Short Essays

Filled with his usual obsessions - sex, booze, gambling - More features Bukowski's offbeat insights into politics and literature, his tortured, violent relationships with women, and his lurid escapades on the poetry reading circuit. Highlighting his versatility, the book ranges from thinly-veiled autobiography to purely fictional tales of dysfunctional suburbanites, disgraced politicians, and down-and-out sports promoters - climaxing with a long, hilarious adventure among French filmmakers.

For over 60 years, since his award-winning debut, The Room on the Roof, was published, Ruskin Bond has charmed and entertained us with characters ranging from the animal world to humans to ghostly spirits, and his magic touch has often presented to us a world unhurried, tucked away in hills and valleys. What does it mean to be an octogenarian loved by the young and old alike? To be synonymous with the smell of pinewood and rambling mountain paths? In short, what is it that makes him Bond?

Each disparate object described in this book - a Caspar David Friedrich painting, a species of tiger, a villa in Rome, a Greek love poem, an island in the Pacific - shares a common fate: It no longer exists, except as the dead end of a paper trail. Recalling the works of W. G. Sebald, Bruce Chatwin, or Rebecca Solnit, An Inventory of Losses is a beautiful evocation of 12 specific treasures that have been lost to the world forever, and, taken as a whole, opens mesmerizing new vistas of how we can think about extinction and loss.

A Penguin Classic. First published in 1938, this volume of stories collected with the encouragement of his longtime editor Pascal Covici serves as a wonderful introduction to the work of Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. Set in the beautiful Salinas Valley of California, where simple people farm the land and struggle to find a place for themselves in the world, these stories reflect Steinbeck’s characteristic interests: The tensions between town and country, laborers and owners, past and present.

"Searingly honest, brilliant and disturbing. Brad Phillips peels back the skin and bone and stares right into the human soul." (Anthony Bourdain) Brad Phillips' collection of short stories adeptly walks a very thin line between taboo and propriety, with rigorous self-awareness and generosity. By confusing ideas around fiction and autobiography, Phillips writes with painful sincerity about shame, addiction, trauma, and the more troubling outreaches of sexual desire, with wit that is at odds with the subject matter. Brad Phillips is a well-known Canadian artist.

This essay is an introduction on the Tao Te Ching exploring the three points of truth, love ,and the interconnectedness of the life. It is written in a modern style using the pop music of Kenny Loggins, Bruce Springsteen, and David Gates to illustrate the points. The purpose of this essay is to serve as a companion to the Tao Te Ching. It is for those who wish to dive deeper into the essence of the Tao while living in the modern world.

A collection of the year’s best short stories, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sean Greer and series editor Heidi Pitlor.

In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic observations of the world around them.

Through a collection of intimate reflections (on art, punctuation, eyeglasses, color, dreams, celebrity, corpses, porn, and translation) and assignments that encourage pleasure, attentiveness, and acts of playful making, poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts 26 ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world. Figure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play.

Karan Johar is synonymous with success, panache, quick wit, and outspokenness, which sometimes inadvertently creates controversy and makes headlines. KJo, as he is popularly called, has been a much-loved Bollywood film director, producer, actor, and discoverer of new talent. But who is the man behind the icon we all know? Honest, heart-warming and insightful, An Unsuitable Boy is both the story of the life of an exceptional filmmaker at the peak of his powers and of an equally extraordinary human being who shows you how to survive and succeed in life.

The extraordinarily evocative stories depict the generation born in a small-town America during the Depression and growing up in a world where the old sexual morality was turned around and material comforts were easily had. Yet, as these stories reflect so accurately, life was still unsettling, and Updike chronicles telling moments both joyful and painful. The texts are taken from his recent omnibus, The Early Stories, 1953-1975.

Alexander Chee, an essayist of “virtuosity and power” (Washington Post), selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

A striking and nuanced collection, bringing to life awkward college students, disgraced public figures, raunchy grandparents, and mystical godmothers. To listen to these stories is to experience the transporting joys of discovery and affirmation, and to realize that story writing in America continues to flourish.

Of all the essentials for survival: oxygen, water, sleep, and food, only food is a vast treasure trove of memory and of sensory experience. Food is a portal to culture, to times past, to disgust, to comfort, to love: no matter one's feelings about a particular dish, they are hardly ever neutral.

Malthus predicted a grim future with geometrical population growth, versus food production that increases only arithmetically. He claimed that this would result in famine and starvation unless births were controlled. It is called the Malthusian catastrophe, in which humans would disregard the limits of natural resources and the world would be plagued by famine and disease.

The New York Times best seller from the author of Slaughterhouse-Five—a “gripping” posthumous collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s previously unpublished work on the subject of war and peace. A fitting tribute to a literary legend and a profoundly humane humorist, Armageddon in Retrospect is a collection of 12 previously unpublished writings. Imbued with Vonnegut's trademark rueful humor and outraged moral sense.

Certain elements, rituals, and stories have been passed down within the brotherhood of masons from those great workers and architects that created structures from King Solomon’s Temple to the classic churches of the Middle Age. The stories and legends of our progenitor and our first Grandmaster could be true. The layout of the lodge and the offices occupied within the lodges of the Freemasons may indeed date back to the time of King Solomon, yet none of these events explain the strange words, terms, and and military-like events taking place within the lodge today.

The Virginia Woolf Complete Collection brings together all of her most iconic works, including all 9 of her published novels, a selection of her best short stories, as well as some of her most influential non-fiction writing. From the enduring importance of her ideas of female independence in A Room of One's Own to the modern masterpieces of Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, alongside many more of her novels, criticism, and essays, this collection takes you across the broad breadth of Woolf's ever-inventive and timeless writings.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s deeply personal essay explores racial conflict through the prism of his childhood and the influence of his father, a police officer who walked the beat between two worlds.

This combination of serious artistic engagement with warmth and clarity of prose revels in the experiences and pleasures of art and the body, identity, and community.