Short Essays

Die schönsten Kurzgeschichten aus aller Welt. Kurz, knackig, auf den Punkt...

Europe and Elsewhere is a collection of Mark Twain's short stories and essays published in 1923. It is a must-listen for any Samuel Langhorn Clemens aficionado.

The Right Side of History tells the 100-year history of queer activism in a series of revealing close-ups, first-person accounts, and intimate snapshots of LGBT pioneers and radicals. This diverse cast stretches from the Edwardian period to today, including first-person accounts of the key protest that is at the heart of the 2015 movie Stonewall. The book shows how LGBT folk have always been in the forefront of progressive social evolution in the United States.

Bruce Pascoe has been described as a ‘living national treasure’ and his work as ‘revelatory’. This volume of his best and most celebrated stories and essays, collected here for the first time, ranges across his long career, and explores his enduring fascination with Australia’s landscape, culture, land management and history. Featuring new and previously unpublished fiction alongside his most revered and thought-provoking nonfiction - including extracts from his modern classic Dark Emu - this collection is perfect for Pascoe fans and new listeners alike.

This collection brings together the best of Ruskin Bond's cameos, all beautifully imagined and crafted, inspired by people who have left a lasting impression on him. In addition, there are a host of characters culled from Bond's numerous short stories. Taken together, they constitute a magnificent evocation of the small-town India by one of the country's best storytellers.

From Pulitzer Prize - winning book critic Michael Dirda comes a collection of his most personal and engaging essays on the literary life - the perfect companion for any lover of books. Dirda's latest volume collects fifty of his witty and wide-ranging reflections on literary journalism, book collecting, and the writers he loves. Reaching from the classics to the postmoderns, his allusions dance from Samuel Johnson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and M. F. K. Fisher to Marilynne Robinson, Hunter S. Thompson, and David Foster Wallace.

Central Park is perhaps the most well-trod and familiar green space in the country. It is both a refuge from the city and Manhattan's very heart; a respite from the urban grind and a hive of activity all its own. Eight hundred forty-three carefully planned acres allow some 37 million visitors each year to come and get lost in a sense of nature. Unsurprisingly, the park also inspires a wealth of great writing, and here Andrew Blauner collects some of the finest fiction and nonfiction - 20 pieces in all.

Mohsin Hamid's brilliant, moving, and extraordinarily clever novels have not only made him an international best seller, they have earned him a reputation as a "master critic of the modern global condition" ( Foreign Policy). His stories are at once timeless and of-the-moment, and his themes are universal: love, language, ambition, power, corruption, religion, family, identity. Here, he explores this terrain from a different angle in essays that deftly counterpoise the personal and the political.

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.

All of the contributors to this book were friends and family of author Ellen Gray Massey, and all of them considered her a model of a strong woman. There was a consensus among contributors that their proceeds from the sale of this book be donated to charities that helped women. The charities chosen are: New Life Project, Lebanon, Missouri, and Tostan, Dignity for All.

Lars Horn's Voice of the Fish, the latest Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize winner, is an interwoven essay collection that explores the trans experience through themes of water, fish, and mythology, set against the backdrop of travels in Russia and a back injury that left Horn temporarily unable to speak. In Horn's adept hands, the collection takes shape as a unified book: short vignettes about fish, reliquaries, and antiquities serve as interludes between longer essays, knitting together a sinuous, wave-like form that flows across the book.

Chloe Aridjis's stories and essays are known to transport listeners into liminal, often dreamlike, realms. In this collection of works, we meet a woman guided only by a plastic bag drifting through the streets of Berlin who discovers a nonsense-named bar that is home to papier-mâche monsters and one glass-encased somnambulist.

This collection of five stories and four essays showcases the work of Mike Heppner, the writer whom Entertainment Weekly calls, "A fearsome cultural critic disguised in a novelist's clothing," and whose funny and biting fiction has been praised in Esquire, The Washington Post, and The Millions. Most of these pieces have not been published before. Featured performers include: A deluded Lothario, a man obsessed with corn, Charlie Watts, the dude from Def Leppard, and a sweet old lady who meets her untimely end at a Boston Market.

The waters of time never lie. Wisdom drifts down through the ages for all who dare to listen. History teaches us through honesty. Are you bold enough to hear the truth? Reflections: Poems and Essays wraps you in the untold stories of the past. Sit next to the waters of time and listen to the wisdom of the past. What if John Wilkes Booth hadn't been killed at Garret's barn? Who are the Shawnee? Why did the Cherokee accuse Sequoyah of witchcraft? These stories and more await you within this inspiring book.

More than 60 stories, poems, and essays are included in this wide-ranging collection by the extravagantly versatile Raymond Carver. Two of the stories - later revised for What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - are particularly notable in that between the first and the final versions, we see clearly the astounding process of Carver's literary development.

This recording is of the 11 essays and stories contained in Volume Five and includes two examples of Poe’s activity as a literary critic. Poe’s dry wit is laced through many of these tales and will bring a wry smile to your lips even as you shiver at the consequences of “betting the devil your head”.

Film festivals. Disruptive elections. Train wrecks. Suburban cults. Empty mansions. Digital dating. In Halftone, new author James Wolf uses a lavish and broad stroke of fiction and non-fiction to discuss feelings of worth, fears for the future, and visions of a new Americana in six stories / essays. In a buckshot-style prose scattering across a wide breadth of genre, Wolf's writings are both touching and hard-nosed, blunt yet pastoral - they are deliciously entertaining and wholly necessary.

Shenequa Golding doesn’t aim to speak for all Black women. We’re too vast, too vibrant, and too complicated. As an adult, Golding begins to own her boldness, but growing up, she found herself “kind of in the middle,” fluctuating between not being the fly kid or the overachiever. Her debut collection of essays, A Black Girl in the Middle taps into life’s wins and losses, representing the middle ground for Black girls and women.

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.

Jodi M. Savage was raised in Brooklyn, New York, by her maternal grandmother. Her whip-smart, charismatic mother struggled with addiction and was unable to care for her. Granny was Jodi’s rock, until Alzheimer’s disease turned the tables, and a 28-year-old Jodi stepped into the role of caretaker. It was up to Jodi to get them both through the devastations of a deteriorating mind. After Granny passed away, Jodi spent years trying to reckon with her grief. In this searing, candid collection of essays, Jodi illuminates the roles that identity and memory play in preserving those we love.