sich Axel Hacke auf die Suche nach einem fast vergessenen Gemütszustand, nach einer Haltung dem Leben gegenüber, in der wir seltsam ungeübt geworden sind.