Showing titles in Essays

This stunningly personal document and extraordinary history of the turbulent '60s and early '70s displays James Baldwin's fury and despair more deeply than any of his other works. In vivid detail he remembers the Harlem childhood that shaped his early consciousness, the later events that scored his heart with pain - the murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his sojourns in Europe and in Hollywood, and his return to the American South to confront a violent America face-to-face.

New York Times essayist and author of We Learn Nothing, Tim Kreider trains his virtuoso writing and singular power of observation on his (often befuddling) relationships with women - romantic, platonic, and the murky in-between. He talks about his difficulty finding lasting love, and seeks to understand his commitment issues by tracking down the John Hopkins psychologist who tested him for a groundbreaking study on attachment when he was a toddler. He talks about his valued female friendships, one of which landed him on a circus train bound for Mexico.

What If This Were Enough? is a mantra and a clarion call. In its chapters--many of them original to the book, others expanded from their initial publication--Havrilesky takes on those cultural forces that shape us. We've convinced ourselves, she says, that salvation can be delivered only in the form of new products, new technologies, new lifestyles.

Michel de Montaigne embodies the humanist ideal—curious, measured, contemplative yet not unworldly, witty, free of prejudice, and urbane. But what does this French Renaissance philosopher have to tell us about how to think and live today? In forty short, erudite, and lively chapters written over a single summer, Antoine Compagnon seeks answers to that question. In A Summer with Montaigne, Compagnon invites his listeners to join him as he strolls through Montaigne’s key contributions to our understanding of what is good and worthwhile in life.

La amistad entre Jorge Luis Borges y Xul Solar y entre Alejandra Pizarnik y Silvina Ocampo es interpretada en este ensayo experimental a partir de las cartas natales de los escritores, analizadas en sinastría, es decir, estudiadas en relación unas con otras, para revelar la belleza del hacer-con el otro.

"Stories, both my own and those I've taken to heart, make up whoever it is that I've become," Peter Orner writes in this collection of essays about reading, writing, and living. Orner reads and writes everywhere he finds himself: a hospital cafeteria, a coffee shop in Albania, or a crowded bus in Haiti. The result is a book of unlearned meditations that stumbles into memoir.

Between 1821 and 1826, the prolific writer and journalist William Cobbett travelled the countryside of the South of England on foot and horseback. Rural Rides is a fascinating account of his journeys, and depicts a way of life in transition, juxtaposing lyrical descriptions of the countryside with criticism of the poverty of agricultural workers. A man of radical politics who encouraged the rural rising of 1830, Cobbett went on to become MP for Oldham and sought to represent the interests of both industrial and agricultural workers. Above all, Rural Rides celebrates agrarian England.

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.

Anne Waldman takes the opportunity with this 20th-anniversary expanded edition to add 20 poems to this collection that brings into focus her lifelong engagement with “chant” as central to contemporary performative poetry.

A lo largo de la historia, algunos libros han cambiado el mundo. Han transformado la manera en que nos vemos a nosotros mismos y a los demás. Han inspirado el debate, la discordia, la guerra y la revolución. Han iluminado, indignado, provocado y consolado. Han enriquecido vidas, y también las han destruido.

Ciudad Princesa es un relato en primera persona en el que se cuentan una serie de vivencias políticas entre octubre de 1996 y octubre de 2017, desde el desalojo del Cine Princesa en Barcelona hasta el referéndum del 1 de octubre. El hilo del relato es: ¿qué hemos aprendido?

自分に自信がない西川きよし師匠から、悪口をエネルギーに突き進む山里亮太、スケールのデカいバカぶりを発揮するピース綾部、恐ろしいほどの執念で紫綬褒章まで行き着いた宮川大助・花子まで……。毒舌を吐き続けても絶対に嫌われない男による「吉本バイブル」、ここに誕生

In the powerful and daring essays in Constellations Sinéad Gleeson does that very thing. All of life is within this audiobook, from birth to first love, pregnancy to motherhood, terrifying sickness, old age and loss to death itself. Throughout this wide-ranging collection she also turns her restless eye outwards delving into work, art and our very ways of seeing. In the tradition of some of our finest life writers, and yet still in her own spirited, generous voice, Sinéad takes us on a journey that is both uniquely personal and yet universal in its resonance.

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...

In a gauntlet-throwing essay at the start of this brilliant assemblage, Cynthia Ozick stakes the claim that, just as surely as critics require a steady supply of new fiction, novelists need great critics to build a vibrant community on the foundation of literary history. For decades Ozick herself has been one of our great critics, as these essays so clearly display. She offers models of critical analysis of writers from the mid-20th century to today, from Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Kafka to William Gass and Martin Amis, all assembled in provocatively named groups.

Wendy Cope has long been one of the nation's best-loved poets, with her sharp eye for human foibles and wry sense of humour. For the first time, Life, Love, and the Archers brings together the best of her prose - recollections, reviews, and essays from the light-hearted to the serious, taken from a lifetime of published and unpublished work, and all with Cope's lightness of touch.

Milan Kundera has established himself as one of the great novelists of our time with such books as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In Testaments Betrayed, he proves himself a brilliant defender of the moral rights of the artist and the respect due to a work of art and its creator's wishes. The betrayal of both - often by their most passionate proponents - is the principal theme of this extraordinary work. Listeners will be particularly intrigued by Kundera's impassioned attack on society's shifting moral judgments and persecutions of art and artists.

After the publication of Outline, Transit and Kudos - in which Rachel Cusk redrew the boundaries of fiction - this writer of uncommon brilliance returns with a series of essays that offers new insights on the themes at the heart of her life's work. Encompassing memoir and cultural and literary criticism, with pieces on gender, politics and writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Olivia Manning and Natalia Ginzburg, this collection is essential reading for our age: fearless, unrepentantly erudite, both startling and rewarding to behold.

Every photograph is a frozen moment, a story waiting to be told. A wedding photograph of a secret marriage. A dapper man who may be a lost relative. Three women covered in funeral shrouds. A brother. A father. A sonogram. These are six of the seventeen that comprise an album of photographs and their stories—nonfiction short stories found and told by a group of Columbia Journalism students. Perhaps in discovering these stories you may set off to find your own photographs, and with them, the stories they tell.

Flower is a book of realistic admissions, likes, dislikes, memories and no-brainer observations, treating personal truth as unavailable – something that must be made up and convincing. Taking cues from confessional literature, his daughter’s improvised games, poor internet writing and shitty AI, Ed Atkins, in his first work of non-fiction, equivocates between inanity and divinity, ease and pain, sentimentality and sterility.